Mari Travels with Tango

After thinking about it long and hard, I have now decided to move all my tango-related Facebook postings to my blog. The reasons for this are many; I want them to be easy to locate, but with Facebook, I feel severely limited by the site's ever-changing policies on what exactly is shown on your timeline. Also, I want to have more continuity in this blog, as otherwise, there are long breaks in updating it. I do travel a lot more than this blog has so far indicated, and in reality, every day is a journey with tango, NOT just those occasions that I am literally on the road! And finally, I want to be able to read all my tango-related ponderings even years from now, and for some reason, I am not confident Facebook will still exist in say 20 years from now. I haven't decided to quit Facebook just yet, But I am getting more and more ready to do that one day. This media is simply better suited for the way I want to communicate. Will be copying my earlier FB posts here little by litt...

It is the International Day of Tango, and an appropriate moment to reflect on the central stage that tango has taken in my, and so many of my closest friends', life. Growing with tango is a slow, painful and often humbling process. At first, you think it is about a set of skills, of fitting a certain ideal and playing your part, and that achieving that would suffice to be a "good" dancer. There are new movements to learn, a lot of unknown social codes to memorise, but it is doable, and you are confident you will get there. And just when you think you are starting to know your way around in this parallel reality, when you are not anymore constantly bewildered with what exactly it is that you are expected to do, not just fighting to stay on your feet while looking calm and serene... that's when you are hit by other kind of turmoil. All your fears and dreams, all your unrealistic ideas about yourself and your desirability as a dance partner/woman/person/friend are ...