Being grounded

Dancing after visiting BsAs: a few recent comments from friends made me look back at the post I wrote after the first milonga back in London (Sunday 11 January). The entire post was about what I saw that evening compared with what I'd seen. Time to revisit the experience.

One comment: I was asked if I felt that my dancing had been deconstructed. That puzzled me a moment or two: it was the passive I found confusing. Nobody deconstructed my dancing. But I did spend the middle weeks of my stay being rather cautious. My first instinct was to get on the floor. Then I started to wonder if I was doing the right thing, doing it well enough. At least I was prepared for the style of dance there, but you become aware that there are people around you who have danced on and off for 60 years, whose experience of milongas goes back to the 40s and 50s. I thought I should regard dancing there as a privilege, not a right: to be on the floor at Canning certainly feels like a privilege! I started to tune in to the Spanish-language classes and to dance with local partners. I also started to sit and watch. You see amazing dance: not amazing in the 'tango fantasia' sense of high kicks and choreographed sizzling sensuality, just people moving beautifully, effortlessly, simply for their own pleasure. Watching became quite important for a few weeks. Some of those dancers, some of that experience, won't be around much longer.

My experience of dancing the first milonga after I got back was confusing because I was recovering from a serious cold, I was deaf in one ear, my own voice sounded strange. I couldn't dance easily because I felt my partners were expecting some amazing experience: how could I live up to it? Hard to explain that for five weeks I actually hadn't been dancing a lot. My feeling of that evening was that the lesson I'd brought back was to be very grounded. I was aware of the strength of gravity now, of weight, whereas before I'd danced around on tiptoe. This was what I learned (apart from actual steps) from Tete and Silvia. “Tango can be danced in a thousand different ways, but let’s step on the ground in the first place, because that is where we ought to dance to the music... Kids these days tend to dance in the air. You can do many nice things, but please do them on the floor.”

So it was strange and very helpful to be told that the impression from dancing with me that first night back was that my posture was a lot better. I wasn't in the least aware of posture that evening, but I'm wondering if the feeling of being grounded isn't related to a partner's perception of better posture.

Other than that: it's hard to change overnight. But, partly because of all this writing, I've still got a lot in mind, a lot of work still to do.