Tips for Your First Milonga

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by Mitra Martin

STRATEGY FOR YOUR FIRST MILONGA !

photo by Sriram V Eleswarapu

In Tango, the truth is that people mostly dance with their friends. So, that means your FIRST job is make friends. Then, dance. You canʼt skip #1. Based on the fact that you have made it to adulthood in this world, I assume you know how to make friends with people. Please do not forget all these skills just because you are at a milonga.

Making friends, in Tango and elsewhere, involves genuinely caring about people and sharing parts of yourself, consistently and persistingly over time and in a variety of contexts.

TIPS FOR YOUR FIRST MILONGA

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Tango and the Dalai Lama! Interview with Eric Lindgren on the topic of Love and Tango!

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by Holly Darling

Eric Lindgren spent a few days with us in January after teaching workshops at the San Diego Tango Festival and at Caltech, and generously offered his perspective on the topic of Love and Tango.  He compares Tango to the Dalai Lama, and says that just like the Dalai Lama knows how to make everyone around him feel good, we can all learn to do this through Tango.  This is what Tango has taught him about taking responsibility for the good feelings of those around us, and for the physical and emotional balance of ourselves and those we dance with.  Sounds like quite the lesson on love.

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Potential to Expand Our Best Qualities ! An interview with Rebecca Smith on Love and Tango !

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by Holly Darling

Rebecca Smith shared her insights and experiences on the topic of Love and Tango, as she spent some time with us after teaching at the San Diego Tango Festival and at Caltech. She says that Tango teaches us about love because through the experience “we re-examine ourselves with what we have to offer, what we want to create…and through that process we grow a potential to expand our best qualities.” This duality in the dance of offering and creating serves as a beautiful metaphor for the concept of love, as Rebecca explains it.  Her insights are full of wisdom and beauty.

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Bad Times? Watch your Tango Tilt…

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by Mitra Martin

During bad times, we get unhappy. Let’s say we wanted to be less unhappy during bad times. We could train ourselves to do it, if we were to use our bad times as opportunities to practice getting better at getting over bad times. The ideal arrangement would be if we had lots of bad times to practice on, so that we could get better even faster. 

So, to help us accelerate the process of learning how to handle bad times, we decide to invent a new game. We call it: Bad Times. The purpose of Bad Times is to cause bad times for everyone.  The more the better, and the worse the better.

We’d want our game to unleash waves of agony and anger, again and again, on every player. We wo  uld call our game a success if it cause depression, opperssion, beguilement, defilement. Bad Times would follow us around and cause us grief, by  souring our relationships, our disposition, and our grapes. We would design and refine our game to be seductive, and addictive, in multiple ways, so that its snares snag many and often.

- Tommy Angelo, A Rubber Band Story

Does the above make you  think of your first Tango class ? Or your first milonga ? Or maybe your first festival, or your second or tenth one ? If not, maybe your first trip to Buenos Aires ! Or the time you endeavored to establish a supremely idealistic Tango School Center to serve humanity, but messed up so many times because of your not-yet-reliable technique ? Any Bad Times at all in there ?

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Interview with BRUCE BLAIR on Unbridled Enthusiasm and Passion for Tango!

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As we celebrate the theme of unbridled enthusiasm and passion for Tango in this new Year of the Dragon, we decided to interview someone who embodies these qualities: O2 student and recent Tango Challenge grad, Bruce Blair. Linking marathon training to Tango, he says, “I believe that whatever your marathon is, you should run it.  I’ll tell you and I’ll stand on the street corner and preach it:  this body is a gift!  Experience it.  You’re not going to have it forever.”  Making time for intense tango study despite a busy job managing a restaurant and raising a son, Bruce is a testament to committing to one’s passions.  He clearly follows the sentiment echoed in his own rhetorical question, “Why say ‘no’ to yourself in life?”
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