For weeks, and even in the hours before the show, my chest was constricted by the grip of fear. Breathing, chanting, meditating, push-ups, nothing would loosen the grip. It was not until one hour before the show that I suddenly experienced the surrender. It was in that instant, when I let go of my expectations, my obligations, my fantasies, that I was freed of thought and judgment and allowed myself to be an empty vessel. And I was filled with joy.
From "The Tao of Tango"
That was the moment where everything about me and my tango was transformed. It was one of two defining moments in my tango life, the passage from conceptual to experiential. And in that moment I went from "doing steps" to "dancing".
When/what/how was YOUR defining "aha!" moment?
6 comments:
The defining "aha!" moment from my first year of tango happened at the very end of the one festival I have attended so far. I was at the closing, all-night milonga, and one leader who had been very encouraging since I began pointed out that over the course of the festival something in my dancing had changed: I was smiling. Maybe it was from being too tired to think so hard, or from having all of that fun condensed into a weekend, but I finally relaxed. I stopped worrying about my ability to properly interpret any given lead and just started dancing. And smiling. :)
Ah, yes. Ye ol' "Shut up and dance." Thank you for stopping by MT. Tango is one of the few things that STILL gives me "aha" moments!
My first DM involved smiling as well...in the first six months or so, my teacher said to me (in a class) "Smile Alex! You're supposed be having fun."
Another was more like a defining 10 days...my 1st trip to Buenos Aires...probably made up of lots of little DM's each day...
Otherwise, like you Johanna, going from "doing steps" to "dancing tango"...I think I may have missed that DM...It may have been a gradual change...I will have to think back on it...
Thunder is thunder, Alex, whether it is the gentle rolling kind or a sonic boom that knocks your socks off.
For me it was the former - twice, as a matter of fact.
But I've had several Rolling Thunder moments as well. Also, interestingly, in BA :-)
A few weeks into tango I was in a class where all the followers were following the sequence we were learning quite well except for one follower who just did "all the wrong things".
On trying to include the sequence in a dance later none of the followers who had learnt the sequence recognised my lead and consequently did "the wrong thing"...
Then I realised (AHA!) that the the follower in the class who didn't get the sequence didn't get it because she was the only one following my lead in the class. The rest were doing the sequence regardless of what I did.
David
Ah, yes. Cause and effect. Lead and follow. Great AHA David. Thanks for visiting!
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