aydan.tango

“Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.” 

(a proverb of the Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.)

Brene Brown, the Ted Talk phenom who went viral with her talks on vulnerability, reviewed some distinctive traits of the most influential people whom she had met. Included in the top four was: they all had a physical practice whereby they integrated the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual learning through movement and exercise and creative impulse.

Colour it agism. The older I get the less my conversations are about content and the more they are about connection. I tend to listen more for the intangibles, attend to body cues, invest more effort in making eye contact, place more value in a smile than the words spoken. My take away from such encounters is a treasured feeling rather than a thought.

The same is true about my dancing.

Warning: A decidedly non-tango Christmas Reflection, only for the spiritually strong at heart.

We cling desperately to the conviction that life should be pain free and all our misadventures have a happy ending and our wayward wanderings end at a Howard Johnson’s. We have problems with real, especially when it comes to birth and death and all the messy points in between. Which is why we attempt to rescript everything Bethlehemish. 

P.S. I could very easily, (and often do), draw a parallel reflection from the destitute conditions in which the Tango was born. Think about it.

When I follow conversations like the ones marking the 30th anniversary of the L’École Polytechnique Massacre, I am encouraged that we are attempting to heal this gender friction that has crippled humanity for millennia. My experience on the dance floor reinforces this conviction.

November is Family Violence Prevention Month in Alberta, Canada. They don’t include learning the Tango as a therapeutic tool but I believe they could… Tango, danced sensitively, is the ideal medium for practicing these behaviours that are critical for all healthy relationships: respect, gentleness, sensitivity, trust, attentiveness, even reverence.

When we show up to dance, we need to first get still enough to hear what wants to be expressed through us, and then we need to step out of the way and let it. Dancing necessitates periods of quietude in which it appears that nothing is happening. We need empty spaces for musing and preparing, experimenting and reflecting.