Boulder Tantric Tango Workshop Series, July 25 - 30, 2003

This class series will give participants confidence and solid grounding in basic Argentine tango skills with a variety of partners in this exciting, intimate social dance, popular around the world. In addition, we will explore the fascinating historical, musical, mental, gender role, emotional, psychological and spiritual facets of the tango experience, giving participants powerful experiences, insights and skills for navigating the strong energies and heart-to-heart emotional currents that inevitably arise in tango dancing (and in life!). Unique exercises used in the class will be drawn from our decades of research, training and experimentation with traditional Argentine tango education, contemporary psychological research, theatrical exercises for emotional authenticity, and both traditional and contemporary spiritual practices recast in the setting of social dance. You can enroll without a partner, although enrollment in the Main Sessions is limited and will be gender-balanced. We will rotate partners frequently. Participants will leave the workshop with the guidance they need to begin what may well turn out to be a satisfying new chapter in their lives, enjoying the pleasures and accepting the challenges that emerge from joining in the "dance of the heart," Argentine Tango.

Requirements:

Although participants with prior tango experience are welcome, no prior tango experience is necessary or assumed. The unique structure of the class will appeal to those of all levels of preparation. Future versions of this class will be aimed specifically at those with more tango experience.

Intro Session: Friday July 25, 8:30-10pm 

Find out what we mean by "Tantric Tango." Watch some tango social dancing.  Is it for you?  If you decide that it is, sign up for the complete lesson series.

The introductory session will accommodate 75 people. Partners not required. There will be an opportunity after the session for a half-hour or so of tango social dancing for those who wish to watch and/or participate at no additional charge.

Main Sessions: Package I $120 (All classes)    Package II $90 (Weekend classes only)

Note: For the regular workshop series, no more than 12 males and 12 females will be admitted. Couples will be admitted together up to the limit of the workshop. Singles will go on a list in order of application, and will be admitted when they apply as long as gender balance can be maintained. For many exercises, we will rotate partners often.

What to wear:

Please bring smooth-soled shoes, or thick socks, or soft-soled mocassins. Definitely not rubber-soled hiking boots! We recommend comfortable casual clothes: T-shirts & sweatpants, jeans or shorts, as long as you can move easily. 'Dress to impress' for the Saturday night social dance!

Other:

We'll provide healthy snack food and plenty of water in the afternoon classes.

First Session - Saturday, July 26, 12:30 - 5:30  (Package I & II)

Pearl Street Studio, 2126 Pearl St.    Boulder

Special Tantric Tango "Milonga" Dance Party (optional, FREE to class participants)

Bantaba World Dance & Music,   695b S. Broadway,  Boulder  9:30pm - 2am  Find out what social tango looks like at our Dance of the Heart Bantaba Milonga, a long-running local tango dance.  Twice a month for almost two years, 40-80 people have been gathering here to find partners and improvise their tango dance in the heat of the moment. Mix with the more experienced local dancers as well as your classmates.  No partner required! For full details, read here.

Second Session - Sunday, July 27, 1:30 - 4:30  (Package I & II)

Pearl Street Studio, 2126 Pearl St.  Boulder

Third Session - Monday, July 28, 7 - 8:30pm  (Package I)

Fourth Session - Wednesday, July 30,  8 - 9:30pm  (Package I)

Special Live Tango Music Session with Argentine bandoneonist Dan Diaz

If you can't make the Monday or Wednesday sessions, we can arrange for credit for the same sessions at other times in future workshops. Unfortunately we cannot otherwise offer refunds for missed workshops, so please plan accordingly. We expect to offer this workshop frequently here and in other cities around the country during the next four months.

For further information, please check back to this page, call us at 303-938-0716, or e-mail us at tangolessons@danceoftheheart.com.

What's Tantric Tango, anyway?

Over the past six years, the art of Argentine Tango has become a calling for us, and as such pulls us forward on the path of our lives in visceral ways that often resist analysis. What we’ve discovered in our dancing, in our teaching, in our performing, and in our interacting with others in our local and global tango community, is this: the primal forces that gave birth to tango (see "About Tango" for a quick historical initiation) – sexual attraction, physical contact, emotional intimacy, artistic and musical inspiration, public celebration – provide, when taken together, a powerful, emotionally charged context for individual and group development work. Yet the structure that has evolved historically to guide and contain these forces in the form of a social dance provides for participants a historically grounded, self-sustaining, repeatable experience of connection on multiple levels – with their partners, with their community, and (we contend) with higher reaches of their own consciousness. 

