For me, the Distance has been a liberation and reprieve from the pain of my long and expensive tango journey. Since March, I’ve sent chirpy missives from my beach aerie about the riches of solitude and stopping. Perhaps what I have written feels glib.
I know that many dancers –those whose journeys are less lengthy, risky, or fraught than mine– must be not relieved, but bereft.
Lost:
- community: a place to go and feel known and involved
- confidence: tango’s various ego-boosts through mastery, studiousness, being wanted, dressing up, volunteering…
- emotions: elation and intensity, comfort and acceptance, sweet and bittersweet
- physicality: touch and embrace, sensuality and sexuality
- intrigue: intellectual stimulation, learning and discerning, gossiping and politicking
- art: self-expression and contact to the divine
We associate these losses with large, crowded rooms, and anonymity – milongas.
Yet we all know that physical, artistic, and emotional tango peaks can happen in a room with only three couples dancing. Let’s take that certainty and build tango around it.
The dependency on public milongas is a presumption that leaves us helplessly awaiting government sanction for large events.
I’ve been developing an antibody to helplessness.
The courage and imagination that brought each of us to tango can be brought to bear on creating safe and fulfilling tango right now.
It does not require a lot of space. 3×3 meters is plenty.
Find your space.
What if we create private home milongas with a fixed group of 6 to 8 dancers?
Public health management concerns inhere not in contagion itself, but in untraceable contagion. It means that small gatherings in which the persons are known to one another, are safe enough. Households are now join into stable, traceable “pods” to socialize, so we can create dance “pods”.
Once we figure out how to rearrange the furniture and work as a team (perhaps rotating the roles of host, communications, refreshments, music), we can iterate these small events as beginner tango series.
This time is an extraordinary opportunity to break our habits and our ideas about how tango has to be. Small-scale home-based events can welcome new people to tango in an unintimidating environment.
On the 1st of September, 2020 we will start our Tango Advocacy Program. This program is a structured way to reflect, experiment, and analyze how to find new dancers and create an empowering first few classes. We believe that the optimal absolute beginners series has yet to be created.
Learn more about the Advocacy Program and let’s create 10,000 safe home milongas and beginner series.
For those who do want a Teaching Certificate, the Advocacy Program is the next step. We will offer a subsequent Apprentice Teacher program, leading to a Teaching Certificate.
