Get Tango, Get Happy (forever)
(Continued from Get Tango, Get Happy, previous post)
Something is happening in South America. For some it is merely a dance that’s been around more than a hundred years. For others it is nothing short of a miracle. Take Patricia Frola, who hesitantly tried it and watched the tremors she had lived with for years vanish. She entered what she could only describe as a Flow.
Take Silvia Alfonso, whom I have never seen without a smile on her face. Once upon a time, she could not cross a city street without taxi drivers honking at her to speed it up, lady, get a move. Finally, she said, “I wished they’d just run me over and end my misery.” Then she, too, with grave doubts, accepted an invitation to try this common dance.
“I arrived at 4 p.m. and met Marisa Maragliano, the instructor. We just embraced and I felt the magic. She held me. Something wonderful happened. My mind told me you need a wheel chair, but my body just started dancing, responding to Marisa. I felt I was dividing into two, a mind and a body. I stopped feeling pain. I left my two canes and came away with two arms.”
You wouldn’t know it to see either of them, but Patricia has lived with Parkinson’s disease for seventeen years. And Silvia was stricken with rheumatoid arthritis in her 20s. She is now 56 but her smile is of the eternal sort.
Then there is Amia (who prefers I use a pseudonym), a young woman in her twenties, with silky black hair, a Spanish-speaking Cleopatra. One night at La Milonguita, she confessed, to my great surprise, to being bi-polar. She told me that dancing tango has greatly reduced her need for medication to treat her serious disorder. And there is Pedro, a Porteño (native of Buenos Aires), with a shimmer of white hair, who is never without a Kris Kringle sparkle in his pale blue eyes. Until he started tango regularly, about ten years ago, he was down and depressed always.
An ABC news show reports from an old church hall in Surry Hills, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. There Jackie Simpson, long-time tango teacher, watches her pupils arrive to overcome depression and grief. One of them says she had lost a son about two-and-a-half years before and although she had done a lot of grieving, “I wasn’t getting up and getting back into life that much.”
After one lesson at the old church that first night, “I got home and I just felt so energized and for the next two days I just felt so focused and things that I was just feeling that I was overwhelmed about before, I just had the energy to do.”
Like so many others who start tango, she reported, “feeling really at a deep place.” What is it about Argentina tango that stirs people so deeply?
Here is a list of attributes that define tango and that in sum make tango like no other dance, which may well account for the therapeutic benefits:
• Tango has a meditative quality The brain behaves in a similar way when dancing tango or in meditation.
• Tango requires, as in meditation, that you be fully present, moment to moment, and that you surrender your ego, and not think.
• In tango, the dance partners do not make eye contact Eyes are soft, turned inward (as in meditation).
• There is no speech in tango The partners are advised not to talk during the dance. However there is constant, even deeper, communication through the body.
• When this body communication is on track there is nothing in the world like the feeling you get. This does not occur in other dances.
• Tango is unique in its use of silence and pauses. It is said that in the silence of meditation, the place of no words, is where the mystery of life dwells. So tango touches life’s mystery.
• Tango’s simplicity rests in the fact that it consists of organic body movements – steps that are natural to our human body mechanics, such as walking, figure eights, pivots, being relaxed, going with the Flow.
• Tango has an ever-shifting sweet spot. This is true of most partner dances but in tango, you must be rigorously present, second to second, or you’ll miss it.
• Tango has a simple structure; it is not freeform. It is a discipline. As a discipline it is most often likened to a language. You learn a vocabulary of six steps, then go on to create your own (sentences) patterns, or figures.
• Tango, like any conversation, is improvisational; like fingerprints, no two dances are the same.
• The tango embrace is unique: It is soft and sliding, not firm and rigid, with a lot of compression, as in other partner dances.
• In tango, the leader’s and follower’s steps may be so different, as to be two different dances to the same music, yet they must be in sync with each other. Thus leaders may simply be called “starters” whose role blends into the dance, once initiated, so that there is no leader and follower, just a dance. This phenomenon is commonly called a tango moment. It is characterized by a sense of no bodies but a total presence.
• The very genetic material of tango carries the primal urge for love. The progenitors of tango were lonely and just wanted human contact, basic intimacy. And a little fun in getting it.
• Tango is best learned, in the truest Zen sense an “unlearning” of those habits that are in your way, such as thinking too much, anticipating the next move, wanting to look a certain way to others, intellectualizing what is happening. Remove these and tango is there. I promise. Not only that—but something else, too, is there.
• The breath in tango, as in yoga, is closely allied with the axis or spine. No one has ever named it such, but perhaps there is a tango kundalini, that serpent which yoga breathing (called pranayama) activates, its tail and mouth meeting to form an endless circle around the first chakra and embracing all seven chakras.
• The music in tango has a primordial aspect. The bandoneon, sine qua non of tango music, is the concertina-like instrument that is likened to the human lungs. It is said to moan, groan, wail. And there are often violins, which may be like our larynx or voice box, whining, crying. Traditional tango music often has no beat or tempo. But there is a rhythm and melody.
• Tango is child’s play. You go round and round in circles, make “sandwiches,” with your feets (yes feets!), and on a whim do a parada (a stop), and the sacada, or invading of your partner’s space, is a playful, healthy way to wage war (between the sexes, in this case). Tango is a contact sport.
• For all its inner game, no-speak, no-think aspect, tango is a natural communal, social, organized discipline or practice. Just sit in any milonga and let your focus roam along three levels: the individual, the couple as a unit, and the line of dance as a whole. The laws of physics are never posted, but they are implicitly obeyed. The people, like atoms, move in circular, linear, and webular patterns or orbits; they bond as molecules; and, in the line of dance, they all blend into one cohesive delicious, delightful, magical, morphing, dynamic compound.
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