Tango slowly and gently changes the body. Now I have the most comfortable one in my life. Not the most hardy or strong, but the most enjoyable. I hear the same from other tangeros. They talk about their bodies, not mine.

Tango gives you not exactly what you expect from a dance.

Musical body

I was taught to listen to music motionlessly, like the mummified Lenin to the “Appassionate”. This is a good way, it does not allow you to respond immediately. It creates emotional pressure, in comparison with which a hysterical steam boiler before the explosion looks like a wrinkled balloon.

A good but crippling way.

In tango childhood, I sometimes didn’t understand why to dance this music. I wanted to freeze and listen. Stupidly stopped in the middle of the melody. Some followers understood. “You listen, I’ll drink some water.” It turned out that the musical brain and the musical body are two different things. You can be a musician, hear a lot and be very impressed, but not feel anything in the body.

And you can experience the music with your body. Music gives rise not only to visual, olfactory, taste, and tactile associations; it brightly happens in the body. But we have few suitable words to describe this.

If you allow music to live in your body, movement can be born. Your own, from the current state, not invented by the choreographer. In tango, this is not just a lonely solo movement, it is a couple movement, a contact movement.

Contact body

Even before birth, the baby contacts her mother through movement. It succumbs to uterine contractions, later she gives in to her mother’s hugs. She learns to push and cuddle, tries to reach, grab, pull and release. Ruella Frank identified these movements as fundamental. We also call them the six movements of intimacy. They are the first preverbal contact experiments, which largely determine the typical ways of contact in the future. Someone knows how to give in, but does not know how to push. The other knows how to push, but only to break the contact, not to make it more intense. It’s hard for someone to reach out – to achieve what they want, or to grab and pull – to take their own. Few people are able to let something go, to release without breaking contact.

It seems to me that for contact in tango all six movements-intentions are necessary at the same time. It is vital to give in – to follow in the very initial sense, to push – to create some resistance to intensify the contact, while reaching for each other, hold and hug, give freedom – let go. All at the same time.

Perhaps that is why tango is so therapeutic, even without a conscious attempt to assimilate experience. It immerses us in the deeper layers of the body-psyche, allows an adult to work out all the movements of contact-intimacy again.

Over the years in tango, the body becomes more and more listening and speaking, sensitive to the other and able to talk to the other.

Natural body

Tango limits the ability to move far-fetched, artificially. The partner will not understand. And although we learn steps and hugs for years, for good dancers the step is like a simple step, hugs are like ordinary ones, from the word “hugs”. To return to naturalness, you need to unlearn a lot, even what you still don’t know.

Tango limits the ability to perform correct movements with incorrect muscles. Any strain is transmitted to the partner. The body has to act as it is intended. And each body is intended differently.

Some tangeros have a convincing “dancer’s body”, but it rarely attracts attention as something separate. The harmony and integrity of the image, including shoes and facial expressions, are often more impressive. Sometimes this integrity does not fit on the cover of a magazine. So much the worse for a magazine.

c)
Igor Zabuta, izabuta.com; 
Emma Kologrivova, kologrivova.com;
dancing psychotherapists

P.S. The original text is in Russian. Please contact us if you can improve this translation.

More essays at http://tangobook.tilda.ws