To dance, to live like a dancer.
To dance, to live like a dancer.
To really dance, maybe what is needed is to live like a dancer.
I don’t mean to say that to dance, you need to dedicate yourself to dancing as a profession. What I want to say here is something that I will explain below with a comparison.
If I liked, for example, riding a bicycle, I would need a bicycle. This bike would be built in a bike factory. It would be ready, with its tires inflated and its chain perfectly oiled when I got on it and started pedaling.
The body and soul of the dancer are like that bicycle. Just as it would be really cumbersome to manufacture a bike to be able to mount it and pedal it, I could not dance with a body that has not been conditioned, trained, and prepared, that is, “manufactured” previously to be able to dance.
Since I could not dance with a body that is not that of a dancer, and since my body is the only one I have at my disposal from the moment I get up in the morning, I already take into account at that time that my body and my whole being have to be ready to dance when it comes to stepping on the dance floor of the milonga.
Of course, anyone can dance, at any time, without much preparation because, in my opinion, being a human being is already being a being that dances.
However, I think we will agree that dancing Tango requires more, much more in subtleties, skills, perception, and awareness than that minimum that is what makes us dancers just because we are human.
Dancing a dance like Tango is, I feel, like philosophizing about what is essential in life, in matters such as the value of life itself, that is: if it is worth living or not, and why, that is: whether or not there are reasons for that answer; if language is of any use to us here, if perhaps it is not a more appropriate response to shut up and dance.
Now, this silence is not a resignation, so to speak, but a celebration, since we discover that the absence of the common language, the one we use every day, does not represent any problem but could even help us in the deepest of these intimate questions in the solitude of the individual.
Tango, as music, as dance, as culture and philosophy of life, and as something different from all that, which includes all of it, but which generates something more significant and further, a way of existing, of living life, is something that excites us, makes us fall in love, gives us meaning, and leads us to a fullness that we always dreamed of living, that which we intuited as children that life was. Perhaps it should not be believed that with an exhaustive and methodical study of its technical aspects, training, and putting objective principles into practice, we will obtain Tango. With that, which is essential, we would only prepare a ground that might one day be fertile enough to make us dancers.
What do we dancers want?
Maybe stop being babies concerning our bodies.
Happiness might not be an end but a tool for a life that would find its meaning.
Happiness would be something akin to getting organized.
Why does a baby stop being a baby?
Possibly because she feels pressure from the environment and has to react and change, modify herself and develop responses and adaptations to those pressures. She fights, opposes, submits, adapts, or imposes herself.
Marketing would seem to be proposed as a philosophy of life according to which we must consume in the present and urgently everything we want now, what we have ever wanted, and what we may wish to in the future (because it may no longer be available in the market in the future.) There are no alternatives that make themselves heard clearly. The ones that exist are timid and weak, stubborn, blind and deaf, wasting vital energy in violent, undignified, ineffective explosions, or with worthless talk, calming or justifying. Such philosophy, called marketing, is presented as if it were the only one possible. So, living seems to become living within the market, something like selling your life to consume things. Even experiences seem to have been reified.
For example: traveling –the “experience” of the trip– has been reified. I heard someone very wise say (I don’t remember who now): “the only possible journey is the journey we make within ourselves.”
So perhaps we would do well to train and know our bodies and gauge the value of the spiritual consequences of that training and knowledge; we could take then that wisdom to the field of our social and intimate relationships, that is, recognize ourselves in others, get to know ourselves more in “making ourselves known.” That would make us dancers.
This is why I think marketing (as understood by professional marketers) cannot help me to find new students, or more dancers to come to the milongas for milonga organizers, or to promote Tango in general.
As I feel Tango, it is for me Friendship. How could friendship be marketed? And since it does not fit in the market, should we conclude it has no value?
My students and I are good friends because we all have a friend in common, a friend we love so much, a friend called Argentine Tango ❤️
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