Stories

I started dancing tango after an operation on my spine. At first I had to fight with my “monkey brain” that always wanted to be somewhere else, to jump from one branch to another. I had to wait for impulses and stay connected.

I had to understand that it is nice to “disappear” by following, and after a while to learn that it is not about disappearing, but about staying there. I am still searching for my grounding.

I have been using Tango in my therapeutic work since 2009. I have seen many people change their way of communicating, feeling their own body and doing these two things at the same time. I have experienced that feeling connected (to myself and to others) is the most healing and necessary way to live a fulfilled and conscious life. There is not just one story. It is all about continuing to learn.

The lessons, which are offered specifically for singles on a regular basis, and not just for singles who show up sporadically, which usually reinforces the feeling of being an outsider, gave me the decisive push to integrate socially into the tango community and really boosted the dance experience.

However, I am going through various phases and am once again struggling with whether I am ‘good enough’. This is currently holding me back from even setting out to take part in a milonga as an individual. Contrary to the official statements made in the best sense of the word, there is of course a hierarchy, especially in the tango scene, precisely because tango is not so easy or quick to learn.

On the follower side, this means that there are ‘lonely’ milonga evenings, and on the leader side, there are rejections that can trigger self-doubt and inhibitions.

A few weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a tango dancer from Kyiv who fled the war with just a backpack, was passing through my city and asked if she could couchsurf for a night. I made the guest bed, prepared some food and suggested she’d come with me to a nice weekly milonga. She wasn’t sure. After weeks of fleeing, of cars, trains, crashing at stranger’s homes, wearing the same set of clothes, trouble sleeping, panic attacks in the middle of a street, of realising the word “refugee” now applies to her too, she was hardly in the mood for a milonga. She said she might just come for a bit, have a look and then go home. I said, whatever made her feel comfortable. Luckily, I had a pair of fitting shoes. I gave her a skirt and a bright red lipstick. “Nothing like red lipstick to put you in the mood!” I said. In the milonga I introduced her to a couple of friends and she ended up dancing until the end. I saw people’s expression change when she told them where she was from, and I saw how they embraced her. Sitting next to me on the sofa between the tandas, she said: “Tango is really like therapy. I start to feel my body again, after all these weeks. And my brain is thinking now of how to move, of other things rather than… you know.” I put my arm around her and we sat watching the dancefloor, each of us trying not to cry.