Tango: A Rehearsal Photograph

(courtesy of the brilliant photographer and wonderful friend, Mike Matthews)

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What Will the Tango Mean?

We danced the tango for Magda today. She helped us to see it through her eyes—shifted the balance in things, taught us the momentum that builds from a rightly strengthened spine, helped us close the piece in, so that we danced it, mostly, for each other.

But maybe that's not why she's entered our lives at this time—all this making right of a single dance, to be performed in a month, for a few hundred people. Three minutes—less—and it will be over, done—the steps worked out or not, the final leap syncing with the music or not, the rondes arcing wide or not—and what, she wondered, what (she asked us) will we have when it is over? What happens after that? What will this tango mean, this thing that we have built from Scott's choreography, and from (now) Magda's perfecting touch?

What will we have, and will we know how to dance—finally and rightly with each other?

Magda is supposed to be teaching us how to move. She is teaching us something richer, altogether.

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Tango

... Then she stood there, hands on hips, waiting. A tango, with its blood-beat fatality. She began to dance. She didn't look at me, but her choices of where to advance and step, acknowledged my presence.

Tangos are made up of scraps of life, which have happened to survive. Scraps, rags, gathered together into the zigzag of the legs, continually obedient to flowing blood, spilt or unspilt.

John Berger, From A to X

One dance book later, several blogged confessions about dance lessons gone awry, and I have not yet said with clarity how elusive dancing is, how bound up with magic. Or how much I love dance but can't withstand dance, want to keep going, want to quit, am desperate to get it right, never do get it right, want to explain it, can't find the words—always competing thoughts in my head that make dance what? A pain? A pleasure? The beauty that is dance is nearly unattainable in all ways, except: Look at Iryna, here. And look what Berger has done with words to capture the raw "blood beat" of tango.

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Happy Halloween

If you remember me blogging about the impeccable John Bell and his "Mikado" earlier in the week, you'll remember that I made mention of his beautiful and talented wife, Andra, who happens to be the star dancer in our ballroom studio, but not only that, she's gracious and smart and thoughtful and works as a reading specialist by day. She's the one who's making sure that children will be able to navigate, to enjoy, to look forward to the books they'll find all through their lives, the stories that wait for them. She's the kind of person for whom all of us writers should be grateful.

Andra also writes terrific emails, and last night she brought me up to speed on the costuming plans where she works. Think of a nurse masquerading as a Miss Diagnose. Think of the male principal, Miss Chief. Think of the literacy coach, Miss Understood. Then put tiaras on their heads and sashes across their shoulders, and this will be school in one part of the world today.

We teach children how to grow up every day. It's a rather grand thing when children teach us to stay young.

Later tonight I'll be tangoing with my husband at the studio, holding my breath through our first spotlight number alone. After two plus years trying to learn ballroom separately, we're forging a path through song together. I don't really care how it goes, what mistakes get made. I care only that we're trying.

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