Tell me how to improve my dancing and I am intrigued. (I may even care enough to practice.)
Tell me how I can become a better person through my dancing and I am inspired. This goes right to my heart’s core.
Growing the power center through Tango.
Reflections on a lesson with Deborah Sclar, an Internationally vetted dance educator/performer from Denver, Colorado:
Certainly, Deborah brought with her proficiency in Tango technique and performance skills. But most fascinating for me was her integration of basic body awareness and training in kinesiology into her dance instruction.
Here goes: I am strutting my stuff, pulling out my most fancy pivots and sequences. Deobrah stops me in the middle of a very complicated step sequence. The nerve!
She starts stroking my shoulder and speaking to it gently.: “There, there now. You can go back to sleep.” Then whispering to my extended left hand, “Yes, you are wonderful but you can relax. We don’t need your help in directing this dance.”
Who knew the body has a mind and will of its own? It is often little help to talk to the head and hope that the information gets communicated properly. Compare this with a typical tango class scenario: The teacher says, “Move the back foot here and step there.” I stare down at the floor blankly. Nothing happens. Paralyzed. Dumb.
Apparently, words aren’t always that helpful. What is helpful is touch. Deborah is speaking directly to the body in a language that it understands – a gentle touch, stroking, whispering. I am getting a lot of touch in this lesson and loving it but most importantly, internalizing it.
This brings me to the most important, persistent and resistant lesson that Deborah focuses on – core strength: how I communicate intention through my power center.
This has been the contention of all my dance instructors and therapists: I cave. I am afraid of my power. I am afraid of power generally. OK. I have lots of reasons or excuses as to why that might be. (I wrote a book about it, Trauma to Tango: Dancing Through the Shadows). But none of these serve me well at this stage. I want to change. I want to carry myself as a power person.
This is the gift of tango. It is a safe place where this reclusiveness gets called, challenged, identified and rectified. Deborah, very hands-on, identifies where I am losing my power and where I can find it.
This process of empowerment is the opposite of what I read in my self-help manuals: thinking, visualizing, and talking myself into a new walk. All mental processes. Deborah’s focus is body-based. This is walking myself into a new talk. It acknowledges the primacy of the body in carrying our sense of self and maintains that the surest way of adjusting the psyche is through the body.
So I begin walking myself into my power self. I stop mincing my steps. (Did she just accuse me of “mincing”? Yuck!!) All the other errors that we were going to address in my other steps in the lesson are instantly corrected. I am leading without raising my shoulders or steering with my left hand. I am simply giving a clear signal of intention through my chest and my partner is having no trouble following.
Dancing that evening evokes a comment from my dance partner, “You seem taller.” The next day, walking around the office I am continually adjusting my posture, aware of how habitual and pervasive it is for me to slouch.
The message is reinforced: If I want to change, it is not enough to think or talk myself through the process. I have to invite my body into the conversation as well. Stroke it, encourage it. Practice the new me moment in and moment out.
Walking the walk into a richer, fuller more powerful me. Or more correctly, dancing. Thanks Deborah.