One (1)

One doesn't step into the line of dance without looking where one's going.

I sometimes step into the line of dance without looking where I'm going.

One always uses the mirada and the cabeceo to invite someone to dance

Though if she won't look in my direction I might have to go up and ask.

"The cabeceo wasn't working..."
She'll smile politely.

One is infinitely patient with one's partner, and convinces her she can do no wrong

On the other hand, I sometimes get cross with myself.

However, I have so far resisted the urge to tut.

So at least I've done the least I could do.

We often talk about what one could, should, or must do in a given situation.

One is obviously better than I am.

'One' is a gender-neutral, third-person singular pronoun.  'One' is generally someone else.

Two (2)

The nub of the matter.

It takes two to tango.

We probably heard this from the beginning.  We get told it many times.  We dance together.  If we don't dance together, we dance alone.  Dancing alone is not tango.  It might be something else, but it's not tango.

We have to go into each tanda knowing this.  Knowing it in our bones.  I hear a lot of people talking about this.  They all say the right words.  And then a surprising number of them go out onto the dance floor and perform for their partner, rather than dance with them.

It may be the leader, who takes his duty as the 'shaper' of the dance too far and claims all the music for himself, leaving his partner to hang on and try to enjoy the ride.

It may be the follower, who takes every opportunity the leader offers her to decorate, embellish, flick, kick (or stick her heel into an innocent passerby), with no reference to the music or to her partner's dance.

If you don't go into each dance feeling like you're a team, or at least feeling like you might become a team, then what actually is the point?  Who's it all for, if it's not for you two, together, at that moment, in that place?

We learn early on that if you don't commit to each step completely, things go wrong.  Why does it often take so much longer to learn that we need to commit ourselves to each dance in the same way?

Three (3)

There are three dimensions.  Three comprehensible ones, that is.  When we start to learn to dance tango we only use two of them.  In fact, right at the beginning, we probably only use one.  Forwards and backwards.  It's enough.  And then, we learn to turn and the possibilities expand thousandfold.  Our movements are now free in the X and the Y.  Floorcraft considerations permitting.  And maybe we stop there.  We can dance, in those two dimensions.  There are infinite possibilities already.  I think many people don't realise that a third dimension exists.  I think I'm only just becoming aware of the third dimension.  Like someone who's spend his life looking at the ground in front of his feet, and now has suddenly noticed the sky.

And I don't mean using the third dimension to bob up and down like a cork with every step.  And I don't mean using it to allow a couple to launch each other into the air or perform acrobatics.  I mean using it to modulate each step.  To provide extra information.  To change a sideward 'plonk' step into a smooth sinking into the floor, or to change a slow pivot into an edge-of-the-rollercoaster, edge-of-the-cliff, preparation to dive.

And here's an interesting confluence.  Interesting to me, anyway.  The ear has three canals responsible for telling us how we're oriented in our three-dimensional space.  And the ear is also responsible for allowing us to hear the music.  And this prompts me to ask myself a question: how three-dimensionally do I hear the music?  I'm told I have good musicality.  I feel that I have good musicality.  But perhaps I'm complacent, now, and lazy.  The music is deep.  Compared to the music, I dance shallowly.

Time to listen properly, again.  Time to scratch further into the surface.

Four (4)

Corazon.  Tangos speak often of the heart.  Usually about how it's broken, pained, sad, lonely.

And yet when we dance, our hearts are as close as they can be.  Sometimes we can feel the beat of each other's.  Each has its own rhythm.  Above and beyond (or maybe below and beneath) the compás of the music.  Between the rise and fall of the breathing.  Personal, but shared.

There are moments, at the top of the music, at the height of a breath, when it feels like your heart may just burst before it beats again.  And then it beats again, and a bandoneon sucks the air out of you, and you take a step.



The human heart has four chambers.

Five (5)

Sometimes there is the lightest of pressures between palms.

Sometimes the grip is firm and strong.

Some women squeeze their partner's hand when something goes wrong, or maybe when it goes especially right.

Sometimes the hand is flat and horizontal, sometimes it's cupped and vertical.

Occasionally it's painful.  More often than not it's another expression of personality.  Another level of communication.  Another way of being close.

The hand may move or flex or tighten or relax during the dance, or it may be constant and unchanging -- a rock to hold on to.

And as the last note of the music fades away, and we wake from our trance, we often don't release hands for just a few seconds longer.  We try to hold on to it.

