Embodying a Dancer

How does one go about becoming a dancer? I started to answer that question by observing the dance floor and trying to extrapolate the characteristics of the people the danced from the ones that were merely going with the motions. My idea was to find those characteristics and the put a plan where xi would tackle my finding from easiest to hardest. That would have been standard operation Nash. Break a problem down into its simplest parts and start attacking each until I’ve attacked the whole. But something didn’t feel right about that. I didn’t feel like tango could be broken down like an engineering problem and I also felt like my mind was plotting something that I couldn’t see clearly. Around that time, I serendipitously heard a talk by Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks that made it all obvious. Burkeman says that the reason that habit building or elaborate learning systems get in our way is because the change we’re contemplating is actually rather scary or uncomfortable and treating it as a long-term incremental project is a convenient way to push the difficult stuff to another time. I never considered that my way of approaching problems which was perfect for some areas of my life, could act as a delay mechanism for the things that I was afraid of. I started to look deeper into this hammer of mine to see what else I was using it on and another insight became clear. I loved breaking problems down and creating systems to solve them because they also made me feel in control. Like I could take whatever challenge was in front of me and with some creative planning establish a process to overcome it. Burkman exposes this perfectly: “We want to see ourselves as the captain of the super yacht of our lives standing confidently on the bridge steering our life towards the future in which we will finally feel adequate and on top of things. Devising schemes for self improvement can really feed into that fantasy because you get to mentally project into the future all details all the nuts and bolts of how you’re going to get to that perfect future place. Where by contrast when you just do something with no promises about the future; when you just write a few paragraphs of your novel or sit and meditate for one session or suggest one meet up with a friend or go for one run, that requires the surrender of control because that’s not about steering the super yacht. That’s about launching your little canoe directly onto the rapids of reality and letting life take you wherever it’s going to take you.” That talk exposed fundamental blind spots in how I was approaching my tango for years. It was time to try something different.

It was the simplest, but scariest thing ever. All I had to do was reverse how I did things. Instead of observing and planning and solving, I just had to dance a lot. Doing that generated all the problems that I needed to overcome and when I went back home I journaled about my experience with each dancer and about the milonga in general. I wanted to gain insights about how I was behaving. Namely, what was my mind thinking and how did my body feel. I set out to do this in order to understand what was it that made me anxious in some dances and what was it that made me enjoy myself in others. The hope was that if I understood my behavior better, I’d be able to get more of the dances that felt good. I felt like I was a bug studying itself under a microscope so I called that period in my development as a dancer a Bug Named Nash.

The first thing I needed to understand and address before I could dance a lot was the force that kept me seated. My fear of rejection. It could prove to be the thing that would keep me hiding in my comfort zone of constant learning and planning. I did not want that.

One night, I sat out a whole milonga without asking for any dances from anyone. It felt like there was an almost palpable entity inside me preventing me from asking for them. That night was the epitome of my fear of rejection and it was to serve as the perfect specimen to help me understand what was going on in my mind. I went home and I started writing. As I dug deeper into the composition of my fear of rejection I realized that it wasn’t rejection that I was afraid of. It was acceptance. I was afraid of dancers accepting my invite, but I was using my fear of rejection as an excuse to keep me seated. Here’s what it means in tango when someone says yes to my invite: my first responsibility is protecting my partner from other dancers that could be bouncing into her from all directions. In milongas there are almost always beginners that don’t know how to navigate the floor and experienced dancers that don’t respect the code. There’s also the embrace. It’s a subtle act of balance: I cannot embrace her too tightly or she’ll be uncomfortable, too loosely and she’ll be lost. I must embrace her within the goldilocks range where I have clear demarcated boundaries that communicate the notion of don’t worry, there’s someone in charge at the helm, but also of the tenderness of holding a baby. I will have to maintain this embrace and multiple variations of it throughout the tanda. Add to the body guard role and the delicate embrace the rich and deep world of tango music. A genre so deep that it stands on its own without the dance. If I were to follow the advice of good dancers, I would have to somehow magically convert my body to a musical instruments and express myself through it. I need to transmit this musicality to my partner in a way that she could understand it or we’ll be stepping on each other’s feet. I added to these all the subconscious muck that I’m not even aware of and reached the conclusion that I was afraid of the responsibility, not the rejection. After my enlightenment, I felt the palpable entity that sat in my stomach and caused my inhibition disappear. I believe that was because my mind knew that it could handle responsibility and once it became aware that that was the cause of my inhibition, it let go. Since that point on I barely sat at milongas. Whenever I arrived at one, I looked for someone that I felt like I would like to dance with and went straight for them. If I didn’t find someone specific, I asked people from the nearest table and then the next until I had my fill for the night. In some dances I felt anxious and in others I felt joy. It didn’t matter. I was dancing and I finally started the journey that would enable me to face new challenges.

