Woo-woo tango or wow-wow?
I am a huge fan of both.
One to watch and one to dance.
Wow-wow tango is what first got my wife, Patricia and I initially interested in dancing tango.
Woo-woo tango is what kept us in the game.
Wow-wow tango is what you see. Performance style. The fancy pivots and spins and everything else that requires talent and skill and advanced coordination. Beautiful. Difficult. Lots of lessons.
Woo-woo tango is not seen. It is felt. It is internal, not external. It is what goes on inside: one’s feelings, one’s openness, one’s heart strength, what one is attending to a deep level. Also what goes on between the dance partners: connection, attunement, shared energy. Rather than the classic qualities like pivoting and posture and sequences, woo-woo tango focuses on emotional orientation, sensuality, sensitivity, listening and responding.
Very little fuss is made about woo-woo tango, perhaps for good reason. As Carlos Gavito stated, “You can teach steps. You can’t teach feeling.”
Presumably he is right. (Who am I to question to Great One?) Maybe you can’t teach feeling. But speaking from my professional and personal experience, my belief is all that is required is that you create a safe and nurturing place and feelings will naturally rise to fill the void.
Which brings me to the most fascinating element of tango. For me, tango introduces a non-verbal language, structure and medium for exploring and expressing emotionality and sensuality in a socially sensitive context.
My wife Patricia and I were fortunate to get some early-on instruction from visiting teachers, Michael Young and Beatrix Saltzinger who taught very skillfully how to blend the wow-wow and the woo-woo. Dancing as a couple at the time, it was all fun and no threat to explore where this would take us. We would carry on unabashedly until someone would yell, “Get a room.”
Then life circumstances prevented Patricia from dancing. This presented to me the necessity of exploring feelings and sensitivity, connection and intimacy, which did not default into sexual or romantic attraction.
I set to work on developing a tool-kit of intra- and inter-personal skills which would support and enhance my connection with my dance partner. It included fine-tuning attitudes and dynamics such as respect (even reverence), attunement, sensitivity, gentleness, support, attachment and detachment, call and response, sensuality (listening with one’s body), energetic connection (the dance in-between), creative collaboration, equality, intuition, body awareness, shared and solitary axis.
All of this is expressed and experienced non-verbally, even non-visually. One neither talks to one’s partner while dancing nor in truth, seldom looks at one’s partner. And my dance partners claim that they usually dance with eyes closed. I have to take their word for it.
In any case, the reference point for woo-woo dancing is always internal. My conclusion? Tango is in every way as much a suitable medium for exploring and developing one’s inner emotional and psychic axis as it is one’s physical centre of balance. One is required for wow-wow tango, the other for woo-woo.
And despite Sr. Gavito’s directive to the contrary, I do try to teach feeling.