Duality of the Embrace -a joining as well as a confrontation- is what
we will explore in tomorrow’s tango workshop at Krannert (12-1pm,
preceding the milonga at 1pm).
Tango being a metaphor for life, the embrace between two people can
span a wide a range of flavors. Simply breathing even without any
steps -the pause- can constitute a dance. Sometimes, the dance is
manifested instead as a storm.
What Tagore said about love applies incidentally also to Tango:
”Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one
and two at the same time. Only love is motion and rest in one. Bondage
and liberation are not antagonistic in love. for love is most free and
at the same time most bound.”
It is an illusion that there is a leader and a follower. This
Otherness is as artificial in the embrace as it would be in love. The
leader dances the dance of the follower. Those who arrive at an
embrace with preconceptions will only find their own foregone
conclusions, missing out on the discovery of their partner.
Conversely, even in the most intimate depths of a union there is
freedom of dissent: ‘Opposition is true friendship’.
I will conclude by having Lao Tzu argue with Borges on this issue:
“To lead people, walk beside them. As for the best leaders, the people
do not notice their existence. When the best leader’s work is done the
people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’”
- Lao Tzu
“To speak of the combative tango is not enough; I would say that the
tango and the milongas directly express something that the poets have
often wanted to say with words: the conviction that a fight can be a
celebration.”
- Jorge Luis Borges
