Chapter Threev0.9.0
On Being Musical
In the mid 90s, in Accra, Ghana, my dad drove us to go play polo at The Shangri-La, the trendiest country club in the city. He was playing a classic by the Egyptian virtuoso Mohamed Abdel Wahab on the radio of our beat up 1990 Peugeot 505, the antithesis of what The Shagri-La represented. My brothers, with their mouths transformed into megaphones, were blasting the lyrics and humming the tune in full stereo directly behind my head. They were not with us in the car; they were transported by the music and Abdel Wahab’s voice to another place. My annoyance was building up because the music felt like a jackhammer pounding on the surface of my eardrums and reverberating over the surface of my skin. I turned around from the front seat to face the twins and screamed the lyrics: “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” My dad yelled “They are entranced by the music, don’t break their spell.” and flicked my head with his index finger to make sure that his words entered deeper beyond my eardrums. I turned off the radio in defiance for some instant gratification and a plethora of delayed regret. About 10 years later when the three of us lived together in Houston, TX, I got into independent movies and happened to watch The Visitor (2007). Inspired by Richard Jenkins’ character and to everyone’s detriment I bought a Djembe (West African Drum) and started taking online lessons. When my brothers’ friend saw the drum in our living room he asked me to play something. I placed the drum between my legs and played a few patterns that I had been practicing that week. He looked straight at me mid-play and said “Hmm”. Him and his wife exchanged glances and it looked as if he silently told her “What the fuck was that?”. She blushed. He then asked my brother to give it a try and to our surprise Jad played some impressive beats that got us all moving in our seats. He had never touched my Djembe before. His only training was going to a nightclub on weekends where his favorite orchestra played. I started to get the sense that maybe it took talent for someone to be musical. I didn’t like how that thought made me feel because it went against a fundamental belief of mine that one can get pretty far at anything if they put their energy into it. About 10 years later I moved to Buenos Aires. One night I went to a milonga to watch Porteños (Buenos Aires natives) dance to tangos that they had been listening to since they were babies. Di Sarli was playing and an acquaintance of mine whispered “I used to hate Di Sarli because my grandpa hit me with a cane during our tango lessons if I didn’t step correctly to the orchestra’s beat.” I frowned in sympathy, but part of my frown was in jealousy. I wished that my grandpa forced me to dance to Di Sarli and hit me with a cane when I misstepped. Would I have developed a musical ear? What kind of dancer would I have become? Like Martìn probably. Elegant and free. But the reality was different. I struggled to let go and let the music in.
If I didn’t have a musical ear and if musicality is the crucial ingredient that made a dancer a dancer, then what chance did I have at tango? Had I overcome my psychological hurdles to face a congenital one? Should I have accepted this as fact and moved on? I decided to ignore these questions and proceed as if musicality is something I could learn. Though, deep down, I could feel a sliver of doubt. I sat at a milonga not dancing, just observing the most musical dancers. It was easy to spot them because they seemed to merge with the empty space around them in spiraling shapes. What made them different than the others? Instead of looking at their feet I looked at their embraces. Then at their faces. They had the same look on their faces that my brothers had more than twenty years ago in the backseat of the Peugeot 504. The leader and the follower shared a look of rapture. They were barely with us; just enough to avoid running into other dancers. Like Sufi dervishes they were not dancing to the music, rather they were being danced by the music.
I wanted to experiment with rapture myself immediately. At that time, I was reading Useful Not True, by Derek Sivers where he says “Your outside doesn’t need to match your inside. You can feel terrified inside, but just pretend to be brave for one minute. By doing that, you were actually brave. You might be a total introvert, but need to attend an event, so you act social for one hour. By pretending to be social, you were.” That gave me the ridiculous idea of faking a face of rapture while dancing for a whole night as an experiment. As soon I got into the embrace, I performed my embrace ritual, as had become my habit, but added a fake face of rapture and lip-synced the music. I was imitating the faces of musical dancers that were around me. It was a combination of a slight smile with furrowing and relaxing the brow to the music: I furrowing and smiled more on the high notes and less on the low notes and proceeded to dance as I usually did. The strange thing was that it started to work. Faking a face of rapture actually put me in rapture. When I succeeded at doing this for most of the tanda, I noticed that some dancers hugged me an extra hug after we finished dancing. A gesture of thanks for showing them a good time. What’s even stranger is that when I faked rapture the dance felt better. Four songs passed in what felt like less than a minute. But I’m faking, how could this be? (At that point, I stopped getting annoyed at fake orgasms. I understood women better.) I knew that I was onto something and I wanted it to be part of my tango. Several weeks into fake rapture and what I came to realize was that my contorted face was telling the music that it had permission to do whatever it wanted with me. Contorting my face was only one of those things. It had permission to make technical mistakes with my body. It had permission to bore me and my partner. It had permission to bounce me into other couples. But it also had permission to show itself off through me, to delight my partner and to perform for the folks looking at us. To be danced by the music, I had to surrender. Since then, before the start of every dance, while inside the embrace, I reminded myself to surrender. I gave my mind permission to let whatever was to transpire next to take its course. And just like that, rapture started to happen without having to fake it.
As fulfilling as it felt, I knew that getting into that mystical state was not enough. Without the right musical technique I was risking subduing a basic element of dance which is to play. If I was going to enjoy my rapture with my partner, play had to be at the center of it. I had only achieved part of becoming musical, but there were other parts as important as rapture left to be tackled.