As the fear of rejection dwindled the number of rejections increased, but surprisingly that had little effect on me. It was like asking someone ‘is this the line for the ice cream?’ and them responding ‘no, this is the line for chocolate, ice cream is over there’ and I simply proceeded to get my ice cream. I was embarrassed with my self at how insignificant it felt because just a short time ago it immobilized me in my seat for hours. The fear felt like it was part of my character and that there was nothing to do about it. I was expecting a bigger fight, but understanding lead to peace. When I saw these rejections with equanimity it became clear that they are part of becoming a dancer. In fact rejection is part of any type of activity that changes your current behaviour. I was rejected by a dozen companies before I got an engineering job. I was rejected by several women before I had found my girlfriend. I was rejected by many leads before I found my business its first customer. Every one of those rejections felt different than the other, resulted in different reactions, and required a different set of tools to deal with them. What was common was that when I learned how deal with them, they moved out of the way. They still felt unpleasant, but they were not blocking anymore. In tango, what makes rejection unique is that it happens more often and you get to see the person that rejected you regularly. So you must deal with it accordingly. One night I was sitting at a table with a few seasoned dancers and xi took the opportunity to ask them how they dealt with rejection. “One night at La Catedral, I saw this beautiful woman sitting close to our table so xi went up and asked her for a dance. She declined. She had no idea who I was. A little while later, the organizer of the milonga came over to say hello and he happened to know her. So he introduced us and me as the former world champion. Her eye bulged out and this time she asked me for a dance. I agreed and during the tanda I used every single move in my inventory to give her a taste of what she was missing. She was blown away and the smile on her face linked her two ears together. Later during the night she kept cabaceoing me and I kept pretending that I wasn’t seeing her. Eventually she sent over her friend to ask me to dance with her and I told him to tell her, thanks, but no thanks. That will show her. That was more than 10 years ago and I still see her at milongas and I still decline her invites.” Then every one at the table started recounting similar revenge stories. I was expecting the pros to share their tools with me, however it seemed like none of them have figured this piece out. That discussion made me proud because even though my interlocutors surpassed me technically I felt like I was ahead psychologically. I could deal with rejections much better. For me, the more people said no to my invite, the more their collective faces blurred into a forgetful memory. My focus went to the women that said yes (which where more numerous) and I worked hard to remember how each made me feel and if I would like to dance with them again and if so, to which orchestra. From then on, I always responded to rejections with a big smile and said “it’s OK, thank you”. I also kept myself open to cabaceos or invites from women that had said no in the past. The bug named Nash could now live happily with rejection.

