Many tango-teachers and dancers know about the therapeutic healing effect of tango. Even some psychotherapists talk about it. There is a vague understanding of how it works. We will share our vision, though incomplete, but largely confirmed by experience.

Experiencing the music

Tango music is mostly about emotions and feelings “with a negative sign”, dark, shadowy, painful. Sadness, despair, disappointment, nostalgia. Even in the arrangement of “rhythm, nerve, strength and character.”

Why do we enjoy listening to mournful, tragic music? After all, we avoid and fear such experiences in real life. Music allows us to live through the pain safely. The very pain the listener hides from himself. He feels better after listening as if after crying.

Music seems to be not about myself, not about the listener. There is no fear plunging into it. Music allows you to accept and experience the emotions you don’t have enough courage to realize. In music these emotions are experienced, albeit not as our own, but intensively and often in an unexpected richness of nuances and shades.

The peculiarity of tango music is that “shadow” experiences are often presented in the arrangement of “rhythm, nerve, strength and character.” Music provides enough supportive energy, strength, aggression to resist the pain. And then there is a space for flirting, coquetry, play, warmth, gratitude, love, which are more than enough in tango music.

Experiencing bodily

When dancing, we express music and its emotions bodily; the listener becomes a performer. In a static position (“sitting and not coughing”), musical impressions are accumulated and reaction, expression is delayed. So they are more convincing, they can be contemplated and tasted. But there is a dissociation of the emotional and physical, the body has to be artificially “turned off”. In dance, music is lived dynamically, naturally, in integrity. This reintegration of the artificially separated emotional and physical domains is healing in itself.

Sharing feelings with a partner

In tango, we live music in pairs. We express our feelings to the partner, share them with the partner. When shared, they are easier to live through. This is the beginning of any psychotherapy.

We not only express ourselves, we also listen to a partner. We can sympathize and participate, thereby supporting and enriching our own perception. If we both feel and “speak out” in resonance, it is possible to expand the boundaries of the personality, partially including another person.

In tango, we experience emotions and feelings that we avoid and interrupt in ordinary life. We experience them in integrity, expressing them with our bodies. If we are lucky, we live them in dialogue with a partner.

с) Igor Zabuta, Emma Kologrivova
dancing psychotherapists