Tropical Zen

Tonight I went stag to the Orange Practica in Berkeley, met Homer and Cristina, and had a great time dancing. It works well for me to show up for the class right before the practica, then I get to meet people in class who like my dancing, and I get to find out who I’m interested in asking to dance. I think part of the problem before is that I’ve been showing up at milongas without knowing the community, and I have to work really hard to get any momentum to ask some stranger if they’ll dance with me.

At a milonga, if you’ve screwed up and they’re not happy, they’ll often put up with you until the end of the set, and then go tell all their friends that you’re a terrible lead. Even if it was not my fault. (Explain to me, again, how this is supposed to be fun? Where’s the motivation, if there is no reward?)

I very much liked the open atmosphere, the friendly vibe, even the few tandas of alternative music. (By alternative I don’t mean Pearl Jam, I mean tango-able songs that were written after about 1959.) Homer was very friendly to me, when I introduced myself and said I was a fan of their YouTube videos; he even helped me get a ride home, which is no mean feat since Berkeley is about 25 minutes away across a bridge, or 1:20 by transit. I feel really positive about him and Cristina, and I’m tempted to see if I can arrange a private lesson with him about when it’s appropriate to relax the hips and get that huge torsion, and when it’s best to keep everything together. I think I’ll ask Michael and Beatrix the same question, and probably get different answers.

I like that about tango, that there can be many different forms that are right. Well, some people don’t think so, but I’m not very interested in their opinions. I just want to have a good time, not be all snobby about someone else having a good time.

The new digs are nice. My sublet is an older duplex, tall and skinny, typical SF in the Mission. Nice neighborhood, too; still a little grimy around the edges, just enough that it doesn’t feel fake. San Anselmo sometimes feels a bit too planned out, too little-boutique-shop/suburbia for my complete comfort, so it’s a nice change of pace. We still don’t have dance space during the day, though we’re working on it; we’ve been having lessons in socks at their place, and that’s a lot harder than it might seem. I keep sliding, in part because Beatrix is bigger than me; and today there was an unfortunate kicking incident that left all our toes really sore, something shoes would have softened. Ouch!

Beatrix and I still struggle to dance well or even comfortably together socially. We just don’t seem to, almost ever. I like her, and I want to be able to dance with her, but it’s just so difficult. We go out on the floor and I feel like an idiot, like I’ve never done this before in my life; so of course I don’t have the courage to ask anyone after that, because they’ve just seen my worst. It can’t *just* be me, because it doesn’t happen that way with 99% of everybody else I’ve danced with; but she’s a professional, so it must be me. I dunno. The way Michael dances, anyone could follow, and feel they were doing well; of course there are things he does that I don’t. (A whole list of them in fact, most of which I forget 20 minutes after the lesson ends. Argh.)

But all in all, it’s good. I’m learning so much, sometimes my brain is full. Soon we’re going to start filming the review part of the lesson, so I can look back later (after I’ve forgotten it all) and hopefully remember. It sure would be useful to be able to do that in shoes!

I just moved in to SF proper. We’d been up in the north bay area, miles from anywhere useful in a suburb that seemed built by Crate & Barrel. I thought I’d be happy to live in a town where there were no chain stores, but these are all upscale boutiques: fashion clothes for dogs, woo-woo-yoga for a prettier soul, Art galleries, that kind of thing. It’s damn annoying and really expensive.

Anyway, now I’m in a sublet in the Mission at 22nd and Guerrero for the next 3 weeks, and it seems like a neat place. I’m very much enjoying my lessons, and also my teachers as people. I like them a lot. Michael is sort of a cross between my daddy Charlie and me: he’s a curmudgeonly computer-gadget-loving dedicated meat/beer consumer who gets nervous around health food, and also a showoff and great physical comedian who enjoys smaller groups rather than larger parties. He’s got this thing he’ll sometimes do he calls “oranguatango” where he does a very good job mimicking an orangutan, and leads an entire song dancing tango while doing it. It’s super funny, and I’ve been encouraging them to get some clips up on YouTube. Oh, he’s also a quintessential Canadian, which interacts strangely with being a curmudgeon, because that means he’s a very polite curmudgeon. I’m not quite sure how one does that, but he pulls it off wonderfully. Beatrix is extremely sweet, sometimes a little too much but then she’ll make a joke out of language or do something weird and funny. German is her first language and she has a heavy accent; she has a hard time with “th” not coming out as “ss,” and she knows it, and she plays with that sometimes. She used to be a therapist on Salt Spring Island, not too far from my lover Derek. I bought her some glove warmers recently because her hands get so cold its painful for me when she touches me. She doesn’t seem to mind her hands being cold, but *I* mind, so I’ve provided a solution.

So there.

Their teaching style is wonderful. Really. Think Jaimes Freidgen’s level of teaching skill, coupled with a deep kindness and the ability to make it all so very clear you wonder why you hadn’t gotten it before. They will tell you that whatever it is you’re doing, it’s right for something; maybe not this lead, maybe not even tango, but it’s right for something. So the students are never wrong, and the sometimes crushing weight of the steep learning curve is suddenly not so crushing. Ahh, it’s nice.

