"dance, and one day you’ll stop walking."

I spent the weekend in strangers' arms.
Many asked if they could do it again.
Many smiled noiselessly.
Many felt music differently from me.
I spent the weekend saying hello and then walking away quietly in the span of 3 minutes and 28 seconds.
We can live a lifetime like this.
We can build a lifetime like this.

1) hello, my name is
2) where are you from?
hold each other.
move with each other.
feel intimate, or don't.
"i'm sorry i hurt you, it was an accident"
pause. or move on.
staccato, or to add a fermata.
"i am sorry, this is too fast for me. perhaps next time."
"could i find you again later?"
"i really enjoyed that. could i dance with you to different music?"
3) are we on the same rhythm? can we coexist to the same rhythm while moving differently?
move quickly, violently.
move slowly, sensually.
improvise. or follow patterns.
fall into habit.
fall into novelty.
try something new. fail.
try again.
fall down.
4) thank you.
5) ...
look for the next one.

i wrote to a friend today about the holiday season:

as cynical as we all can be about the modern world we live in, and as cheesy as it may be to write about this-

i am really happy that there are different instruments playing holiday songs every day in the lobby of my office downstairs. there is a harp today, playing with a violin and flute. yesterday there was a string quartet. pachelbel canon almost made me cry, a little. 

in the tunnels there are carolers. and singers. and jazz guitarists. 

sometimes i know it's hard to believe that this tradition still exists, and maybe we can make fun of it a little, but i am so happy during this time of year. everyone says hi to each other, and is cheerful, and talks about presents, and their kids, and their families. people wear their ugly christmas sweaters and santa hats. we share chocolate, cookies, hot cocoa. my coworker has Linus's Christmas tree on her desk.  there is that buzz in the air, that words can't describe. some combination of happiness, hope, excitement...

it moves me so much to be around so much cheer. i keep thinking, what if we practiced this attitude all year? one of anticipation, one of gratitude, one of closeness, one of commonality and community. wouldn't the world be a better place?

honestly, i can think of a hundred cynical ways to retort to myself about this, but really. everyone's attitude is so authentic that it just makes me smile. 

on a somewhat related note, Amanda (you can find her here and here) sent this to me today. Vienna Teng, one of my overall favorite musical artists, continues to exhibit authenticity in everything she does. The video is inpsiring. i relate to it, and think about how this past week i tried to explain to someone the feeling of letting go when you dance, and also that dance changed (and saved) my life. 

"Humanity may let you down; you may let yourself down," Teng says. "That's not important at the end of the day. What's important is that you have a sense of possibility, that you can look around and be amazed at how far we have come, even though we have farther to go."

of what is the body made? it’s made of emptiness and rhythm. at the ultimate heart of the world, there is no solidity. once again, there is only the dance.
george leonard

the NYC ballet

oh YES!

NPR's story on The Healing Power of Blues Dancing:

LAURA SULLIVAN, host: We're going to take a turn now on the dance floor.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU")

SULLIVAN: There's a style called blues dancing. It's a kind of marriage between European and African-American styles, born in the Jim Crow South.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU")

SULLIVAN: They say that dancing to the blues is like falling in love. That's what attracted reporter Lindsey Lee Keel. Here's what she found.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU")

NINA SIMONE: (Singing) I put a spell on you.

LINDSEY LEE KEEL: You hear that? It's Nina Simone. And this is the blues.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU")

SIMONE: (Singing) 'Cause you're mine. Du, du, du, du, du, du, du, du, du, du...

KEEL: It's Monday night in San Francisco's Mission District, and I've just arrived at the Polish Club. It's not a bar. It's a community center that tonight, and every Monday night, attracts a crowd of devout blues dancers.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: The room is warm, the windows have begun to fog, the lighting is dim. Couples are close, dancing slowly, arms around necks, heads on shoulders, foreheads pressed together.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Hips pulsate at the beat. Partners spin out for a moment of space between them, and then they move together again like molecules that can't resist each other.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Though it might look like it, these dancers are not in love with each other. Some may not even know the name of the person they're dancing with. But everyone is here for that connection, for that feeling.

