The other evening I was dancing tango with a woman who teaches swing, but for whom, like for me, tango is relatively new. I could tell she was enjoying our dance; a smile lit up intermittently on her face, and now and again she joined me in a little conspiratorial laughter. We seemed to have a nice rhythm. She was funny and snarky, too, which I liked. But while we were in between songs at one point, she said to me something that struck me: ‘for this next one, don’t THINK; just dance to the music.’ I joked that I would pay close attention to not thinking, but in the end her advice led to something fresh; the dance was much sloppier, but it felt more alive, as if we were using tango to channel the music, rather than using the music merely to keep pace in our tango. As the song came to a close we were both grinning like school-kids.
My dance partner’s challenge to ‘just dance’ was actually a relief to me. With her intuition as a dance teacher, she was telling me that I’m ready to shuck off some of my ugly duckling phase and to move forward—that I know enough now that I can play a bit, and that what’s most missing from my dance isn’t technical but rather lyrical. It’s one thing to do a cross or an ocho with exact timing. It’s another to use the ocho or the cross in creating a dramatic narrative, one that ebbs and bursts with the music. The narrative might even be juicier if the ocho is fumbled, or the cross isn’t perfect; it’s not the exactness of the individual steps but the improvisation towards the narrative that makes the dance float off the dancefloor.
I was also reminded that we needn’t master every conceivable tool to create something beautiful; rather, we must merely know how to use some tools well enough, and then it’s our soul that determines the outcome. In my tango, I can strive to create art from the few steps that I know, just as a good female dancer will strive to take the steps she is guided through and use their bounds as her own palette for expression. Equally, a dancer who knows many moves isn’t necessarily a good dancer, because it’s the interpretation and expression that make it a dance, not the mastery of technicalities.
In this sense, I feel that tango is very much like life. The man and the woman in tango each embody different struggles, which can be relevant at different times in anyone’s personal narrative. The man’s challenge is to create art from a limited repertoire. He succeeds if he manages to not think but to dance, to feel the tension of the music and the woman, and to bring something unique to them. He is like the majority of us, handed some instruments from our upbringing and education and then released to the world with the challenge to make the most of ourselves. The woman’s challenge in tango, on the other hand, is to take extremely confined circumstances and, through her spirit and soul, to transcend them. She is like those of us put under extraordinary physical or mental constraints, and left to find nobility and expression in the very embodiment of this struggle.
Paradoxically, when I watch extremely skilled dancers, it’s the woman, not the man, who appears to be running the dancefloor. Similarly, it’s the people in life who achieve spiritual heights under the greatest duress who generally garner the most human respect. It was through his spiritual response to decades of imprisonment, for example, that Nelson Mandela was able to bring a new political reality to South Africa. But tango is a dance, and like life it is fluid. The man is no prison and the woman no prisoner; he who can’t respond to the woman’s intention isn’t really dancing at all, despite the fact that, indeed, he is leading. How many couples in real life are like this? The best couples collaborate spontaneously, and neither can predict the outcome, for each is inextricably involved. The drama is rich.
On my way home after being told to just dance, I passed a few cafes filled with people conversing and laughing, and it struck me that these people too had spent the night tangoing. How many of them were just dancing themselves, never even realizing their perfectly timed steps? They weren’t thinking about the mechanics of their conversations nor about the relationships they were nurturing; they were just living and enjoying their night out, and in the process creating some sort of life tango. Likewise, friends can gather again and again over a chessboard, trying their mightiest to become masters, only to realize in old age that it was the narrative of their gatherings through which they attained mastery at something much richer. It’s usually only afterwards, sometimes years afterwards, perhaps even only at the very end, that we can see which of the tangos in our lives were the most meaningful.
Life’s dance is elusive; we might feel it at moments for what it is but not realize that the dancefloor has already shifted, and then we might be left fumbling again, trying to work through a new set of uglies although we had previously thought we had mastered it all. Things can change suddenly, such as in the death of a loved one. If this process were more linear then it wouldn’t be life, for in life, there’s no guide but experience, and experience itself is what creates the rules of one’s tango. Perhaps as we grow old we’ll have discovered our true narratives, and we’ll be able to look back fondly and laugh at it all. If we are rich in our spirits then we’ll certainly do so. The trick, then, is to try and catch ourselves dancing, and then to determine what exactly it is that we’re dancing to. In some cases we might even be able to mold our own dancefloor as we skip breathily over it. But even when we can’t choose our own tangos, we can still dance with abandon. And I think it’s through this unintentional dancing that we’ll discover life’s ultimate meaning.
