How tango changed my life

In my entire life I’ve never been much of a person for things that need body awareness. I always had a bad reaction time, I simply can’t memorize choreographies and I can neither throw nor catch. I usually got a D in PE, because there were things I would simply refuse to do. High jump, gymnastics, rope climbing, etc. The only thing I was ever good at was long distance running. You don’t really need much coordination for that.
When there was the time when kids are usually forced to take ballroom dancing lessons, I hid the application form from my parents, because I was always very aware of the fact that I simply can’t do choreographies. You can imagine that a lot of people I know were very very surprised when I took up tango argentino! How did that idea get into my head anyway?

When I was studying Media and Cultural Studies I had a favourite lecturer. He was not only a great teacher, but also a very interesting character, who originally didn’t even have A-Levels. He only took them after an apprenticeship of, well, painting walls. Now he is a philosopher and got a price for his PhD. He was a junior professor in Düsseldorf while I was studying there and he obviously liked to do unusual seminars. I couldn’t get enough of him and therefore enrolled for every course he gave while I was there. One of them was a course about the medial representation of tango argentino.

When I first saw that course in the course directory I thought I was misreading something: it was just listed as “tango”. Wait a minute what has that to do with my lecturer? How random! I was really not prepared for that, because I saw him as such an intellectual person – I wouldn’t have guessed that he dances tango! Now that really made me curious: if such an intelligent person is doing a whole university course on something so random, there must be more to it then just … some dance. In the course description he recommended a book, so I got hold of that and read about the history of tango. It still meant nothing to me. I would even say that I wouldn’t have understood what tango was all about even after the course, if I hadn’t tried it out.

If I am honest to myself then I would say that not the course, but the man made me try it out. He was more than just a lecturer to me and I turned to him when I needed advice, because he seemed like someone who would understand. He was someone who like me first did an apprenticeship and probably hated it as much as I did. He was someone at the right age to understand what I was going through, when my ex-partner was threatening to leave me if I wouldn’t have a baby with him. He always had an open door and listened – I am very grateful for that!

Without him and his advice losing my long-term partner would have been a lot harder on me, because I simply had nobody else in my environment who would have understood my dilemma. I wanted to have a baby with my ex-partner, but at the same time it had become impossible, because this threat to leave me forced me to say no. If my ex-partner was someone who would make such a threat then I couldn’t possibly have said yes, even though I would have said yes if he had asked in any other way. This lecturer whom I now consider a friend seemed to understand me better than anyone around me, because nobody in my environment was old enough to have these kind of problems. I really valued his judgement and therefore it was curious to me how he could like tango!

Dancing, body stuff, that’s like sport isn’t it? In Germany people who don’t like sports sometimes say: Sport is murder. Dancing is almost like sport, so it must be like that as well, right? And then there is this highly intelligent man, who always impressed me with being absolutely accurate and on the spot with his judgement and he likes dancing tango? I just found that really unusual! Suddenly I started to wonder whether my judgement might be wrong and just a result of absolutely stupid PE classes and teenage embarrassments. I decided to be open minded and try it out. I asked a friend to be my dancing partner and we both turned up to the uni sports tango argentino course about a week after my ex-partner and me broke up.

At first everything was very hard: even not falling over was incredibly difficult! I proved to be: untalented, not able to control my feet, I had a bad posture and absolutely no balance! It showed me that I was bad at it in so many different ways that I thought I might give up. My partner seemed to have even more difficulties and we were both struggling a lot.

As long as I can remember I was avoiding things that I couldn’t do. If I was crap at it, why bother? There were so many things I was good at so that I didn’t really need to bother about the stuff I couldn’t do. Not everyone has to be good at sports or coordination or dancing, right? There are people, who are just untalented and they will never learn it, right? WRONG! In tango you just use your body in a very different way than in normal life and everyone has to learn how to do that, even people who are good at sports. Even the walking in tango is so different, that it might seem as if you have to forget how to walk properly to be able to do the “tango walking”.