CAT HUGHES: It's falling in love, that's what it is. It's crazy.

KEEL: This is Cat Hughes. She's been a blues dancer for three years.

HUGHES: Every dance is like a love affair. You're falling in love for three minutes with the music, with your partner, with your connection. And it can be dangerous because you're falling in love like, a million times a night, and it can really screw with your emotions. But it can also be amazing.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Dancing this way takes some getting used to. Back when she was first starting, blues dancer Krystal Wanberg remembers telling a prominent dancer in the scene how nervous she was.

KRYSTAL WANBERG: And he was like, OK, just play along with me. Pretend that I am your one, true love. And I kind of gave him this weird look. He's like, wait, wait, wait. I am your one, true love, and I have been called off to war, and I'm leaving tomorrow. You may never see me again. He's like, dance with me like that. I was just like, ah.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

KEEL: Wanberg was hesitant, but then she gave in.

WANBERG: And then we danced, and it was just the most incredibly connected dance. I was completely, completely done. Like, I was a blues dancer after that. It was done.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Many dancers talk about before blues and after blues. Vhary Leggat started dancing almost two years ago. She says before blues, she had a drinking problem. She struggled with a negative body image. She sometimes felt suicidal. But after blues...

VHARY LEGGAT: I have become more connected to my body. You can't go to a dance and say, I don't want to be reminded that my body exists - because that's what dancing is. And so that's extremely important for me because I had never before found a situation where I wanted that to be true.

KEEL: For Leggat, blues dancing is about transformation.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LEGGAT: My release from fear and sadness started with getting sober, and ended with learning to dance.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LEGGAT: Because of those two things, I am awake, and I am healing.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Blues music was once called the devil's music.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: But for so many, blues has saved them.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Though the Polish Club may not have a neon sign that says Blues Saves - shining like a guiding light for the wayward - and you won't see dancers at your door holding pamphlets, for Hughes, Wanberg and Leggat, the road to a better life began at the Church of Blues.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: For NPR News, I'm Lindsey Lee Keel.

Two more tango poems by L. Kwan (He's cranking them out). 

First Tango Lesson


In the beginning. Not feet.

But small children who were raised in the forest, vying to be in front of the other, their earnest display of welcome.

I remember long ago playing with them in the forest.

When I saw the men with guns coming and I abandoned them.

"Hello again. My name is."

My language tossed aside.

Only interest and wonder at such difference or indifference on our parts, eyes taking in what I might call "countenance."

In other words

How to communicate my hunger
Now that I too was in their forest. How to survive with grubs and berries, roots dug up and acorns ground into gruel.

How naked I became.

Not even a rag to cover my loins before them.

Hair matted to their foreheads, dirt on the brow and chin, their tongues tasting every green thing and remembering the scent on their upper lips.

Such wildness of feeling I had lost
Not innocence
They were still children after all
Human like me.

One a boy. The other a girl. Teaching something simple but necessary to share. They stood there and took turns holding me.

The word for shelter.

---

Endeavour

Between nights of tango, the day fills itself
with space shuttles perched on jumbo jets,
a reminder that even our loftiest efforts must end.

At the office, we rush onto the roof, gravel and tar
pungent and crunching beneath our shoes. 
The wind splits our collars and this close to the edge

our feet pinch the deck like rail birds as our chatter mocks
the street-stuck gawkers ten stories below us. I get woozy
with imagining gravity and breaking it, like water rising

to the chest, carried into salty seas, or a sudden womb
enveloping my grown body, how being held and holding you
feels simultaneous, what the interior of a circle must be.

Our CEO shouts and points at a large seagull, again
at a plastic bag, jellyfish puffing through the rare air,
everything not quite what we want to see,

but no one’s cynical this high up, and we’re all in love
with what we might see and dizzy ourselves,
each second another door into the possible,

the delay of gratification more satisfying
than the thing itself, ceremoniously lumbering
its space-weary cargo across downtown’s rake of buildings

where you illuminate my darkest corners, throw flares
into the unknown. Curiosity can fling a man
from an entire planet, this much I know. We risk love

everyday. Tonight, I’ll step into your space and feel the clean
coldness of you, weightless in your vastness
where our most precise experiments can be tested.