Michael is a professional dance teacher first, and then also someone who likes tango. Many of the teachers are so wrapped up with tango that they can’t see it from the outside, and they can’t see that the different styles are created because someone did it wrong, and other people thought that was cool. He has a great sense of physical humor and has been known to treat his more advanced students to the “oranguatango” display, where he leads a dance from the orangutan pose. It’s really funny, and it makes fun of a weird pose, which some people do in less extreme ways.

The basic premise seems to be that a) you’re dancing with a person, not just doing steps and b) the leader is pretty much just changing the direction of the follower, but the follower is always trying to move in the direction they were sent, until they’re stopped or changed. This is very different from the “lead every move” style, but when I try to lead every move, I’m so busy trying to control my partner and negotiate the floor that I can’t have any fun or do anything interesting; it’s just work, and it’s only the leader that has to do it. Pththtbpt, I say; there’s no fun in it. Also, by waiting for the leader to lead every move, as a follower I prevent them from having any kind of flow; things get jerky, stopping and starting and waiting instead of dancing.

I’m starting to see it this way: the follower is like a solid, weighty ball that moves at a regular speed and direction, and the leader rolls it on the floor until he decides to change direction, speed, or rotation, which he does and the follower responds as best as they can; the leader then responds to that new direction, even if it was imperfectly followed. So if she misunderstands and steps back instead of to the side, he follows her as though that’s what he meant to do and they keep dancing. The leader anchors when he’s the center of a turn, and otherwise when they travel he offers a lead, waits a split second to make sure he knows where she’s going, then he follows her and they collect their balance.

I’m overwhelmed with tango. One lesson every day, sometimes milongas and practicas, we’ve just moved from San Anselmo in to San Francisco. I haven’t met any gay tango dancers yet but I hope to soon, and there’s a gay tango festival the first weekend of July that I want to attend.

I’m really enjoying Beatrix and Michael, as teachers, as dancers, and as people. They’re wonderful! They complement each other in so many ways, it’s like they were really meant for each other. I’ll try to write more down soon, but I have to get to sleep now, there’s another practica in the afternoon and a milonga at night, and somewhere in there we have to have another lesson. I’ve learned so much!

I’m going to start taking videos of the reviews, and post them up on Youtube. They’re trying to get a body of work up there, so we may as well start with something I can edit, instead of more work for them. I wonder how to check around Seattle to see if there’s anyone to host them when they come through toward the beginning of May next year; they’re going through too fast this year to really teach any classes.

I’ve been here in California for six days now, and I’m starting to become acclimated to the weather, and also to the dancing. We’ve even managed a sort of a comfortable routine; late mornings with a large meal, puttering in the afternoon until it’s time for my lesson, then games until dinner. Some nights we go out dancing, get home late and fix a little more food, but more often Beatrix and I end up in the hot tub, soaking our sore bodies. It’s comfortable enough, and I really enjoy them as people.

Yesterday I put on a pair of Beatrix’s shoes. Her feet are only a little bit larger than mine, and these are surprisingly comfortable for three inch heels; the sides are a soft mesh and the whole shoe laces up, so it moves with your feet and adjusts to the contours. The arch is very solid, the sole a very thin suede, so I can feel every nuance of the floor beneath me.

And everything about my dancing changed again. Smaller steps, directly under the place my hips stop; no more skidding to a tenuous halt, no more underpowered steps, I can’t afford them in these shoes. It’s good. The bones of my big toes hurt, through the base and all the way up the inside of each foot; not because of a lack of arch so much as because I’m using new muscles I haven’t felt since I was re-learning how to walk after the military… or during my exploration of zen … or during my first time learning to walk in tango. Or my second time learning to walk in tango. So I guess this makes it Learning to Walk v6.

I’ve been learning about walking again; I also learned something I dearly wish I’d known three years ago. I showed up to a practica in a new city, knowing only my teachers, and almost immediately a friendly man asked me to dance. It was the shoes, he explained. Oh, I said, as we danced around the small dark room.  I’ve been waiting more or less quietly for over three years to find out how to tell the men I want to follow, and here it is! Finally!

So tomorrow we will go out shoe hunting. The store where Beatrix got them is in Berkely; we’re headed there for a milonga tomorrow night, so we’ll just go a little early and catch dinner after. I have no idea how much they will cost, and I don’t think I care. If I can find good Cuban heels like Michael’s, I’ll get them too. Those he bought in Seattle.

[edit: Her shoes are from Experience Shoes in Seattle beneath Highway 99 in downtown, his shoes are Capezio Cuban heels which we were able to find for $80. It took a few days to get comfortable in them, but with the right socks they're very nice.]

But tonight, we dance. I’ll bring in my thighs in the back, try to stay hips over feet and belly button toward the leader. Zoom!

So I’ve done another crazy thing: I’ve followed some tango teachers (Michael and Beatrix) to a strange city so that I can pay them an extraordinary amount of money to teach me to dance better. Actually, what I want to learn is how to have a good time, but a large part of that involves dancing better. Dancing better doesn’t always mean that my steps will be perfect; it means that I will spend more time focused on the real, live, human being in front of me, and making adjustments according to their abilities. My job, whether as leader or follower, is to take care of myself and to get in to the music; if the leader has to take care of both of us, we never have any time for dancing.

So I’ve been learning a great deal about tango. New things, like how to walk again, and really new things, like a cross that becomes a sacada that becomes a turn around the follower. Crazy stuff, good stuff, and really interesting and well-explained.

I’ve started blogging a little bit about my journey, so here it is. Enjoy!