On Suckage

So at this point I've been studying tango for 3 months and a (very small) bit, and while I've been trying to do it full-time, there are always some distractions (life obligations and non-obligations).

So let me go over why I suck in tango thus far:

• I have a very limited vocabulary to play with
• My posture isn't great yet, and sometimes I still move from the legs or feet
• My balance isn't great yet, so I can't do complicated enrosques
• My connection with the woman isn't great
• My connection with the rhythm is good, but my connection with the song is limited
• People say that I am tense and have all kinds of tension and pulling in my right arm
• People say that I still don't move from torso but rather I use my arms

Now I would write some good things about my tango, but "I'm learning fast" isn't too tangible. I do spend a lot of my time on the balls of my feet and I can find that forward posture, but really, on the dance floor, can anyone see that? I do "mark" well and there's rarely ambiguity. That's nice. Also I'm generally good at the inter-dance chatting :)

However, I have come to this deep conclusion tonight: this is no time to think about whether I'm a good dancer or not. This is the time to think about whether I'm moving from torso, whether my posture is right, and basic stuff like that. If the woman is bored out of her mind or I'm not terribly creative, interesting, plugged into the music or the woman, that's fine (for now).

This is all based on my language learning. My Spanish is great and my Italian was great and is now pretty damn good. And both of these projects were done in a vacuum and then later perfected on stage (The Italian Project living and working in Italian in Rome and the Spanish Project living and teaching in Spanish in Madrid and now Buenos Aires). And the idea is that if you had to constantly defend yourself in a language, as an adult, you actually slow down your learning. Which is why there are Americans who have lived in Rome for 35 years and suck.

So anyway, fuck everyone who says that I need to go to the milonga and dance and try to connect with the woman and the music. Right now I'm just trying to get my body moving in the correct fashion for this tango shit. Later I'll be learning cool moves and then, in the last phase I'll be extraordinarily worried about connecting the woman and the music. I know what anyone who reads this will think: "then it will be too late! You must do that during all of your development." Well, yes, I am doing that to some small extent. But if you focus on fluency and social aspects of speech from the get-go, you will be very very good at speaking in your fucked-up way with your little vocabulary and grammatical control. And that's how languages work, and I'm betting that dance can be learned as a language.

As I always say about all of my projects, if you can't identify the woodshed and separate it from the stage, you'll always suck. Look at all those drummers who play their same shitty style but really well after millions of gigs.

Unfortunately, in tango the woodshed is the (public) milonga right now. Sorry to everyone who has to put up with me, but to be honest, for you it's probably equally annoying: because a shitty guy who's practicing one thing or another for you is just about the same.