I am so very lucky – I get the occasional dance with a formula one dancer.

This is only because I pay for their time – they are teachers.

And not just ordinary teachers – but passionate, talented professionals with over 10 years of teaching experience, a truly  intimate knowledge of the tango world, a huge sensitivity to the music and thousands upon thousands of accumulated kilometres on the dance floor.

I am also so very, very fortunate because I get to practise and work with some people who – like me – just love to learn.

And for me the most exciting, memorable joyous things in that learning experience are about the interpretation of the music and taking risks together. I love it when she pauses unexpectedly – when she holds me back just by her presence and her immersion in the music.

I curse myself when I sense it too late – and I rush her. I thought of one response and she felt something else -and I was just too slow – I blew it and now she is going to play safe for a while. Damn it! I just wasn’t good enough. I held her back from the edge. I caged her.

Safe is boring. Correct is not good enough. For both of us.

My focus is on learning, learning, learning so that when she feels something I can react fast enough and run with her. Tango is of course based on walking, but dancing with a woman who expresses the music surely requires a different mental agility and physical speed – like some kind of futuristic martial art where energies and balance points spiral without friction between us.

Where she can hang over the edge and look down that precipice of failure and yet feel totally, totally safe.

I need to be  so fast and so seamless that she honestly feels I was always with her – even though I am in reality breathless – heart racing – feeling so happy to support her as she just flows wherever the music takes her.

Tango is an improvised dance – there are so few rules and whatever rules there are can be broken if you have the technique to stay within them.

It’s our choice – lean out over that edge and look down – or just shuffle about.

Please don’t disappear. Don’t be average.  Be more than them.

Keep learning.

Make those around you feel great to be there.

Keep going. For all of us – but mainly for yourself.

You can do this thing.

Shine.

At some point in our Tango development we begin to care about what we look like when we are dancing.

Why?

We are not professionals. The crowd, certainly, is not focussed on the aesthetics of every heartbeat of our dance. There is – in fact – no crowd at all – but yes – there are people that are watching.  And they might want to dance with you.

Beauty needs someone to appreciate it. And the person that you are dancing with cannot see very much of you at all – they can certainly feel your skill, your focus – but in the moment your visual appearance is largely lost to them.

And this I think is where the circle is squared. I feel your beauty through your technique, your balance, you connections to the floor, to me and to the music. It is indeed absolutely beautiful. Someone watching cannot yet feel you – but they sense the same qualities that I am feeling – because when they watch you they see the years of effort, the balance, the grace and the connections.

So in fact you look beautiful precisely because you can express each moment with technique, without noise, purely and appropriately.

True beauty comes from deep within us – and Tango is a wonderful light to show that to the world.

And who would not want to dance with you when you look like that?

There is a growing tendency – I think – for tango classes and workshops to feel like physically demanding exercises and for leaders in particular to loose the end goal.

That end goal for all of us is the Milonga. And her pleasure.

We are never going to be on stage. So that impressive tortuous repeating back secada based complex figure of the moment is perhaps something that we should only be working on as part of a creative exploratory analysis that unpicks spatial relationships and technique. In this way these complex figures and dynamics are indeed so useful – challenging and enjoyable.

But it’s just a class.

For her, when we dance together – if I turn my back on her and threaten to kick her – perhaps I have broken the moment?  A cold shower comes to mind.

Surely we want to be brilliant social dancers. That is a goal I personally was so specific about when placed under pressure to define my objectives a couple of years ago.

Social dancers create something with this woman or man, to this music, in this space and time. It is most unlikely that your parter – or indeed yourself – could pass even the most basic of gymnastic qualifications

Personally I am spending so much  more time on the music, the energy flows and finding pleasure through well danced figures that we can enjoy equally.

Dance. With her. To the music. It’s such fun.

Don’t kick her.