The Torment of a Dancer

The torment of a musician is that he strums out his heart so all can hear his soul.
The torment of an artist is that no one knows the water colors were from her tears.
The torment of a dancer is the horror of the cliff, merely the edge of the stage.
Then there is tango--a torment-less duet of music-that-is-dance, an embrace of two.




Meet the dancer

How to please a woman

As in life, so in tango every man should know about what women want.

• Woman would be glad if the roles were reversed: That there would be too many men rather than too many women.  They would not complain if men were sitting it out, waiting for a dance (at least for the first few years).  
• Women would be very picky about men, and if there were many good dancers, the

Tango: The "Synful" Dance

Tango culture at its center and at its best is a community of harmonizing elements:

The whole dance floor is synchronized in movements to symphonic* (harmonized) sounds of musical notes. And tandem dancers,  synsomatic in their dance, are perhaps some of the best examples on earth of "two becoming one" in a spontaneous way.

Synsomatic
In order to find this epicenter of tango, I try to be more fully present in my own body, my feeling, my breathing.  Only then can I evolve into the dancing animal with four harmonizing legs, four lungs, and four cerebral lobes; four eyes--two eyes open, two eyes closed, and two hearts drumming together the most primal of all symphonic rhythms. 

The Many Hands of Manipulation

Literally "manipulation" is skillfully working with one's hand,
just as a sculptor manipulates clay.

What you learn from tango will help you in life.  As we dance, our hands are constantly touching and we both have a hand on each other's back.  Are all hands the same?  Of course not.  And so from tango we learn that hands have a spectrum of behaviors, feelings and emotions behind them.

In the "real world" hands are not so often experienced by others at work and between friends as we dancers experience them.  And many languages* do not help clarify this spectrum in the definition of "manipulation," meaning "the work of hands."  Manipulation in day-to-day usage has mostly negative connotations as I hear it.

Official definition for Manipulation

Manipulation's official definition does not help us understand the wide spectrum of behaviors of manipulative behavior, ranging from "ethical and appropriate handling" to "unethical and over-bearing handling."  So I am going suggest more clarity to the subject by adding five different Greek prefixes to help clarify, using social tango as a way to understand the complexities of social interaction.

Tango's a bad boy magnet?

The Milonga Dialogues:                                                       German translation at this link

Don't touch that lever on the "E.I. Tango Magnet"!

Is Tango a magnet
for the emotionally impaired?

The Greek philosophers would meet in the streets and often converse about the meaning of life while eating together. Tango philosophers meet at milongas, and work out the meaning of life while observing the Travelers on the Wooden Path.

The Tango Effect--5 years later

Tango Therapist's 5th Birthday

Today my blog is five years old.  Also this week I will have posted 300 little pieces of my passion for tango.  Around five years ago, I discovered something that has transformed me, and it wasn't tango itself.

The Tango Effect
Tango had transformed the way I understood the patient/therapist relationship about three years after I started dancing tango better than salsa. I learned about "the tango effect" from so often--too often--hearing women say, "Wow, you led me to do things I never have done before."  I kept hearing this, and still do, but at the time I was startled because, I was feeling many women were (and still are) leading me to places I had never gone before.  I started calling these misunderstood tango roles as "the tango effect."