tangopilgrim.com

and those who don’t .  Here is from Chicho, the icon of “tango nuevo”,  excerpt from his interview with Milena Pleb:

… I remember we were talking, then we embraced each other and in that moment I felt 40 years of tango. In the embrace, do you understand? We hadn’t taken a single step! It was simply from the way in which you held me. For me that was the most powerful moment of the tanda. The we danced for a long time. It was great, we did all sort of things. I enjoyed myself. But the moment of that embrace, like the one of my first class and some others, have marked me in regards to my relationship with the dance. I’m talking about the intimacy of the embrace. With very few people have I been able to feel the same way, much has been lost. My wish for the dance of tango, then, is that the shared intensity returns, in the soul. Not to stay in the surface, but to feel it inside. That the genre evolves from that intimacy. The essence of tango is in the embrace and the person you are dancing with.

Coincidentally, I wrote a post not long ago about my own similar discovery. Tango is internal. As the subtitle of this blog, in my mind as always, tango is a feeling in the embrace, the music and the sound of breaths. Simple.

I was reading the interview with Chico a few days ago.  I enjoy watching Chico’s performances most of the time. He is unique and brilliant on his own. What impressed me most was what he had said, according to some friends who had taken lessons with him , that students shouldn’t come to him without a solid traditional tango foundation. The problem is that there are  too many bad imitators  and  few truly inspired by him.  Anyway, in this article, he mentioned that at the time his weakness had to do with his inhibition.

Inhibition

Don’t we all have it? Aren’t we all carrying some kind of inhibition into our dance?

One of my friends came back from a trip.  He had an amazing time dancing with an acquaintance of his.  What made it such a unforgettable experience for you? I asked him. ” I felt free, completely free.” he answered.  I knew what he was talking about.

Tango is a partner dance. We are influenced and affected by the other person in embrace. The more we focusing on how to lead and how to follow, the more inhibition we create.  When we are not sure about ourselves, we introduce inhibition to the dance.  One of my teachers asked us this question at one of my beginner’s classe:

” Do you know who you are?”

Much of what he taught was forgotten, but this question has stayed in my head. In retrospect, three and half years of dancing tango, I have been trying to find out who I am. Not until we know who we are, could we come in the embrace without inhibition of our own.  Not until we set ourselves free, could we come in the embrace as one body four feet.

To dance free, I think we have to identify our inhibitions first.

What are your inhibitions?