Although I was staying longer at milongas and dancing a lot more, there was an underlying anxiety that never left me. I became aware of it one afternoon when I could not get myself to maintain eye contact with people. I would try to look at someone to ask them to dance, but my gaze would automatically divert away to the side. And my mind was streaming with a plethora of thoughts that I couldn’t discern. When I saw that in my self, I realized that I had seen this in many dancers before. Flashes of women putting on their dance shoes with shaky hands and men looking at the ground unable to look forward came to mind. What keeps us coming back, I wondered. What’s the matter with us? Finding myself in that state, I brought my awareness to my breath and started to take deeper inhales and exhales. My mind seemed like it did not want to admit that it was anxious and was reacting by generating even more noise. However, as I stayed more with my breath elongating my inhales and exhales my mind slowed down and my thoughts became more legible. I could clearly see what’s occupying it. “Are people looking at me?”, “Who’s here today?”, “I don’t want to dance, what am I doing here?”, “Did I leave the stove turned on?”, “Are there any good dancers?”, “I want to go home and watch a film.” There was nothing much for me to do other than stay with my breath and wait for my mind to see what was going on right in front of it without its creative additions. Nostalgic tango music, big smiles on the dance floor and people embracing each other. From then on, I made this my first ritual on arrival to a milonga: before changing into my dance shoes, I connected with my breath and stayed with it long enough until my mind moved out of the way. I did this even at familiar milongas full of friends and ordained it The Milonga Ritual.

It seemed like the firsts in every milonga generated their share of anxiety. The first few minutes on arrival was one thing, but getting into the first embrace of the night had its own kind of anxiety. As soon as I got into it, I could feel my heart race and sometimes, depending on who I was dancing with, my knees weaken. It would take a tanda and sometimes a few before these effects dissipated. This was frustrating me because I didn’t want to spend an hour every night until I started to enjoy my dancing. During that hour I might have danced with dancers whom I enjoyed, but due to my anxiety, I wouldn’t have been able to be relaxed and creative. Could I also bring my attention to my breath to help me ease this tension? I discovered a similar way to help ease my body into the flow of dancing that had to do with the fact that when in an embrace, we are no longer alone. All the work we do is in the couple. This is not limited to movement, but also to how we are feeling and how we are breathing. So I experimented with looking for the breath of my partner and as soon as I detected it, I tried to synchronize my breath to hers. Once I felt like we were in sync then I could use her relaxed breath to relax mine and if I felt tension in hers, then I worked on slowing the both of us down. My mind relaxed in both instances because in the former it used the help of my partner and in the latter it learned that we were both in the in the same situation. Here’s an entry from my journal describing this process on the first night that I tried it: “Tonight I asked a beautiful dancer up for a dance and as we got into our embrace she surprised me by going deep. Her chest was completely glued to mine and her arm wrapped around me with her hand on the back of my neck. Damn. I could immediately tell that she knew how dance well because even at that closeness she had her own axis. I got intimidated. I felt my heart spike up and my legs shake and I knew that she could sense both of these things which just worsened the shaking. I immediately put my hypothesis of synchronizing our breaths to test to see if anything different would happen. Instead of starting to dance, I started to look for any signs of her breath and I found it easily because we were practically glued together. Her breathing told me that she was totally relaxed and in her element so I started to slow mine down to mirror hers until I felt like she was now sharing her confidence with me. Only then did I start to dance. She danced superbly. While dancing my mind would spike with a stream of thought, but would then suddenly calm down allowing my creativity to flow out of my subconscious only to then spike again. During the calm moments, I found myself doing creative things and enjoying the dance profoundly. At the start of every song with her I felt the same racing heartbeat come back accompanied with shaky knees. I recovered my composure by looking for her breath again and synchronizing. This is working, but I wonder how to keep my mind calm in the middle of dance? Possible?” I called this ritual The Embrace Ritual and I started doing it at all time regardless of how I was feeling. I had to accept the fact that honestly embracing a human being closely and for an extended amount of time will always stir a soup of novel emotions. There’s no way to predict what you or your partner will feel and how each of you will react.

I overcame my fear of rejection and learned how to coexist with milonga anxiety and first dance anxiety very differently than how I would have done it before. The flow of information was directly from the dance floor and the solutions where experiments in the dance floor. I wasn’t hiding in my planning or classes or practice anymore. I was still doing these things, but not as a way to delay what I was afraid of rather as tools to improve areas in which I needed to grow.