The task tango had set me was the hardest ever: I had to completely change my attitude! I had to learn to accept my body, I had to learn that my body needed to get used to the new movements and if I was just patient enough, then after a while it would magically start to work. At least it would seem like magic to me. And then there was the biggest problem: I couldn’t stop to think! Thinking and tango doesn’t go well together and even now sometimes a dancer would whisper “I can feel that you’re thinking”, when I wouldn’t consciously clear my mind. While back then my own pondering would make me unable to move, because I wouldn’t get the lead, nowadays there will be a noticeable lack of connection that any good dancer can feel. Now there I was: Someone absolutely dependent on rationality, who wanted to make a living with just … thinking, suddenly thrown into something that seemed impossible, even unnatural to her! I’ve never been so lost in my life!

I could have given up at that point. I could have just left and said “This is not my kind of thing …”! A lot of people just walk out on tango and don’t give it a chance to grow on them, because it can be just so hard to get started. In fact after a while my dancing partner did exactly that and always had more important things to do, but I just went anyway and tried to learn. After a while I bought tango shoes, which were high enough to give me trouble with my balance once again. After about half a year all these setbacks were so normal for me, that they didn’t bother me anymore. Tango taught me how to accept failures and keep trying anyway!

Why did I keep doing it though? There were two reasons: One reason why I didn’t give up was that I never give up unless it threatens my mental health! My entire life before tango has been within my comfort zone and I never tried something that I thought I couldn’t handle. I never bothered with things I thought I couldn’t do. If you don’t start doing anything that you can’t handle then you never have to give up, you just keep going because you know that you can do it! Tango was different: when I started I thought I couldn’t do it and decided to prove myself wrong! After only a short while it became a matter of self-esteem, I just needed to do this! The other reason was my lecturer: he knew I was trying to learn tango and somehow that made tango really exciting! A handsome guy who impressed me with his sharp mind from the moment he started talking in my first ever university seminar. Of course he was completely out of my reach: After all he was my lecturer! And then there was this one opportunity to be close to him without any consequences as such … of course that was exciting!

I’ve danced a lot of tangos in the last 2 years and I’m ashamed to admit that of course I can’t remember every guy I danced with and surely not every tango. That’s how the memory works though: There needs to be a lasting impression and then you will remember. A few tangos made a really amazing impression on me though: I remember exactly the first tango I ever danced with my lecturer. He asked me to dance and I was just an absolute beginner. I was prepared for total failure! So the tango began and I was standing in front of him and suddenly I realized that dancing with him meant … touching him! My heart definitely played a song of total fear! I was so paralysed it was amazing that I even took a few steps! Maybe half the tango didn’t work at all and then he said to me “Just let go!” and my heart made another jump. After that it kinda worked – well as well as things work when you are an absolute beginner! This was so memorable, because I was dancing with someone who was marking my papers and we suddenly moved from total distance to body things and first name basis! How odd is that!

The most memorable tangos for me were those that either changed the real world – like this first tango with my lecturer – or those that were absolutely amazing and had no impact on the real world whatsoever! Once I had the most amazing connected almost intimate tangos and I hadn’t seen the guy before and I’ve never seen him again! We didn’t even talk, I have no idea where he was from, whether he even spoke any language I would understand and I can still remember his embrace!

10 things tango did for me:

1. It made me move out of my comfort zone.
2. It gave me a balance of body and mind.
3. It transformed the meaning of communication.
4. It made me change my perspective.
5. It made me take up exercise.
6. It gave me more self-esteem.
7. It taught me how to deal with failure.
8. It made me more outgoing.
9. It transformed Düsseldorf into the place I consider to be my home.
10. It made me an addict

The message of today’s post is that changing your life is sometimes as easy as taking up a new hobby. Of course this has to be a special hobby: it has to be something that you think you can’t do, something that is completely outside of your comfort zone. For me it was something that changed my attitude and my perspective on life and communication and human beings completely, because it was so entirely different from everything I was used to. Taking up tango argentino might not be life changing at all if you have been doing other dances your entire life, but it might as well be if you have never done anything with your body! Similarly, if you have always done something connected to your body, maybe it’s time to do something for your mind!

Tango changed my life and you can change yours today by starting something new: It is never too late to change your perspective!

The tango videos I picked for this post are videos of my favourite couple: Javier & Geraldine. I find them amazing, because they show so much awareness, self-control and precision, while not losing sight of the feeling. Sadly they don’t dance together anymore. The real world probably caught up with them.