And though you may refuse my theories, I know

my body warms you, as any body in heaven would.

Matchbox- 8/29/2008

it’s quiet tonight and you
instruct me where i should place my head when in close embrace,
looking straight backward instead of
pressed against your cheek.

in the midst of our battlefield of ochos cortados and bad breath,
my gasoline-drenched legs rub against the gunpowder of your smoldering words
and one morning the hardwood was burning,
bandits of movement, burning
bandages of poetry, burning
bees and honey, and anthologies of a mere thought named Peace
burning.

i'm still the gasoline,
i still smell and taste like burning fuel
lying here with pieces of past

here, where our antebellum innocence reeks of happiness
and where the remains of our independence are wounded and strewn all over the ground

it’s quiet tonight and i
listen patiently to your chest
while the swords of your breath
challenge duels with the air

“Let me explain a few things,”
you offered in the dark
and in your wordless explanation you
fastened your body to my arms
and reminded me with galloping silence
that love is not always melancholy
and songs are not always sad
and poetry doesn’t always burn,
and peace can be more than thought
and breathing doesn’t always mean fighting

and if these are the nights of vulnerable fires,

let me be water just this once
let me break against your harbor of sand.

Someone asked Loren if she could share his poem. His response: "yea share and write your own poems to share, i'm trying to start a revolution of feeling"




Parting Words and Salida, by Loren Kwan


If you had read this after our very last tango
And not this first day, everything still to be explored

And if I will have been honest
Then you will know these things I want to keep hidden

I am not always honest
Nor am I particularly courageous
My eye, as if to follow the flight of a startled bird
Will avoid your gaze
My embrace will stiffen with fright
And my language be useless

If I am brave at all
It is because I am thinking first of myself, my floor
And not you
I am hunting for my self among the circling throng
And not the quietude of you

For I have been afraid of you my whole life
You who are destined to change me
Who will turn my foot one way, and my head another

So that I might trust a direction I cannot yet see
But must go

the Tango space is a cautious one for me, now. for many reasons.
sometimes I feel as though it is a series of scenes from Waking Life, and not only because Glover Gill scored the soundtrack.
I have disjointed conversations in between disjointed dances,
tango tango vals tango tango milonga.
TTVTTM they say,
and .


Every since I met L, I have wanted to read his poetry. Poetry books are stacked everywhere in his apartment. I am hesitant to post this here because this is his, and it is for an Intended audience. but as this place has been a collection of notes that explode with inspiration for me, I am putting it here for safekeeping and contemplation.


Preparing to Cabaceo, by L. Kwan


I am taller than most parked cars in my neighborhood
whose city blocks take
about two thoughts to stride across.
The amount of time I avoid a stranger’s eye contact
comes close to four steps,
then I peer up again to inspect the bungalows and cottages
dressed in leaves of ivy, glassy from too much light.

At times the sun is very warm upon the asphalt,
though often the coastal fog has nightly crept beneath the bridge
and driven attractive, young people indoors.
We are all average and the men roughly weigh
within twenty pounds of each other which is comforting.
Music is playing for one half of the room
to watch the other half dance.
The women lose themselves among talk of other women
because what is beautiful remains a debate in this era
of recession, while the young men busy themselves with side-stares
as their beards grow hoary and their drink glasses
empty beneath broad-hazy grins.
The syrupy air in these rooms smells of medicine and sometimes
nobody is looking to be healed,
causing a reluctant abandonment into the cold.
Outside the stars have come out
with the primitive force of prophecy, bones strewn about.
I breathe quieter than half the population
as I continue over the crest of Dolores towards home.
Thinking of one thing at a time before each red light enlarges in my vision,
I keep a good pace by myself.
Every so often a young woman also stops at the crosswalk
and leans her frame on the roughness of the lamppost.
I am smoother than most stones against her hand.

Well. If you ever wanted to learn more about fusion music (or blues) and dancing to it, here's an excellent post  to help define it all.