As I became more relaxed with the beginnings, I was starting to reach more into the middle. The dance itself. There, it wasn’t anxiety that robbed me of pleasure, rather it was thoughts. The overarching thought pattern was boredom prevention. If at any point in the dance I felt like I was being repetitive or that my partner was being distracted, my mind wanted to take over my body in the form of an insecure choreographer. What was the last step I learned that I could do next? How can I combine what I was already doing in a new way? Is there a step in my repertoire that I can pull out now? Is she bored? The rush of these thoughts tensed my shoulders, put me in a frozen state where I was not doing any interesting steps and distracted my presence away from my partner. One cannot think of steps while dancing and be relaxed. How odd. Thinking of steps was the most logical thing I could think of.

I thought that next logical point of focus was the music. Many a teacher has told me that music is where it’s at. That at any time when I felt consumed with thought that I should come back to the music and stay with it. That made a lot of sense since the music is what drives us as a couple, but as I tried that, I felt another kind of tension. I became focused on trying to predict what the orchestra was going to do next. Is this a syncopation that is coming up (playing notes slightly before or after where you’d expect them)? Is the conductor going to switch to marcato in 2 right now (play every other beat)? What step can I do with this musical phrase? I thought that I may not have been listening to the music properly. That the music was a valid point of focus, but there was a specific way to listen to it that I wasn’t aware of. I needed help. I reached out to Pepa, a tango musicality expert and teacher, and asked her what was the right way to focus on the music while dancing. Surely, someone who made a career out of teaching tango musicality knows. She said “You must not focus on the music when dancing. When dancing, your focus must be inside the embrace and nowhere else. Focus on the music outside the milonga and teach your body there how to express it.” More bewildered by this, I reached out to El Nene, a very musical dancer and teacher in Buenos Aires, with the same question. “When I’m dancing” he said “my body is flowing with the music, with the usual patterns that we always hear in tango, but then at a certain moment, I feel a vibration telling me that there’s something different coming up, like a syncopation or a switch in timing from marcato in two to marcato in four, it’s a feeling in my body, not a mental anticipation. And as soon as I feel the vibration, I express it with the relevant movement. It’s almost automatic, with a sprinkle of conciousness.” Two experts had just invalidated my focus-on-the-music hypothesis.

My mind needed somewhere to be and so far I knew two places where it couldn’t. I wondered how far I can go with this process of elimination before I found my composure in the dance. I started to look into how people synchronized with each other in various fields, like dancing, acting and music. David Leigh, a singer at the Metropolitan Opera, caught my attention when he said: “[Synchronizing breaths with another person] is a thing that I’ve discussed with other opera singers that is actually kind of mindblowing to us: we think we’re watching a conductor beat time while we sing, but actually every singer I’ve ever met will admit, when questioned, that we look the conductor in the eye while we sing, we don’t look directly at the baton. When we look at the baton, we get basically one piece of information: the tempo he/she wants. When we look him/her in the eye, we get information about the nuance of the sound he/she wants; we can see the baton peripherally, but really we’re not even getting the tempo that way: we get it from the way the conductor is breathing. We become experts at syncing the pacing of our breath with a conductor’s.” After reading that, it dawned on me that this was an extended and comprehensive version of my Embrace Ritual! I had already discovered my mind’s home, except, I was going out of it as soon as we started to dance and it lacked peripheral focus. As I experimented with staying in a synchronized breath throughout the dance while peripherally embodying the music and accepting my mind’s choreographic suggestions, everything started to feel right. Whenever my mind went into boredom prevention or any kind of monologue, I invited it to look for my partner’s breath and worked on synchronizing with it. Once in synchrony, all the peripheral elements could then come in without any of them taking over. My mind loved that because bringing your breathing together with another person felt like it had a lot of substance. It was also ephemeral and dynamic; if you get distracted for a moment, you had to find it again and when you did, it would have been different than when you had it. This was the doorway into Unity that I mentioned in chapter one and it is the blank canvas on which the dance is painted.

Dancing was starting to feel like dancing. Thicker and with more substance. Relaxed. Fun. I realized that until that point I was robbing my partners of what it meant to dance tango. I was too self involved and self aware distracted by steps, technique, musicality, the people around me and criticism. All of which was leading to tension in my body. I look back and wonder how all these dancers must have felt in a selfish embrace. I realized that at the minimum, I had to find Unity with my partner in order to make tango.