Tango High - Totally Legal!

Wednesday's class went better as they usually tend to do. Same number of mistakes, same levels of anxiety, but yesterday, after a week of stress and bad news, I decided to dance out my anger and disappointment. Dance is therapy, right? Might as well exploit the lesson to get rid of my sadness.

Apart from tango for 3 months, I've been taking bellydancing for three years. I love to dance and I love the natural high it brings. I had never heard of a tango high until I experienced it. The high I get with bellydancing is more energetic and more instant, like an exploding bomb of sequins. Since you dance it on your own, you know you're guaranteed a high as long as you want it.

With tango it's turned out to be different, unexpected and in some ways more intense. It creeps up on you, ending in a crescendo of feather-light highness. The teacher led me into a dance on Wednesday (read: dragged me screaming by the hair; my stress levels were off the scale) and a few moments into the song, I was stumbling around and said "I don't know what I'm doing".

He told me not to think, just follow through with whatever feels natural. So I did. I switched my brain right off. I tried to loosen up and simply follow, though I knew I was making mistakes. As the song played and I tried to relax, I felt myself lightening. For a few brief moments it felt like I was far, far away from all my troubles and cares.

And you know what? It was 100% purely, double distilled bliss. In a life with so much responsibility and stress, sometimes it's the perfect remedy not to think at all, not to be responsible for where you'll go next, not to know what the next move will be but not to care either, to not be afraid of where the next step in your life is coming from.

All too soon, in what felt like a matter of seconds, the song was over, and with that it was back to the real world. A tango high I've found seems to happen all in the brain. With other dancing when I'm happy I feel it rushing in my veins. With tango, I feel lightheaded but not dizzy, refreshed as if I just took a nice hot shower.

I'm starting to understand the attraction of tango. I've never learnt a dance before that involved two people. Who knows? Maybe we carry with us energies that we can exchange when we connect in different ways?

I Don't Wanna Dance with Somebody

I think I've burnt myself out with how ballistic I went for tango in the first two months. As of today, I enter month 3 of my tango journey and have found that Monday lessons always go kinda crappy.

The boy-drought continues, my hubby no longer has time to come to class and my stress levels are so high that instead of taking the opportunity to rotate partners and dance with the teacher at least once per lesson, I slink away to the bar to practice figure of eights. At the moment with all the other stresses in my life, overnight it's become too much pressure to be under the spotlight of the teacher.

This is not a good strategy at all. For one thing, dancing with someone who knows what they're doing is the best way to highlight where you are going wrong. Secondly, practically jumping out of the window every time the teacher approaches you makes you look uncommitted at best and a snob at worst.

I can't help it, but it is a shame at the same time. I need to get serious!

***

Lashings of tango hotness are heading our way this weekend with the Argentine tango show, Tango Por Dos. Running from the 3rd to the 5th of December at the lovely Megaro Mousikis theatre, tickets cost from EUR 25 up to 65, ph 210-7282333.

Tango Chemistry

On Monday I had an absolutely terrible tango class. Legs this way, arms another, it was really disappointing and after my disaster of a milonga, I was feeling like maybe tango isn't for me. I got a lot of corrections - posture, hips the wrong way, feet together etc. etc. The hips! The goddam hips! Locked, locked, locked, forward towards your partner at all time, don't lift the hip when lifting the leg! What's life without a bit of hip action, guys???

I left the class feeling really disheartened, but I have a funny feeling my new red tango shoes are to blame. Ever hear the story about the little girl who gets red shoes and then can't stop dancing and gets kicked out of church and finally a woodsman has to chop her feet off? Yeah. Red shoes. The footwear of the devil.

They don't need much breaking in, as they're pretty comfortable already, but before I was going for class in a pair of ordinary high-heeled shoes for a month, and I'd worn the new shoes for a total of about 2 hours. So it was obvious that I needed to take some time to 'learn' the new shoes.