Because “Fusion dancing” can refer to both fusing different elements of specific dances and also to dancing based more on spontaneous creative movement, defining what “Fusion music” is can get tricky. In other words, music for fusion dancing can mean a cross-over song to some, but for others it also means music that is not necessarily related to traditional partner dancing. These categories are not mutually exclusive.
For this reason, our Fusion music should be looked at as a vessel capable of holding a lot of different dancing. The parameters of this vessel are same parameters we use for any dance. And, like any dance, it’s about optimizing a combination of tempo, pulse, accents between odd and even beats, melody and phrasing.
Between different musical styles we can find songs that have similar elements and complementing these elements will probably make for the most satisfying dance experience for the most number of people.

my god. this is exactly how i feel about dancing.
(take the specific dance style references out, and this describes my sentiments exactly).

From Traci's blog:

Many, many years ago (four? five? six?) I was quite addicted to tango.

I went alone to my first milonga. I didn't know anyone who danced. I had never taken a class.

Soon thereafter,  I danced three times a week at least, danced with everyone who asked, danced with confidence. 

My skill, relatively high in a street-cred sorta way, never equaled my desire -- and that's how I liked it.

To remain pretty good, to remain forever an amateur.

A perpetually talented beginner.

Because if I was decent by accident, then my potential was always unfulfilled.

So what would have happened had I given it my time, my love, my discipline, my passion?

Much harder, what if I would have given it my failure, my inability, my letdowns?

I don't know if I've ever given my failure to any thing or any one.

I don't let myself be bad at anything, especially anything about which I really care.

The first taste of failure makes me wanna change direction.

When I hit the glass ceiling (of my own talent) in tango, I didn't take classes.

I never even bought a decent pair of dance shoes!

No, I decided that having good balance was enough. Being able to dance a fast milonga was enough.

And, for a while, it was.

Samba, however. 

Maybe because it's not a couples dance; maybe because it's a formal dance that doesn't prohibit smiling.

Maybe because I'm finally able to enjoy more than my successes.

I'm taking classes: I'm okay one day and awful the next; I stand in the back of the room.

Tuesday, I fell during a fast song. Tonight, I embarrassed myself with my own enthusiasm.

I theorize about how our eccentricities and faults in dance class are always relative to hurdles in real life.

I want to know that I can move past being the committed (or, in my dreams, prodigious) amateur. 

I want to fail at being fantastic.

(And if I get that far, we'll start imagining what might come next.)

Dancers are stripped enough onstage. You don’t have to know more about them than they’ve given you already.

It doesn’t matter how high you lift your leg. The technique is about transparency, simplicity and making an earnest attempt.

I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.

—Mikhail Baryshnikov

thanks, addie. 

how quiet must our mouths be in order for our hearts to feel the stillness of light?
how often do we need to speak loudly about it until this happens?
if we blindfold ourselves, can we see more clearly than if we just close our eyes? does the temptation to look outweigh the possibility for growth?

--

Pina Bausch explains that keeping her eyes down behind closed lids, or centering them, made a great difference in how she performed. Something this small can make a difference. Yesterday after our walk, I marveled at this. I thought about how in the movie Garden State, Andrew Largemen points out: "It's amazing how much of [his] life has been determined by a quarter inch piece of plastic."

--

During our walk we came across a large empty space right in front of the water. I tried to slide the balls of my feet across the floor and you commented, "it'd be lovely for a milonga, wouldn't it?" and I almost collapsed to the floor with incredulity that you could tell what I was thinking just from the slight movement in my feet- and you have never even stepped foot at a milonga. You laughed and I realized just how amazing it is to have known someone for more than a decade and still have the kind of friendship we have.
--

I met Paritosh only twice, but the second time he made me give him my address. Gibran's The Prophet arrived in a neatly wrapped package. It's been 4 years and I haven't returned it yet.

I saw this on a chalkboard on the street today:

(Gibran writes):

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
TS Eliot from the Four Quartet

Thank you s.

“Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”
― Edwidge Danticat

I risk my life to write this. I risk my life to write about you. I risk my life to love you. i've risked my life to dance.

"I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving, I could feel."

-Pina Bausch, on dancing as a child.