The Blog comes to life: Roles
The Revel’s gift is her taut musculature and her capacity to witness contradiction, her comfort with the unknown.
Gender Liberation
I have to believe that my 11 years of tango are not in service only to sexist retrenchment but to something liberating. I think tango has shown me that there is indeed creative mystery to be revealed in our depths and that patient witness is what enables it to manifest. My belief is controversial that […]
How I Revel – 2017
So many women write and speak to me with the same question: “How do I find pleasure in tango, when I’m getting less and less from men?” They ask this question because where they live there are few advanced men, or becuase the men they like to dance with are not always available, or because […]
No more Mastery
Instead of going to a milonga as a dancer, for the first time I just went out as a writer. In a weird affirmation, someone came to sit and talk to me about writing. I also danced. He was a a visitor, attractive, in town for one of the marathonic events, and was recommended by […]
The Pleasure Principle
Dancers who violate the ronda, execute moves unsafely, or have difficulty dancing on music recorded after 1950 are simply unskilled, and ideology is no protection from the resultant problems.
Dancing with Germain
DJ Elio Astor’s live mixes are improvised; Germain and I don’t know what the music will be or how long it will go on. The reality of dancing this way is very, very difficult. Not knowing what will come, we must continually leap into our interpretation of the music and one another. The demand to “trust thyself” is immanent. In addition to the unknown of the music, Germain is a contemporary dancer. So the matrix of movement possibilities expands dramatically beyond the already-rich tango lexicon.
A manifesto for dancing
I have been waiting to write a general TangoForge update until I knew the story. I still don’t know it, and it’s more complicated than I anticipated. But I have a part of it ready for you. It’s summer in Europe and I decided to get out of Berlin and see what’s there. So I […]
The deeper cabeceo
Globally, the best coffee is served in places with inadequate and injurious seating… Black Star and Blue Bottle in Sydney and San Francisco. Here in Berlin Double Eye and the Barn. If there are enough chairs accompanied by a table of the appropriate height you probably won’t want to drink the coffee. So I am […]
Inhabiting the tango roles
If the leader doesn’t risk openness and vulnerability, if the leader falls back or contracts power, the follower has to extend too far across the emotional and physical gap. It’s very difficult for leaders to send their hearts forward, and much easier to pull the follower to them. This stance countermands a comfortable retreat to the intellectual side and requires a dramatic embodiment of an extreme and seemingly archaic gender role — the protector.
