“I love Italian opera–it’s so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don’t care about their immortal souls, and don’t worry about the ultimate.”
D.H. Lawrence, letter, April 1, 1911
Impulse: living dangerously, recklessly. Do first, think later. Or maybe don’t even think. Being spontaneous. Perhaps that’s how tangos should be played/danced.
Reuben and I attended our very first milonga (coincidentally, IXI’s final one before shutting their doors) since we started learning tango 5 months ago. What an experience! We danced our first milonga and vals with some difficulty and some foot-stepping, he’s getting so much better as a leader (: Although I danced more tandas with him than anyone else, I got a chance to dance with a few other gentlemen too, and there’s just so much to learn! A good leader naturally awakens me to my depth and it’s difficult to focus on the outer environment much at all—meaning anything beyond my body and his. Even when navigating our way through a crowded dance floor (one of my partners compared it to driving on a crowded road), my eyes remain closed, as we’re transported to an inner world where the music and close movement seemed to meld our bodies into one.
And it really was like being part of his body…or being part of the One body that our two bodies become for those three minutes.
This, for me, is tango at its best. Nevermind the fact that I’m a beginner.
And it’s amazingly sensual without being sexual. In fact, in a funny sense, it’s almost as if bringing in overt sexual energy would be an intrusion, a dilution, or diminishment, of what is so lushly available. And it truly is wonderful…just different.
—
Thank you for the dances, and the many more to come.