 “The integral sage, the nondual sage… Known generally as "tantric," these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion… Indeed, the whole point is to be fully at home in the body and its desires, the mind and its ideas, the spirit and its light. To embrace them fully, evenly, simultaneously, since all are equally gestures of the One and Only Taste. To inhabit lust and watch it play; to enter ideas and follow their brilliance; to be swallowed by Spirit and awaken to a glory that time forgot to name. Body and mind and spirit, all contained, equally contained, in the ever-present awareness that grounds the entire display.”

- Ken Wilber, “One Taste”

The music caresses everyone in the room, the lights are dim enough not to dazzle, but bright enough to find a partner…the partners find each other, eyes locking, agreeing (traditionally without speaking) to the encounter. As they embrace, the dance arises spontaneously, each step improvised in the moment.  The leader surrenders to the passion of the music, to the embrace of his follower, to the heat rising in his heart – and allows inspiration to take him.  The follower surrenders to the leader’s inspiration, fueling it with her willingness to be led to greater heights and depths of her own wordless expression. Their dance manifests as stylized pursuit and evasion, reenacted endlessly to keep the game going. The leader seeks to protect her in the crowd, creating the safe harbor in time and space for her dance creation to emerge and re-inspire them both.  The tango trance opens around them, and time-awareness changes.  The follower relaxes into the intimacy offered by the leader, lost in the moment…and yet, the encounter must end…

…the music dictates it, the dance requires it – and so partners take their leave of each other,  re-entering their social matrix – and after sharing the “three-minute lifetime” with that partner, they each may pause and reflect: where in the spiral of human experience did THAT dance with THAT person take me?  Was this an encounter tinged with raging jealous possessiveness, childlike playfulness, choreographic cleverness, erotic passion, exuberant celebration, meditative stillness? Was it a conversation without words in call-and-response fashion, jam-band style, or was it a merging of bodies, minds and spirits into a single unified artistic expression? Any lessons there? 

“…After that tango, we are no longer strangers…”

 - Robert Heinlein,  “The Number of the Beast”

For those who are drawn to the integral vision, and who seek transformative practices in their lives, the art of tango offers a pheromone-stoked arena of opportunities to come to terms with some highly charged gross-level issues arising from living in the physical vehicle, such as sexuality, gender dynamics, and personal boundaries.  In our work we see some evidence that personal issues arising from life traumas at these levels of development, which may have been repressed or denied for years, are given a chance to emerge into undeniable awareness and find controlled expression in a social setting.  This exploration occurs in a context without words: partners experience each other through pathways other than intellectualization (“you dance who you are”).  Paradoxically, the structure and pacing of the partner interactions in the dance fosters reflection and detachment as a counterbalance to its emotional intensity, alternating with re-immersion in the maelstrom of heart-to-heart wordless connection. 

The tango is a great and terrible gift...you have quite simply entered a SERIOUS relationship with an art form wherein the possibilities for self-expression are profound...but such a gift requires work and discipline...therefore, it will challenge and test, bring pleasure and pain, bring out your best and worst and everything else in between...why else do we love it so? The tango is a demanding, often playful, always gorgeous, sophisticated, primitive, deceitful, sensual, SMART, multifaceted, brutally honest mistress, even when she is absolutely uncompromising and takes NO prisoners whatsoever. How remarkable and lovely for us that we are required to merge with fellow dancers to receive this gift; the pleasure and richness of connection with another human being...and at its VERY best, that rarest of creatures, the joy of creating a totally unique, collaborative work of art.

Deborah Sclar, Dance of the Heart

Our own experiences of tango in this “pheromone furnace” raise subtle-energy questions as well.  Even as a beginning dancer, I’ve had mind-altering moments where I found myself looking at a brand-new partner with a dim awareness that the music had ended, the trance state was lifting, and both of us were staring at each other with a look that said, “What was THAT?”  I’ve had dances where I thought my heart chakra was going to explode out there on the floor from the intimate sweetness of the moment.  I’ve had dances where, as a leader reaching his consciousness out to guide his partner’s feet, I found myself with a clear sweeping awareness of the inner aspects of my partner’s body that defies description, yet provoked a need in my partner-of-the-moment to look me up days later to discuss it in energetic terms. 

Copyright (c) 2003 Brian Dunn and Deborah Sclar, Dance of the Heart  - All Rights Reserved

Inspirations for this work are described here, with gratitude...

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