A comment worth posting as a blog entry:

I loved your post on the topic of women who quit tango, and have been thinking about it a great deal ever since I read it. It is clearer and clearer to me that I dance for personal fulfillment – with an intention to be able to create even a few beautiful movements – as well as connection. But the connection isn’t of the ordinary social kind – exchanging thoughts with friends, etc. (although some of that is possible at Milongas) it is of the soul-to-soul kind. Since that is my desire, I don’t feel badly about sitting for tanda after tanda. I don’t feel like a planchadora – I am just waiting, in peace, for the transcendental to come into the room. Perhaps newcomers see the Tango as a social dance, when it is really more of a meditation – with another person’s spirit in the mix to make things even more mysterious. And perhaps they quit when they discover they don’t have a vocation for it – for disappearing ego in the service of the beautiful, for suspending the need to lead, for manifesting someone else’s interpretation of the music, for learning to accept that you may not actually be able to control when the magic will come -- and that when it does it will be fleeting. Thanks for connecting me to my thoughts!

Besitos,



AND: From the same writer....

Hi E:

This is very interesting! We do have a great upsurge of girl leaders – you see them dancing and switching back and forth at milongas and practicas – and I have noticed more men doing the same – which can only be good for us as a community, since it will bring us to a deeper appreciation of what it takes for each partner to make the dance work. However – and this huge for me – Tango is the only place in my life that I don’t have to lead. When I put my “leader” brain into action, I develop a set of standards against which I constantly measure everyone else in the universe where the action is taking place. You know the kind of thing – would I hire this person, can this person be coached to better performance, can this person make a reasonable contribution to our enterprise, why did (s)he chose this moment to say/do the idiotic thing just said/done? I don’t want to get into a place where I am disappointed/critical/snarky about why there weren’t more giros led in this vals or why somebody is dancing to Pugliese as though it were a polka instead of manifesting the exquisite tension/release of the music. I already have enough trouble wondering why the DJ is playing Pugliese at 10 pm instead of after midnight, and why C never notices that his partners hate his stupid side drops and why all beginner boys insist on dancing too fast and why certain people have danced ten years without having ever discovered where the follower’s body is. So, for me leading is out of the question – I can lead a step or two in a workshop if needed when there is an imbalance, but leading anything beyond that is an invitation to the gates of hell.

BTW, there are some women I adore dancing with, because they offer me the same opportunity for surrender and for relationship that I have with the gents. Of course, their breasts must line up with mine in an over/under kind of way, but as long as that happens we’re ready to try to get to the tango zen place. J One of my particular favorites is a girl who has the same name as one of my daughters – she reminds me of all of the darling young women I have mentored over time and it is just a joy to share her musicality, her dance vocabulary and her lovely embrace.

I think this just ties back into the issue of why I dance. I do see many women leaders that I might not care to dance with – they dance in an open embrace, they are leading a lot of Nuevo-y kinds of things, and so their presence doesn’t necessarily increase my dance opportunities.

I think Clay is right in believing that the women have quit because they aren’t invited to dance (shortage of leaders paradigm) and so the situation falls short of their social/entertainment/validation expectations, but that is a bit like quitting fly fishing because you don’t get to keep the fish. If you aren’t there for the wading and the casting and the standing in the rain then you should get out of the water, sweetie, cuz it isn’t really about what’s for dinner.

Besitos


From Elizabeth: I love the fly fishing analogy...