Feelings, Passion, Love and Tango...

What is most beautiful than Love? I never managed to find anything with more beauty than what makes our species to bound whatever the disasters, whatever the hatreds, whatever the humiliations. Love is the key to our survival. It is something extraordinary simple and extraordinary complex at the same time. Feelings, passions, reason, come forward whenever two people meet. Is she, or he, the right person? Why is my heart beating faster? Why can't I have the simples conversation with him, or her? We all went through this at least once.

 

The amazing thing about tango is that it gets us so close to one another and it ask so much commitment, that, we easily get confused between feelings, passion, desire and Love. What do I mean by that? Well,... It happened to me several times already, in my yet too short tango life, to reach a level of feelings hardly bearable. The persons I was dancing with were usually physically to my taste, but also very nice person that were challenging my mind in intellectual discussions (I know it sounds posh, sorry, but that's really something important to me). The smell of there skins were very attractive  (which is often an under-looked factor), and in the dancing, these women were just amazing. Their level in dancing tango doesn't matter much. What mattered was their ability to let themselves get carried by the music and by my lead. They were truly dancing with their souls, like me, to the extent that we were not two bodies dancing, but only one.

 

Achieving this state is amazing, but really disturbing too. We all spend our life trying to find the right person and trying to share and create with the elected heart. It often fails, and most of us still bear the scares of deceived Love. Finding the person with whom we think about spending our life is the single most treated subject by novels, plays and cinema. It is a very hard task, not because it is hard in itself, but because we have placed a lot of boundaries and requirements in our quests that our bodies were not design to take into account. For example (and that's a subject I already covered but that is really interesting), the sense of smell tend to be completely fooled by our social need to using parfums and after-shaves. From a biological point of view, when considering the use of our nose, covering our identity with such fragrances is like pretending to be somebody else.

 

For me the smell of the skin of the person I'm dancing with means something. I do not necessarily understand it consciously (ie, it's not because I don't like somebody's smell that I won't speak or dance with that person), but my body does. How can I be sure that my body, and therefore myself, does understand? Because with ladies that have those natural skins fragrances that I like, my inspiration is fantastic and the tangos becomes amazing. I usually don't really enjoy dancing with women wearing strong parfums, or parfums I don't like the fragrance. It takes me much more effort to actually overcome that disturbance and be able to dance properly to make the tango enjoyable for both.

 

But anyway, back to our subject. When the skin smell of my partner is right, when the music is right (Piazzolla has amazing powers on me, for example), when my partner starts freeing herself and play with me, I was easily geting confused between the feelings of the dance and Love. I had couple of hard experiences as mistaking the enjoyable moment of the dancing, I was trying to convince my partner and myself that is was much more than that. I turned the feelings of the tango into passion, and thought that passion was Love. Two hard mistakes!

 

Sometimes, indeed, this feelings can lead to passion, and the two dancers can share more together for a while. It also happens, that this passion turns into Love. But Love, passion and feelings should not be mistaken for one another as they leed to a lot of hard feelings and sometimes to hatred.

 

These situations usually happen to me with Ballet or contemporary dancers. There is a reason for that that I have been suspecting for a while, but that I only truly understood yesterday with a nice German contemporary  dancer. During the day, I saw a performance with her and an Argentinean contemporary dancer. During their performance, her beauty stroked me. Later on, I met her at a milonga in Amsterdam. We had a lovely chat, and we went out dancing. It was amazing. Most of the people there that night realised that I was deeply falling in for her. Nothing happened between us because, seeing how tired she was, I didn't even try to push my advantage further. This decision was wise in the that later on I understood something fondamental about tango and dancing in general. Next day we met again, and I accompany her to the train station where we had a very interesting chat about feelings, passion and Love.

 

There is something particular about professional dancers that most of us don't understand. They are in physical contact with other bodies all the time. For them (and I would enjoy criticism if I'm wrong), it is something normal and they don't find any difficulties to let themselves go into the dance, because that's what they are training all day for. To emphasise the problem, for us, common people, touching somebody else feels usually unnatural. When we dance, we have difficulties at the start to get close to our partner, and I know many men and women that needed several years to feel confortable dancing in close embrasse with complete strangers. When I dance with somebody that doesn't know me well, it usually takes her several tangos to actually feel confortable enough to start letting go of all the barriers she put (or I sometimes) into the dance. Professional dancers have learned long ago that you need to let go all these barriers if you want to dance correctly. This is why I got confused for so long with such angels: it just felt too right from the very first step.

 

To dance properly tango, you need to put all your feelings into the dance. The music carry the passion we can feel towards another soul and this expression combined with a beautiful girl becomes dynamite. However, if putting all your feelings into the dance is necessary, it doesn't mean that it should end with passion and Love. As I said, feelings, passion and Love are very distinctive things. Feelings are about what you perceive; about enjoying the moment; about exploring the unknown and learning. Passion is about (from my point of view) trying to find a person you can match with; about letting burst of bottled up frustrations to blow out before becoming insane; about getting back in balance in your life. Love is something very different. It is something you build. It is something that feels better when it is composed with bits of passions, but also some feelings and a lot of reason and understanding.

 

Because of the way tango is danced, the two partners will always face a large amount of feelings. Such a large amount can be too much and be miss-interpreted as being passion or Love. Sometimes, it is the start of passion and then Love. But most of the time it isn't. Some good dancers are aware of that fact and abuse of it on others that don't have this awareness(but this is another subject). Other times, dancers just get overwhelmed and get lost and confused into the wild of their minds. Professional dancers have less difficulties because they have learned to handle this over-burst of feeling long ago. Us, common people need to learn to handle these feelings and sort what shall be put into the Feeling box, the passion one, or sometime into the one with the big lock and the label "Love" on it.

 

I'm starting to understand something fondamental about tango: it can be enjoyed like an amazing wine, the most fantastic food or the most beautiful scenery, without necessarily being the final and only dance with that one single partner. Everybody has something to express and to share. Like when I cook with my friends, we all try to share different taste and experiences simply because we like to have a good time. It is the same with tango. The main difference between tango and so many other things we can experience in life, is that it is a very high concentration of feelings. You get the feeling you can get when doing sport; you get the feelings when holding a person from the other sex in our arms; you get the physical contact with another body; you get the feelings of the music; you get the feelings of writing a new story with somebody else; you get the feelings of friendship and mindful binding, etc; all that at the same time. There's not so many activities in our life that bring so much in so little time. This is probably why we are all so addicted to tango. It's also probably why we all need to have a break from tango every now and then.

 

I am glad of that discovery that most of older dancers probably have had long before me. Now I know that I can put all my feelings into the dance without needing to be passionate about it, or expect that my partner will fall in love with me. However, that understanding also mean that I have to be careful with dancers that haven't  reach that stage yet...

 

See you all soon in Stockholm or in Göteborg.

 

Have a good sunday.

 

Maël

 

PS. As usual, your comments are most welcome. And if you don't want your name to appear, just send me a message, I will post it anonymously on your behalf... ;-)