(Warning: Use of this word is about as close as I get to ‘waxing’ poetic about Tango. So pay close attention.)
Scenario:
You’re at your table with friends.
You see a couple get together that to your knowledge has never danced together.
He’s from out of town. An older ish guy, gray spot here and there. Nicely dressed.
What caught your eye was his clear cabeceo and who he was trying to get to.
Turns out, she’s an older lady that you’ve seen around. She never sits unless she wants to.
He Cabeceo’d. She accepted. He walked around the floor to her, not across.
You watch the following to see what happens.
She stays in her seat until he is standing right in front of her and he had extended his hand to her. She stayed because she was sitting with a group of ladies and any one of them could have been his recipient. She practiced good códigos here. As did he, because he then guided her to the nearest portal to the floor, and didn’t just jump into line of dance.
He invoked a Lead Cabeceo to the oncoming Lead. Making certain that he had a clear entry point and to set up. And once he had it, he entered the floor with her. This guy was on point. Classy. A clear example of refined códigos.
The orchestra you don’t know off the top of your head but you do recognize the music. Not by song title. You’ve just danced it before and it’s familiar to you.
It’s the first song of the tanda and like all good dancers that have never danced together before they start out slow, careful, methodical. There’s no need to rush. Everything is excuted with gentility without compromising frame, posture, position, or embrace, and clearly without rigidity, tension, or force.
There are deliberate, careful pauses in the vocabulary in the exact places of the musical pauses and musical paragraph markers. And at each marker, the embrace is relaxed and reset, to reset the couple.
From the outside looking in, all it looks like is the exercise of the ‘Five Social Figures’ of Argentine Tango: Walking, Ochos, Turns, Crosses, and Cortados.
However, if you look closely, it is a deft, complex, slow, patient, building, ebbing, never rushed. Body position is constantly being adjusted for with each move, ever so subtley, so that the partnership is always, always, always in front of each other. And NOT in the armpit as you see so often.
One could easily make the argument that the Lead is either a teacher or a very seasoned dancer. One could make the same argument for the Follower. Everything she does is crisp, clear, clean. No dangling feet, no head buried in his neckline, no contortion of her body to meet some crazy embrazy, none of that. Just long, elegant extensions and her Lead filling the space. It’s a treat just to watch this.
They’re dancing close embrace. This is a textbook asymmetrical embrace format. However you note that there is no extreme apilado as would have been done in the past. But instead an ever so slight, almost imperceptible, little lean forward to create forward intention. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d miss it. But you’re a smarty pants and you get it.
No one is hanging, pulling, or pushing. Her left arm is around his back and not over his shoulder as you see so often. But looking closely you see she’s lifting her left arm ever so slightly so as not to place weight on his right arm around her. You know this because there are no fabric wrinkles where her arm ever so lightly touches his bicep.
His right arm along her backside, captures her but doesn’t compress. And the way you know that is because there are no wrinkles in her clothing. His arm is just under her bra line, just as your teacher said it should be. His fingers are closed together and not outstreched. They appear relaxed. His left hand is clasped in hers, without compression. It’s a relaxed handhold but clear lines of the asymmetry. You see this clearly because you see no muscle or tendon tension in her arm or hands.
There’s no lagging, or lolligagging. There’s no misplacing the feet, no loss of balance, or equilibrium.
Slowly, during the 1st song, a smile creeps across both their faces as you watch. Then it is maintained throughout the rest of the song. Oddly enough she doesn’t close her eyes as many followers do, but instead is aware of her surroundings. And it’s clear she is beaming now, as is he. You can clearly see as he engages a Lead Giro with a very small lápiz ending in a Lead cross to her Molinete.
As the song draws to a close and you hear the familiar last notes of the ‘bum-bum’ of every tango song ever, they linger in the embrace. The couples around them all de-embrace quickly. They don’t.
And then slowly they detangle themselves. You can see them greeting each other. There’s a bit of polite and pleasantry charla. The next song starts and they’re still chatting. Other couples around them all embrace after first 15 seconds of the song. They don’t. Still chatting. 20s, 30s, and then finally they embrace again and the whole thing starts all over. Only this time the smiles come a lot faster. And that’s when you see it. It’s not a delusion. It’s not a perception. It’s almost like you can touch it. To be honest you’re a little jealous.
What do you see ?
Transcendence.
The rest of the song, and the rest of the tanda, they’re generating transcendence. You can clearly see it. It’s unmistakable. You’re not waxing poetic garbage to impress someone. You’re not romanticizing the perception. You’re not over exaggerating. You can clearly witness the markers of Transcendence.
—-
What on earth is this mishigos ?
This is a word I don’t use often. And the reason is because it is all too easily mistaken as a poetic misshapen nightmare.
