17th October
I have a rough weekend, unexpectedly so, and staggering out of it and around into tango; turning up to my new, later-night local on Saturday past ten, having made the effort of putting on a dress to fit in with the formal style and get dances. It baffles me how easily it works. I have some nice dances: one with a leader I dance with most weeks on Mondays, another with a man from a previous week, another with a warm, friendly woman who I always love dancing with whenever I see her. There’s a man there who I’ve danced with, outdoors, a few times on a Sunday at Spitalfields. He’s older, but with the slightly lascivious air of a man who was very handsome twenty years ago or so, and which he struggles to shake off. He’s good to dance with, though, better than I’d thought; I find that his lead is able to accommodate anything I choose to follow, without registering any deviation from what he might have expected me to do, and it makes for smooth, easy movement.
I dance Sunday, and Monday, and they’re good too. The bad weekend has dampened the elation I’d been feeling for the return of my favourite teachers, but they’re Back, and teaching their first class on Tuesday night. Just beforehand I have my first private tutoring session, with a little four-year old who needs to be taught how to lead. It is mostly acting, and improvisation, and negotiation; I think about the training tango gives me – in my body and socially – for accommodation, flexibility and convenient niceties. But it goes well, then I hare over for the class. It’s on walking, and projection, but the class is too full, and my (lovely) practice partner and I are still new enough to each other that honesty and directness are still under negotiation. The teachers work, often, with some degree of apilado, or otherwise dancing on the metatarsals, on-axis, but leant forward, and ideally with little or no connection from the bra-band downwards. It’s a form of dancing that, when practiced with appropriate partners (there is some adjusting for heights), works well for me; enables dissociation, means my legs can effectively start from the top of my obliques. I just need to make sure I can combine it with the soft, heavy hips I’m still trying to establish. But, for whatever reason, this form just doesn’t take off in the class for me, and I find myself exhausted from the weekend and teaching adrenaline. It’s okay, but it brings back memories of the teachers’ last residency here, where for five or six days a week I’d leave the house at 7.30am and get back close to or well after midnight, and the stupid, limiting exhaustion of that time. I sort of want to dive into every lesson they teach, and not miss a beat, and sort of want to find a way to create my own space.
Wednesday I go to Brighton, which I do whenever I am sad or heartbroken or mildly inconvenienced or have a week off, to see the sea, to buy expensive handmade natural fibre clothes, to eat small plates of food, to be glad to be in the world. I write a poem, thank God – the first since, what, June? – and get an email back from a series editor who might be interested in publishing my PhD. Then home, bath, Rachel Roddy’s pasta e ceci, aging-but-still-all-right fridge white wine, kind day. I’m not doing the class in the evening, but turn up for milonga, later, in a pair of my danger shoes (the 10cm ones I can’t quite get away with dancing in and normally just wear for weddings), then find I can dance not only fine in them, but quite well. Maybe it’s just this evening, maybe I’ve finally reached a point where I can dance properly in them. And I have a milonga tanda with one of my teachers, the first milonga we’ve danced together, and I can do it, I can follow where he goes and shift fast when he asks me to, and it’s a relief to be better, and to find dancing easier and easier, and myself less and less out of breath as I dance. After, I have another milonga tanda with another teacher, and find a smoothness of understanding and connection there, too, in my stupid too-high shoes, on a good night in a bad week.