The human hand has five digits.

Six (6)

"I'm from hither.  It's just South of thither."

"Oh, you must know X and Y!"

And it's true surprisingly often.  The travelling tanguero will enjoy the 'where are you from' question frequently, and will enjoy watching the most unexpected of connections reveal themselves as the conversation continues.

I enjoy returning home and being able to say to someone that they're known and remembered in a different town, county, country, continent.  Some people are hubs for these connections.  Some people seem to know everyone.  Or if they don't know everyone, everyone knows them.

And the world shrinks a little with each new connection.

Various studies have suggested that there are, on average, roughly six degrees of separation between every person on the planet and every other person on the planet.

Seven (7)

Feeling lucky?  One of those days when you arrive somewhere, you don't really know anybody, but you can't wait.  You invite somebody to dance who you haven't seen dancing.  If they accept, well, they're obviously feeling lucky (or desperate) themselves.  A complete leap of faith.  When you go somewhere new and alone, you depend on somebody feeling lucky.  Otherwise where would your chance be?  Your chance to let everyone see that you're not a stamper, stomper, cruncher, crasher or basher.

I try to take a chance on somebody new, when I get the opportunity.  They could be the best dancer in the country, but they still need someone to gamble on them for that first dance.

When the gamble pays off, winning the lottery has nothing on the feeling.  (I'm willing to be proven wrong on this one, if the universe insists).

Seven is considered a lucky number in many cultures.

Eight (8)

There's magic and joy and sharing in tango, but in order to experience that you need the base requirement of trust.  I sometimes wonder that any of you women out there manage to trust any of us men at all.  How do you let go and give yourself completely to the moment, as the best of you do with every single tanda?

I've seen some very untrustworthy men recently, whose behaviour prompted me to write a very long and angry post, which I've now deleted.  I rewrote it and deleted it again.  Suffice it to say that sometimes just taking a breath doesn't seem sufficient.

An Octopus has eight arms, matching the number of tentacles that some men appear to have while dancing.

Nine (9)

Cloud nine: Where you end up after a particularly blissful Di Sarli tanda, perhaps.  I'm still at the point where I have to use enough of my brain consciously for navigation that being in this state is relatively rare.  But it does happen.

It's why I'm still here.

Ten (10)

Have you ever danced with anyone while you've been in a bad mood?  I have.  Most people I know have.  I've danced with people who've been in a bad mood.  It's never a good idea.  But what do you do?  Going and cooling off and calming down and chilling out will just take too much time.  Tango is meant to be the part of the week that reduces our stress levels, if we can't relax during that then what hope is there?

The worst is when you're in a bad mood because of the person you're dancing with.  Mutual politeness might prevent it being mentioned, but she's wound him up by dragging him out for a dance when he was desperately trying to get a glass of water, or he's wound her up by standing in front of her just at the moment she was about to successfully get a nod from the man she's been attempting to dance with all evening.

In all these cases, we're probably dancing with a good friend who has temporarily annoyed us.

We'll get over it.

But it's a pretty sad experience, being party to a grumpy dance.  They're another thing you get better at avoiding and preventing.  And if not avoiding or preventing, at least recovering from.

Counting to ten is an old technique for keeping calm in the face of aggravation and provocation.

Eleven (11)

The music is distant and tinny, today.  My legs feel slow and ponderous and as though they could float away from the ground at any moment.  Breathing is laboured and heavy.  The connection doesn't always happen.  Sometimes it will start this way, and then things will come right.  But not always.  It's possible to have a bad night.  We shouldn't be too mean to ourselves.  It doesn't mean we're going to be spending the rest of our lives dancing on the moon.

We'll be back to Earth tomorrow.  Or if not then, the day after.

Apollo 11 was the first manned spacecraft to land on the moon.

Twelve (12)

The seasons go by very fast.  It doesn't seem like long ago that I could tell people I'd been learning tango for six months or twelve months and they'd smile and nod and look impressed.  At some point I began saying '3 years' or 'four years' or 'five years', and people stopped looking impressed and instead simply started nodding their heads, as if to say 'seems about right'.  I assume this means I'm following the natural curve of tango progress.  At least people don't usually shake their heads in horror, so I suppose I'm not behind or under the curve somewhere.