Transcendence is the pathway to an experience that some have had and some are still trying to have, and most are spending thousands of dollars in a vain hope to have it.
However here’s the part that will blow minds: Transcendence is NOT a destination, it is only a passage way.
It is, in the simplest of explanations, a series of deliberate and calculated movements and motions that invoke the 5 Social Figures, in time to the music, within the line of dance, within the format of the tanda, while respecting the line and lane of dance invoking the principles of floorcraft, all the while maintaining good posture and an extremely careful embrace format, all devised to engage entragase with the end goal to allow both partners to get to go beyond their original programming and free associate to create a dancing experience into another place like a lucid dream or otherworldly place.
This is transcendence.
These are NOT Transcendence:
“It’s so roooooomantic”. – Ummm … no. This is the part in the conversation where I start shaking my head.
“It’s sooo passionate”. – FFS No. Passion is not in the equation. And to characterize it as that is limiting it.
“It’s so transcendental, like a meditation”! – This is a destination, and not a pathway. And calling it that limits the possibilities.
“It is soooo symbiotic”. – Can be but that’s an illusion.
“It’s sooooo ‘connected’.” – No. No. No. No. And did I mention, “No?”.
Please stop saying this! It is not that.
Please go watch the treatise on this > https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1AYB1ffSPh/
“It is soooo blissful”. – That’s a destination, and not Transcendence.
“It’s tango bliss!”. – Again destination, not transcendence.
One way to think about the state that above is this > If you’re a fan of quantum physics, one fact of the quantum reality is the moment you observe it, it collapses. The same is true here! The moment you qualify this stuff by categorizing it, it disappears on you!
For the rest of us reading this, we’ll erroneously reach the conclusion that Transcendence appears to look like (enter any characterization). When in fact it is anything but that. And the reason is because when you have two skilled dancers who have worked hard on their technique and are able to exercise it with someone else in the same way, sometimes what you end up with is transcendence. Sometimes. And the reason why Transcendence happens is because their unconscience body issues and habits don’t get in the way for Transcendence to occur. The rest of the time, transcendence, does not happen and you end up with the motions exercising the well worn pathway towards it.
Secondly, 9 times out of 10, most people cannot control the pathway of transcendence. They have no idea how or where it starts, how long it’s going to last, or where it will lead to, or for that matter how to generate it. They erroneously believe that more vocabulary and a deliberate study of the music, and the exercise of technique drills will get them to the pathway. Nope. The fact is that these things are required for transcendence to happen. These things will prepare you for it but there’s an element that’s missing. The only time, that 10th time out of 10 is when that singular missing element occurs.
What’s that missing element ?
Entregarse.
You thought I was going to beat a dead horse by saying “Intention” and then wandering down some technique based pathway to get you to believe that it’s X.
Ummm … nope.
No. This one is all about the gift of you. This one is about showing up. This one is about giving everything that you have, taking care of the other, actualizing your technique to the best of your abilities at all moments, never faltering, never backing off, always johnny/jane at the ready, mindful of the music, aware of your surroundings, never tuning out but in fact tuning in. Eyes open, body hyper aware, every nerve ready and awake, hyper sensitive. And then giving all that you know, all that you are to the other.
“The more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful.”
You are the bowl.
Lastly, I would remind you that to achieve this state of transcendence requires work. Working for 3 minutes on your technique until you’re bored at a practica and then not at all for the rest of the evening; or showing up to an hour long class isn’t going to do the trick. That’s not how this works. It requires due diligence on all fronts. Constantly. You can leave nothing to chance here. What you’re attempting to do is create a state of readiness. Sadly, most are not willing to do this kind of work to walk the pathway.
This is why, haphazardly, you may quite literally bump into Transcendence for a hot 10s purely by chance and then it’s gone. You don’t know why it happened with that partner. And after the fact you keep going back to that partner ‘hoping’ that it will happen again. It may, if the stars align in 20,000 years or so.
Think ‘Groundhog Day’ with Bill Murray as he tries to replicate the magic of 1 moment in time and it goes horribly wrong. So much so that he tries everything up to and including memorizing every moment to get the language just right so that Andie McDowell will fall in love with him. It’s left to the viewer to see that he’s going spend an eternity in this time loop. The only way he gets out is to improve himself and to give of himself to everyone around him. Which invariably leads to Andie McDowell’s character falling for him because of it. In short > Entregarse!
However, believe me when I say, that there is a pathway to Transcendence. It can be generated. It can be manufactured, and you can create it every, single, time without fail! However the one piece that can’t be manufactured is you. You have to be ready and at the ready for Transcendence to occur.
And if you’re wondering what are the steps, what do you have to do ? It’s actually outlined in this topic.
Every bit of it.
That is where I will leave you.
I hope you all have a lovely day and I may see you on the dance floor somewhere in the world. Maybe.