Tango in Southern California

Before Tango

I first heard the phrase "dance from the heart" in the early 1960s in Naha, Okinawa. I was in the Air Force and went to the church on the military base there. I also took dance classes twice a week which were sponsored by the base recreation department. The woman who taught the class often said, "Dance from the heart and the feet will follow."

She meant it two ways. First, physically. When we walk we are constantly deliberately unbalancing ourselves in the direction we want to go. Then we move our legs to get back on balance. Watch any movie where people are walking fast or running and you will instantly see how this works.

When we dance with a partner in an embrace this is how a woman knows before her partner takes a step what he wants to do - if their embrace is good. She feels him shifting his weight to one foot, then feels his upper body begin to "fall" in some direction.

But she meant it emotionally and mentally, too. Watch a baby bouncing to music. She knows nothing about technique. She just knows the music moves her soul, and her body follows it. Even when she cannot walk!

I heard it in Spanish in the early 1980s when I moved to California to work for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. I took salsa lessons, and met a wonderful woman whose parents were from Colombia. She taught me a new meaning of danza del corazón.

After Tango

In the late 1980s I took up the Argentine tango and forgot the phrase. At that time the teachers taught intricate and difficult figures taken from tango shows - partly because many of the teachers danced in those shows. We students filled notebooks with these figures, memorized strange (Spanish) names for them, and practiced with all the solemnity of someone performing religious ritual.

A few years after beginning tango I'd had more than forty teachers, most for just a few hours. I had forgotten that dancing should be more than robotic repetition of "steps" on crowded dance floors, which sometimes seemed more like the angry jockeying for space on a stage that you sometimes see actors do. Then I met a remarkable man.

He was visiting his daughter from Argentina and attended a milonga at the Argentine Association in Glendale. He was crippled and had to walk with two canes. I kept him company and found him a knowledgeable and wise man. For instance, he told me much about China and business there that I had not known. But I instantly recognized its correctness, for I had been a Chinese linguist and analyst in the military.

He had danced the tango for decades. A woman sitting at our table, looking at his canes, said it must be hard not to be able to dance any more.

"But I do dance," he said. "In here." And he touched his chest.

That night I started writing the book that eventually became Tango Corazón - How to Dance the Argentine Tango. And I put on my web site the motto that (according to a Google search) has since been added to at least 91 other web sites.

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