But the years blur together.  When I started, I remember chatting with someone who'd been dancing tango for three years.  It seemed like an unimaginable investment of time to me back then.  And now, of course, I can see that there's not ever going to be an end to it.  Or I think I can see that.  Maybe in three years' time I'll feel differently.  Three years is a drop in the temporal ocean.  Three years just gets you to the point of realising that you've probably just spent three years working on the wrong things and ignoring all the right things.  And the cycle repeats every year or two or three.

There are twelve months in a year.

Thirteen (13)

What can you do about bad luck?  Not much, I think.  You can do your best to improve your odds of having accident-free dancing, but you can't ever completely account for the behaviour of others.  Who knows who's about to elbow their way into the ronda and tread on everybody's toes?  You can slot yourself in ahead of, or behind, or ideally between the most social dancers present, but sooner or later somebody's going to attack you with a hot cup of coffee on the way back from the kitchen or the bar.  You can have complete control over your movements and have lightning reflexes, but a slippery patch of floor will trip you up regardless.  Hopefully your bad luck doesn't take your partner down with you.

I have a horrible feeling it's contagious, though.

Thirteen is unlucky for some.

Fourteen (14)

The poetry is something I'm missing out on.

I don't understand the words.  Not as they're being sung.  I can look at the lyrics and work them out.

I need to do better at this.  I'm missing out on a lot.

When the songs are sung in my ear as we dance, I can feel the poetry, and the shape of what I'm missing.

I'm missing a lot of information.  There's often a contrast between the words that are sung and the tune that is played.  I'd like to feel that.  I feel it in people I dance with who do understand the lyrics.

There are 14 lines in a sonnet.

Fifteen (15)

There's often a bit of point-scoring, isn't there?  Some places just seem to encourage it.  Some others, even though all the same people attend, are relaxed and unhurried and friendly.  Not that a little friendly competition hurts.  If it weren't for that, who'd bother getting any better?

It's the unfriendly competition that's the problem.  I've seen people actively standing in front of people to block them from the view of someone else. I've seen people hijacked on their way back from the dance floor, before the next tanda has even begun to play.  Those who want to play by the rules tend to suffer.

When you win your first point in tennis, you get 15 points on the scoreboard.

Sixteen (16)

Size sometimes matters.  But this dance of ours holds another set of apparent contradictions.  The largest of people are often the lightest on their feet.  The smallest of people can feel the heaviest.  If you haven't been watching the dancing carefully enough, it can come as a surprise.  It's a beautiful moment when you embrace somebody who looks like they would be blown away by a faint breeze, and they turn out to be anchored to the ground.  And you can feel the floor and the shoes and the feet as though they were yours.

There are 16 ounces in a pound.

Seventeen (17)

A nice exercise in improvisation.  Throw a bit of random into your practice.  Every third or fifth or seventh step, go in a different direction than you would normally.  Break the patterns.  The patterns dig themselves in, you have to fight to break out of them.  I do, at least.  Maybe in thirty years' time, every direction will feel as natural as every other.

According to some surveys, if people are asked to choose a number between 1 and 20, they choose 17 a disproportionate amount of the time.

Eighteen (18)

Freedom from and freedom to.  This is what the mirada and the cabeceo offers us all.

Freedom from the creeps and crazies, and from the lead weights and unmusicals.

Freedom to vote with our eyes.  To see the whole room, and to make a choice of exactly who you want to dance with at exactly this moment.  And they have the freedom to say no, without having to say 'no'.

The voting age in many countries is 18.

Nineteen (19)

There are times when the dance is a battle of wits.

In a good way.

Like a game of chess or of Go, perhaps.

She refuses to take me up exactly on my suggestion, but slows it down or speeds it up or sometimes sabotages it completely.  When it works with the music and doesn't crash me into anyone else on the dance floor, I couldn't be happier.

She might challenge those patterns that I've fallen into.

A wake-up call.

Go is played on a nineteen-by-nineteen board.

Twenty (20)

Contact lenses.  Spectacles.  The solutions to short-sightedness at the milonga.  Those that wear glasses have their appealing little rituals.  The invitation to dance is accepted, the glasses are folded and secreted somewhere on the person or on the table.  Occasionally I'm asked to carry them in my pocket.  Occasionally they're pushed up to the top of the head.  Some people keep wearing them while dancing, which can pose interesting logistical challenges with respect to head position.  The dance ends.  The glasses-wearer is escorted back to the table on which they can find their glasses.  The ritual concludes.

20/20 vision indicates normal human visual acuity.