Why dance? (2)

Tango has taught me about the gulf between appearance and reality. There, I met artists whose art remains (forever I think) unknown to all but those with whom they are embracing on music, and many ordinary people who have an extraordinary skill that nobody would guess who doesn't know their dancing selves. About five years into it, I was walking to a milonga in a foreign city; a block away from it, I walked past a man, neither short nor tall, quite large, middle aged, so grey and plain that, I told myself (why? why then?): "before he fully disappears from my visual field I will have forgotten him forever". And because of this thought I remembered him long enough to recognise him in the milonga. We danced, barely talked because he could only speak a language that I didn't. But his embrace, his gift of a structured space in which I could dance freely, how he gave me the music, how his feet always found mine on the floor, and the way he put me in unexpected places, effortlessly, imprinted this man in my memory, with longing. I had many encounters just as spectacular, each of them different from the rest.

Confusion

Because each of us finds in tango what we need, what we look for, what we are, and these things are so diverse that between them they seem to cover the entire range of human experience, I assumed that everyone must possess the ability to love tango - when given the right opportunity. I was wrong.