Skip to main content

Tango Homes

Where is your Tango home? Where is the place where you walk in and immediately everyone greets you. You take your seat, air kisses all around, ask the one who's been to Buenos Aires, Dubai, Shanghai or Bali how it's going, what did they see, what did they learn. You hear the strains of your favourite melody and catch the eye of the dancer you always dance this orchestra with.

He twitches his head in the direction of the dancefloor and you can barely get your shoes on before running onto the floor before that first song finishes.

Home. Your Tango Home.

Or the origins in a dusty floored classroom, a packed dance floor. The salsa guy trying tango in front of you and you, trying to figure out where to put this damn left hand of yours. On the bicep? Behind the back? Owch, he just stepped on your toes. The arguments over the latest basic sequence you just learnt-"you have to place me here so that the cross happens automatically, signal like that...or maybe it was the other way..."

Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree comes on and you watch in envy as the teachers dance so cleanly, so exact, so musically. They can dance to anything, and you in your pumps watch their Comme's twirl and glitter even under the fluorescent lights of a classroom.

Getting shoved to dance with that absolutely horrendous lead. By your friend. Great. You smile and try to make it out with your toes intact.

Laughter in a Mexican bar down the road on a winters night at 11pm, Margaritas, Nachos. A mix of salsa + alt-stuff. A floor that is kind of undanceable on, but you're there for the conversations. A loved one next to you and the end of a journey where you've finally let go of everything-all that stress and goal setting realised.

Finally.

And you walk home under gently falling snowflakes-satiated. Satisfied.

Where, oh where can I find you again?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Recap 2019

Well well well, here we come again to the end of another Tango year in 2019. Granted, this year was a lot more muted for me, just one Tango Prelims Championship, one Fame Tango Weekend extravaganza, one Tango marathon (shit, just one?!). This years tango centered very much around home, no crazy travels (thanks to change in job), no multi-country tango events (thanks to no budget + no time), a smattering of lessons. But internally, centeredness, duende. Next year, Taipei Tango Weekend, Singapore Tango Marathon + Lisbon for food, travels and Tango. Where is my tango this year? 10 years since that fateful day running to Michigan Union in shorts and t-shirt with flipflops, hair wet from a swim on a balmy end of September day, 3 to 4 weeks into the new semester. Not knowing this would kickstart one of my greatest passions in this life. The one that brings me into the world of friendships, arguments, travels and meetings. All sorts of people, friends, acquaintances, annoyances. The ...

I'm...Back?

Honestly, it has been a struggle to get back into Tango. I'm having a bit of difficulty figuring out why, but it might just be a combination of having disconnected from it in my regular weekly schedule because of COVID, same COVID making it impossible for me to travel to other countries to dance and join Marathons, a number of years since starting and feeling stagnated, and honestly just feeling a waning interest overall. There is still motivation there, it isn't entirely gone, but life has gotten into the way. The using Tango as a bit of an emotional crutch has also been replaced by a real life human being, so that is yet another reason for the increasingly ambivalent attitude I seem to be having to the dance nowadays. All that being said, I did just fly to Singapore this weekend for Tomas workshop and because damnit, I am fan #1 in Malaysia, unabashedly! Time to see if it's time to kickstart the organising again!

Egos

I have been shifting focus internally all over the place recently. Sometimes I wish this conscious incompetence would just go away for a while, so I can shut up the critic in my head that seems to have gotten louder the more I dance. Are you balanced? Did you embellish to that quaver? Why is your rotation on the left so weak? Knees keep banging into the guy! Ochos not feeling supported! Don't hang off him! Disassociate damnit! Left toes also feeling a lot more pain recently. Hello bunions, you can go away now please. Looking forward to KLTF. Had a quick discussion about egos in Tango as I am getting irked by certain people because of this. The ones who think they are "the shit" and where they can barely acknowledge the people who supported them from the start, thinking that they were the only ones responsible for their current outcome. Bullshit. Which only serves to remind myself never to turn into them (at the risk of course, of going the opposite way an...