We begin our 10,000 kilometer flight home from Buenos Aires with mixed feelings. The time would hopefully provide time and space to recover from the humiliation and frustration of enduring three weeks as a gringo, a genuine foreigner but an imposter in every other way, a misfit, a cartoon in someone else's drama. I am not Argentine. I am not a tangero. I don't embody the machismo and bravado of the Latino (nor do I care to). I do not sweep my partner off her feet and into my arms and boldly parade her around the dance floor with flair and panache. (I was lucky to escape the dance floor with my life, let alone my dignity.)
I am at a crossroads, at the point of dropping the dream altogether or infusing it with a new vision. The initial charge, the thrill of snuggling in with a pretty lady, the ego satisfaction of doing some fancy steps without falling or kicking someone, the mystique of an exotic dance in a dimly lit cafe, have all faded. The body issues internalized from my childhood abuse have for the most part been healed. In short, the juice that brought me onto the floor in the first place has for the most part past.
But still I dance, even though age and ailments have severely curtailed my time on the dance floor. What is it that still draws? Is there is something unfinished, something yet to be explored or discovered or healed?
On arriving home from Buenos Aires with mixed feelings I am welcomed by some emails from an old tango friend, Mary Anne, who shares with me from her unpublished manuscript some theological reflections about her dance experiences:
I realized something sacramental about embracing a stranger with love and appreciation, about listening and attending to how the music will be expressed. It is a creative act, each step new in a physical conversation that links not only the present community of dancers, but also the past generosity of composers and musicians. Two dancers join each other, join the community on the dance floor, and join the orchestras in creative expression. Embracing the other, and connecting across time and culture ...
I reflect again on my experience: the relation, the bodily presence, the listening and responding to another, the communication, respect, reverence, love. When I am dancing, I attend to every symmetry, every missed or mirrored step, every opening that my partner graces with her adornments. I attune to the opening breath, the embrace, the feel of our bodies blending, finding a shared style and form of communication, the language of our dance. As I listen to the music, every swoop and swell, the staccato, the melancholia, the plaintive wheezing of the bandoneon, I allow them to lift me up and carry me along in the magic. That is the magic of tango. And it stays with me still.
This is an exerpt from my book, From Trauma to Tango, availability on amazon.com/kindle at
http://www.amazon.com/From-Trauma-to-Tango-ebook/dp/B005UGADDS
