(Un)thinking tango – on the corporeality of dance and musical improvisation
ANNE MARIT
Through our presentation we want to discuss how we can think through,
with, in – or which ever term we prefer to use – our utterly intelligent
bodies. We will do this through demonstrations and a discussion of our
tango dancing. Towards the end we will give some examples of how the
knowledge we gain through scrutinizing our dance experience can shed
light on musical performance and improvisation.
 DEMO!
MAGNUS
 Why do we perform flying colgadas?
 Love – not structure
 This aspect is actually crucial. Unless we understand our
improvisatory activity with this in mind, the dancing will be
misunderstood.
ANNE MARIT
 As said: we perform the element because we love doing it. We love
how it makes us feel. Still, enjoyment cannot arise out of nothing, and
it is indeed a particular structure that we enjoy. Our initial question
will then be: Which part does the intellect take in our hedonistic
activity? What would an intellectual dance be? Would that be a
question of dealing with technical issues?
MAGNUS
 We could mention what it requires to perform the steps with ease
o Excessive energy
o Dynamic abrazo
o Know our partners point of balance, etc.
 We could also mention how these techniques lead up to the flying
colgada.
 Tempting to speak of tango in these terms. Why?
o Clarity!
o Important to know for us as teachers
o BUT
ANNE MARIT
 They are remote from how we as dancers experience our activity.
Remote from our love to the steps.
o Still: steps will always be there. There is no experience without
the steps. But merely looking at steps is like trying to
understand how a lover feels by only researching his mistress.
There is no love or lover without the mistress. We must focus
the lover if we want to understand his experience.
o We want to focus the experience of the dance.
o We want to make a shift from
 thinking about structures to
 Thinking with, in or through the body
o We want to shift from intellectual to corporeal thinking.
o What could this shift look like?
MAGNUS
 Were we to dance from our brains, it could look like this.
 DEMO
 We hope it looks ok.
o Correct in terms of length.
o A variety of repertoire
o But DULL and lifeless!
 You could ask us to spice it up by, perhaps:
o Longer steps
o Pushing the floor
o Be more elegant
o Dance with more life
 Indeed, we do believe that we do those things when we dance like
this
 DEMO
ANNE MARIT
 BUT, what we just did is NEVER reducible to longer steps or pushing
the floor.
o Those aspects of the expression are indeed important when we
practice, and the aspects are also important when we teach our
students BUT
 What the qualitative parameters aim at is a particular kind of shift of
how we think and act through tango.
 To us Tango is something very simple. It is about energies.
Performing the shift is to think through these energies rather than to
think about what one should do as a dancer.
MAGNUS
 One of the easiest ways to elaborate the shift and our work with
energies is through scrutinizing our walk.
o My partner could do exactly what I want, but that renders the
tango lifeless DEMO
o Instead: I want to walk in one direction and she opposes. DEMO
o We could speak of this in simple terms of opposition. Yeah! We
have an intellectual category. But that is not how the dance
works. The category is derived after practice, and it is through
practice – not conscious thinking – that the opposition takes
place.
ANNE M
o We believe ourselves to be utterly intelligent people, but we do
not have the capacity to think the opposition. It is rather in
incorporated energetic knowledge that we perform and discuss
with our bodies.
o This energy is constantly at stake when we dance, and it could
be used as a model to explain why different qualities arise in
the dance perhaps even without we thinking about it.
 Are we thinking? Usually NO, if we speak of deliberate
pensive thinking, but YES if we speak of letting our bodies
be listening and alert.
MAGNUS
 So, let us go back to the flying colgada.
o This step will not inspire us to do a flying colgada. DEMO (utan
kompression efter sidosteget) PEKA PÅ ATT DET INTE ÄR
ENERGI NÄR SIDOSTEGET ÄR AVSLUTAT
o This step will. DEMO (med kompression I sidosteget)
 So, perhaps the first flying colgada happened because of an imprecise
weight shift from the man? DEMO
 Now, this simple weight shift is an interesting point in terms of
thinking with mind and/or body
o We can use it deliberately to find the effect. Still, if we use it
without having done the shift, it would look like this. DEMO
(stanna I spänningen – kom inte helt vidare).
o We do rather than let happen. Tango is about letting things
happen. We can deliberately make up our minds to do
something in particular, but that will only be a suggestion to
our corporeal thinking. We must still perform and pursue the
steps energetically.
o DEMO – SAME AGAIN
o We believe this point could be proven more clearly if we go
further and show you some other “mistakes” that could render
new repertoire.
 DEMO med överskottsengergi tillbaka så att det blir en liten
linjeboleo.
ANNE MARIT
 Yet again, we are intelligent, but we are not intelligent and quick
enough to anticipate that my leg would go up and then “perform” it
through thinking what we should do.
o Instead, how we experience what happened is like this: the
energy was more extensive than what it takes to come into the
cross (DEMO with hands). Therefore, the energy must be
expressed, and this little boleo happens.
 There are other mistakes that could happen too.
MAGNUS
o (If I’m not clear in my intention to oppose her when she finds
the cross) In i flera kryssteg på serie
o (I oppose her but our distance is too large) Volcada
o (I do not keep my torso towards hers) Rund boleo
ANNE MARIT
 So, what is it that we have tried to say so far in this presentation?
MAGNUS
o We have shifted our consciousness from brain to body
ANNE MARIT
o We have tried to show how our thinking has been less
concerned with objects and structures than we have been
preoccupied with processes and energies.
MAGNUS
o The thinking mind is still part of the dance, but it can merely
suggest and challenge. Everything that is performed must be
done so from a place where the shift has taken place.
ANNE MARIT
o In very simple terms: we hope that we have shown how we
think with our bodies as our starting point.
MAGNUS
 This presentation originally had the title: Playing with rhizomes. The
idea was BLABLABLA. We never got that far. The basic idea was to
point at the intelligence we possess if we think through our bodies.
Our intellects are not strong enough to follow all the intricacies of the
embrace. Still, we can play with all those parameters as long as we do
not treat them as parameters but we deal with them physically.
 So why have we had this presentation at a conference mainly
intended for music research? Well, the conference welcomed
presentations from other art forms, but most of all we have done it
because we believe that these thoughts have relevance for musicians.
ANNE MARIT
There is, we believe, a sad tendency among musicians to think about music
rather than playing it. Many students are told to strive towards an ideal way
of playing rather than to acknowledge the unique sound that surface when
the student approaches her instrument. Merely the fewest take their own
idiosyncratic physique as a starting point to create the music they wish. We
hope our presentation has shown the importance of our physique. It would
look and feel totally different given we danced it with another body (det
skulle vara skitkul om Daniel var där och vi kunde visa med honom – eller
bara att vi bytte).
MAGNUS
Striving towards an ideal is more or less the rule for too many musicians.
We believe that many musicians would find their unique voices if they
acknowledged their own physique and the sound it produces. Furthermore
we believe that if the musicians would better know the questions that arise
from their idiosyncratic physique when they touch their instrument, they
would have tools to create new structures. Even more importantly: they
would open up for stronger and perhaps new expressive qualities to their
improvisations. We also believe that a sound relationship to the musician’s
physique could help them solve technical difficulties. They would to a larger
extent acknowledge what they do as artistically valuable, perhaps even
more valuable than the ideal that they neither can find nor reproduce.
Finally, the acknowledgement of the sound they produce with their physical
possibilities and limitations would be more unique to themselves as artists.
ANNE MARIT
We hope that our few tango steps have indicated something about how we
can act as the entire beings that we are. When we can act with all of our
bodies, a different logic than the logic-discursive knowledge will apply.
MAGNUS
Thank you for your attention.