I did this by throwing them on and doing some housework in them, and of course lots and lots of walking. Since my place is not at all big, this meant walking backwards round and round a coffee table for song after song. The neighbours probably think I'm losing it. For three years they've watched me bellydance to my reflection in the TV screen, and now I'm walking backwards for hours around a coffee table.

Anyway, the exercise was a good one because it helped me understand where my weight goes according to where my foot is with these new shoes. I think mood and the state of my nerves has a lot to do with it too though. Class yesterday was my best yet in terms of how euphoric I felt afterwards. All that talk about exercise and endorphins must be true because I was on cloud 9 after class and literally skipped back home. Remember that dreamy feeling I talked about? I had that practically every time I danced, and praise heaven, some boys turned up too!

Technically, I was no better than Monday. I had the same if not more number of corrections and had to totally deconstruct the way I do my figure of eights because I've been doing them wrong all this time.

But I think my new shoes and I are starting to become friends. I hope they decide to cooperate with me for this Saturday's dance. I'm still two minds as to whether to go or not. I think I have come up with the perfect strategy for not freaking out when dancing socially - take off my glasses. If I can't see, I can't see my partner's feet or my mistakes, or the snotty super tango dancers that give us evils if we bump into them. Perfect!!

Image: http://www.tangoandchaos.org/chapt_6school/5posture.htm

A MAAAAAAAAAAN!!!

It's a mystery to me why more men don't come for dance lessons. Let's say you're a single guy and overnight you want to be swanned over by lots of women. How can this goal be achieved in such a short space of time? By going to dance classes, of course!

You know in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that character, Lena Hyena, that's what we all turn into whenever a new man turns up to tango class. The last lesson we had there were 7 girls and two men, which means Christmas if you're one of those two men, but crap for the women. Tango lessons cost money, and we're not paying to spend an hour stumbling about with another woman because it's really hard to switch around when you've been learning the woman's steps to try and do the man's steps too.

Gentlemen, please come to tango class! No matter who you are or how well or badly you dance, you can spend two hours a week with women falling over themselves to get to you first when the teacher says "Change partners."

Image: http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/disney/images/thumb/2/20/Lenahyena.gif/180px-Lenahyena.gif

Gasp!

I think my heart stopped at 2.08.

One Upon a Time in Athens...

This is the story of how I stepped into the garden of tango and fell down the rabbit hole. Tango is one of those dance I had always wanted to take up but always made excuses. In my prudish days, I was too timid to dance that close to a man. Then I convinced myself that girls from the East couldn't dance a dance from the West. Then is was lack of time, then, then, then.

I had decided for certain that I wanted to learn after a tango exhibition in Athens 3 years ago. It wasn't the dancers on stage that melted my heart. While the exhibition was going on, a couple in their ordinary clothes broke away from the crowd and began to tango. They looked so happy and blissful, and the chemistry between them crackled off the scale. It was like watching a new language rather than speaking it. I wanted to learn this!

Finally the 5th of October 2009 came around, the day tango well and truly bit my ass. I went along to a local school to try out a class. It went well. The next few classes went equally well. I was enjoying learning something new, enjoying the exercise and spending one hour not thinking about the real life.

And then, slowly, without me noticing at first, it happened. Drop by drop, like a glass filling up, I found myself thinking about tango all the time. I dreamt about it, I read about it obsessively, I became a maniac. It's like falling in love. I spend my days like a feverish lunatic trying to walk correctly up and down supermarket isles, in my living room, doing weight changes at the bus stop. I want to dance every time I hear anything that could pass for a tango. I wonder, if I had known I would go so crazy for it, would I have taken that first step?

I have fallen absolutely and hopelessly in love with this dance after just one month and it's taking over my life! This is why I started this blog, because everyone is starting to get sick about me talking about tango. My drug is the dream-like sensation I feel on the (very rare) occassions when I manage to execute a good tango. I don't want to be technically perfect, I just find myself chasing that rare sensation all the time. On the days of my lessons, I can't wait for my working day to be over to go to class. When it's over, I feel gloomy at the prospect of all the days I have to get through before I get to go again.

Oh, tango, more addictive than cocaine! I love you! Welcome to my life!