My idea of being musical was to be able to embody different musical suggestions and instruments from the orchestra at different times. When I watched a musical couple dancing I knew they were musical because they seemed to be able to anticipate different parts of the music before they manifested. The leader prepares a step before the piano plays a small solo and right when it starts, he lead an expression of it with his body. The follower seemed to know exactly when the violin was about to begin playing and she would sway within the embrace embodying its sound. The leader would perform a musical play with his feat that seemed to move at the speed of light, then returning to a position from which he could continue his step before the conductor ordered him to change course. In trying not to over-analyze this, I attempted to imitate them on the dance floor myself. I found it to be nearly impossible to anticipate any kind of musical adornment. Every time something different happened to the music it was too late for me to do anything with it. I suspected that all these musical dancers were able to be so musical because they knew the songs well. That they had been listening to them since their early years and here I am trying to do the same as they were doing with just a few years of exposure to tango. Since my pragmatic approach failed me, I put a three part plan in place to figure this out putting my usual self into bliss. Part one was about understanding tango music. I signed up for a theoretical tango musicality course, a hands on course and read the popular books on the subject. At the end of that period, I came out with a better understanding of the rhythm, melody, counter melody, bridges, musical phrases, and syncopations. In part two of my plan, I listened to a lot of tango music. I listened to playlists grouped by different aspects like period, orchestra and type. I came out of part two being able to identify when a syncopation happened and sometimes what kind of syncopation it was. I could more easily demarcate the start and end of musical phrases. I could sometimes identify the orchestra and the period of the song. Part three of my plan was about applying all this learning to dance. I asked my teachers to refocus my lessons on musicality. To let the music drive our curriculum and to teach me how to express it. They were doubtful of my approach, but tried to accommodate my request without much success because from their perspective you just had to wait for you body to be able to do it. You had to put in your ten thousand hours. And it was apparent that that’s how they became musical because they could do it, but they could not explain it. It was like asking a career pilot who had taken his last grammar class twenty years prior to explain the subjunctive tense to you. He uses it skillfully everyday, but could not explain how it works. Around that time, I felt like my dance worsened because I had become more aware of possibilities that I couldn’t express. My education had brought me back to where I started, except at what felt like a slightly worse place.
I was recounting my struggles to a dancer friend over coffee one afternoon and she was surprised with the timing of my complaint because she had just seen a social post by a tango dancer and teacher that addressed the root of what I had been describing. I looked at his writing and almost all of it resonated with my struggles. It seemed as if he had some insights that could help nudge me forward. After some back and forth I was able to book classes with him. On the first class I explained my musical troubles to him and he suggested we dance a few songs. After we finished, he said “The reason that you don’t feel musical is because you are not allowing the music to enter into your body.” I invisibly rolled my eyes and felt disappointment flooding in. At that point in my journey, whenever a teacher overused metaphors or imagery, I saw it as a smell. It was indicating that they lacked depth because otherwise, they could point out exactly what you needed to change in your body to create certain effects. He then proceeded to say “I noticed that you paused in our dance whenever the music suggested a pause, but you were copying a form of pausing, you were not actually pausing.” He then elaborated “There’s a difference between imitating a form and actually embodying it. You are imitating it because all your pauses were transmitting the same information. They were all the same, while the music was suggesting different things. You have an idea of what a pause is and you’re just doing that.” I interrupted him asking about what did all that mean in my body. He countered “I’m getting there. Your pauses are still transmitting information to me, a lot of it, but in a suspended form instead of in movement. As long as you are transmitting information, you cannot receive information. What we need to work on with you is to teach your body to turn off information transmission completely in your dance so that later, we can modulate it to the proper frequency.” At that point, I was starting to get excited for the simple fact that what he was saying made sense. But the ultimate test is trying this out to see if it actually made a difference. He added “I need you to dance as you usually would, but at moments of pauses, I want you to release your breath and relax every muscle in your body. Exsert barely enough energy to stay in the embrace. Then just wait for whatever movement your brain suggests and do that. Then repeat, but in the middle of movements where it feels right to pause.” Just after the first try, I discovered something new in my dance. I was a busy dancer. Constantly doing things and never seizing to move. Even when I thought I was pausing, I was giving out a lot information to my partner: my breath held indicating an upcoming movement, my embrace suspended keeping her on her toes, my hip, knee and foot in tension preambling the next movement. With all that activity, there was no way to let the music make any suggestions. In all my years of tango practice I had never been with a teacher that worked up from the such basic fundamentals. I thought fundamentals started with technique and posture, but this teacher seemed to have gone deeper than that. From that day on, I practiced with completely turning off information transmission in my body while dancing to teach it that there is another way to dance. The idea was that after my body understood this, that when I danced outside of practice, my dance would change from a mode of constant movement to a modulated movement with peaks and troughs. The troughs were where the music entered into my body and did things with it. The troughs were the silence that I had to cultivate.
The missing paragraph: If you’re seeing this, it means that I don’t feel like I can say that my dance is musical yet. I will come back here to complete this chapter when I do, before the book is published. One cannot force this. The paragraph below is a segway into the next chapter.
Musicality turned out to be more than doing things to the music. It was a mixture of rapture, knowledge, and silence. But its catalyst, the element that pulls it out of your body into your partner’s is the quality of your movement. How you invite your body to occupy space. Without that element, musicality will be a series of missed expressions. As I worked more on inviting rapture and silence into my body, I started to take movement technique more seriously and accepted the fact that after a few years of dancing, I was ready to feel like a beginner again. Beginner mind is hard.