Mari Travels with Tango

When exactly dancing lost its innocence to me,I cannot say, but somewhere down the line it must have happened. What used to be a search for fun, momentary emotional relief or pure somatic pleasure turned into a deeper, much more complicated quest for self expression, meaningful connection and shared sense of humanity. Along with this change, came a much more complex relationship to what it means to have a "good dance". Long gone are the days when for a great night out, it sufficed to dance a lot, to get a couple of tandas with my favourite partners, or even, to achieve the longed-for tango bliss. Now, most of the time I battle with my own self-expectations, memories or frustrations. At best, I am observing with mild curiosity how even slight changes in my own attitude seem to have a much bigger impact on the resulting dance than who I am dancing with will. Perhaps inevitably, milonga life has lost a big part of its fascination with the years spent watching and participating i...

Dear beginning tanguer@, On the brink of becoming totally hooked on tango. Perhaps, you just took your first intensive beginner's course, or just got through your first night dancing at a milonga...or maybe even just returned from your first tango trip abroad. I have decided to write you this letter, perhaps as a word of warning, perhaps to ease your path a little, or perhaps, to reminisce about my own path that has taken me through some pretty amazing highs - and the most crushing lows. Indeed, what i am going to tell you, I wish they had told me before I took a single step on the dance floor. Years ago, when I was a starry eyed beginner, full of hope and aspiration to become one of those mystical creatures filling up the dance floor in the milonga, I met a man in the lift of a low-end hostel in Berlin. Somehow, we got into talking about tango, and the man told me he had also been a tanguero for a long time, before walking away. Shocked by even such a possibility, i enquired how...