Tango is danced to the beat of the heart … Only feeling gives it understanding and beauty, which is what is between the musical and the poetic and differentiates it from the coarse and mechanical…. Carlos Gavito.
I love to quote Carlos Gavito, especially with respect to adding artistry and feeling to Tango. Certainly, he and Marcela Duran had their own unique and spectacular fashion of blending the two elements.
But that still leaves mere mortals like me and you with taking up the challenge in the above quote:
How do I transition from motion to e-motion, from the mechanical to the heartfelt, from the pedantic to the poetic?
The HOW and WHY of Dancing
To improve on the how of dancing (the coarse, mechanical, so says Gavito) continue with the tried and true learning technique of visual/ auditory instruction mirrored by brain/ body processing. (NB: Practice until the step becomes muscle memory.)
But, if you want to explore the why of dancing (feeling and artistry) then you need to internalize some special skills which take you far beyond the dance floor.
And if you are a teeny, teeny, teeny bit of a science geek like me, you will want to know what goes on under the skin from a neurological perspective. (It is worth the effort. It will enrich not only your dancing but also your romance life. Wooo!)
The Skinny on Tango Touch
My premise is that all the secrets, the dark mystery, the sultry allure of tango begins and ends with touch. So if we want to expand the richness of our dance, the best place to start is to understand what is going on, on and under our skin.
In a recent publication, Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind, the author, David Linden identifies two different types of touch systems:
One (A tactile fibers) … gives the ‘facts’ — the location, movement, and strength of a touch — and we call that discriminative touch. But then there’s the emotional touch system. It’s mediated by special sensors called C tactile fibers, and it conveys information much more slowly. It’s vague — in terms of where the touch is happening — but it sends information to a part of the brain called the posterior insula that is crucial for socially-bonding touch (nicknamed caressing touch). This includes things like a hug from a friend to the touch you got as a child from your mother, to sexual touch.”
Type A fibres provide all the information the brain requires to get you around the dance floor, such as maintaining balance, coordination, following the beat, sensing where your body ends and your partner begins, etc. Type C fibres provide information to that part of the brain that translates sensation into emotion.
Motion before Emotion
The default touch system is set to the A fibres. These fibres respond to bold, loud, attention-grabbing stimuli that are difficult to ignore. We are pre-wired with learning the mechanics of dance, just as we were with learning to walk at age 8 months.
But if you want to dance from the heart, to feel a connection to the music and your partner, to paint the floor with your feet like an artist (another Gavito quote), then you will need to develop another skill set through the stimulation of C-fibres.
C-fibres respond only to delicate stimuli, necessitating that we give special attention to innervate the sensors in the right way. Further, the translation by the brain of C-fibre sensation into emotion is very subjective and filtered through multiple layers of context.
How the brain works:
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1) Context matters: The same touch can be experienced entirely differently depending on the brain’s appreciation of the context.
A close embrace feels entirely different from someone you like than someone you don’t. A light touch from a “creep” will send chills up your spine whereas the same touch from someone you care about will give you warm fuzzies all over.
2) Focus. Contrary to popular mythology, our brain does not multitask. What we call multitasking is merely a continual state of distraction, technically known as “monkey-mind.” The brain focuses on one sensory stream at a time prioritized according to the strength of the stimuli and our valuing of what is most important.
3) Stimulation. The brain gets bored very easily and will quickly ignore any stimuli (within 8 to 12 seconds) if maintained at a constant level. To keep the brain focused we need to keep changing it up. In the dance context, this means that adjusting the embrace ever so slightly ever so often goes a lot further to enhancing the dance feel than locking into a fixed grip.
Steps to adding the E to your motion.
1) Turn down the volume on the A Channel.
We can only attend to one channel at a time. The A fibre sensory system is the default because it reads large and loud stimuli, such as rapid and gross motor movements. Turning down the volume affords the C channel a chance of being heard.
How do we turn down the volume?
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Pause. Tango is designed to allow for precisely this, namely, pauses and other phrasing and timing variations, (not so the milonga or vals).
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Slow down, pause, keep the dance simple. Avoid Shakespearean dramatics, “strutting and fretting your hour upon the stage,” “full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.” (MacBeth, of course).
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Practice technique until it becomes muscle memory and your brain is freed up to attend to more subtle stimulation, like the C channel.
2) Turn up the volume on the C channel.
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Create sensations that are within the C channel transmission range. Touch that is soft, slow and subtle stimulates type C nerve endings which transmit emotional content to the brain.
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Pay attention to these subtle transmissions. This is an acquired skill and very critical to emotional intelligence in general.
3) Linger.
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Give extra time and space to the simple touches: arm around the shoulder, clasping the hand, opening and closing the embrace, finishing the phrasing on a step sequence. Every little detail is to be finessed, savored, and relished.
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Negotiate and renegotiate the embrace throughout the dance. The brain gets bored. Command its attention.
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Become skilled at reading and acknowledging consent from your partner with every movement. Sensing consent – your partner saying “yes” from the body’s core – is the most sophisticated learning we will gain from Tango and will sustain us through our entire relational life. (N.B. Compliance is not consent.)
4) Breathe!
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Nothing expands our consciousness like attending to our breath. Make the most of the pauses to check-in with your breathing.
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Attending to your partner’s breath at the same time makes it twice as powerful.
5) Employ emotional IQ.
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Match content with intent. The brain will not interpret Type C sensations as conveying emotional content unless there is a corresponding intent. Whatever the touch, it must be done with sensitivity, gentleness, respect, attunement, reverence, vulnerability, safety, and valuing. This is the context in which positive emotionality lives and thrives.
Take-aways
Cultivating a creative, feeling style of dance is very challenging. It must be practiced just as diligently, courageously and selflessly as our mechanics. To put “e” into my motion I must invest myself, take personal risks, become vulnerable, sensitive, and create space for intimacy.
Is it worth it?
I am acutely aware of when my partner and I are dancing from the inside out. A simple dance with e–motion is more pleasing and satisfying than a more technically sophisticated or stylistically correct dance that has no heart connection.
Just recently I came away from a well-manicured milonga of which my partner commented, “It ran very smoothly but it had no soul.” The externals were all in place, but the internals were missing. Lots of motion. No emotion.
When I cannot make a heartfelt connection with my partner and the music and the dance floor, I cannot dance to the best of my ability. Sometimes I am not able to dance at all. That leads to many unfortunate and funny stories but for another time. This blog already went far too long. Back to short and simple the next time. Thanks for lasting to the end.