Pulse*

* Necessity, something needed for a desired state. Prerequisite, necessities, essential or necessary. A condition or set of circumstances, state or quality of being obligatory or unavoidable, urgent requirement, as in an emergency. Compulsion through nature laws, chemical bond, fate, organic chemistry that cannot be otherwise, constraining force of physical determinants on all aspects of life. Compare: freedom. Nécessité, avoir besoin de chose nécessaire or essentielle, d'urgence... il faut ! Notgedrungen, notwendigerweise, es ist unbedingt notwendig, müssen. Cosa indispensabile, necessità, necessario, necessariamente, bisogno.

Dance is a physical need. In Argentine tango is a sense of the risqué involved. It gives an energy that an increasing number of people find exciting. It's pulse is stronger than inhibitory factors such as inhibition due to the threat of performance-failure and inhibition due to the threat-idea of such play consequences. This means that there is a surplus-value in tangodancing.
Dancing is a system that intermediates between extremes, it's a catalysing development inside the body. It all brings a certain level of erotic excitation and even some violent movements, maybe like the act of teasing. This playing refers to the act of engaging in unrestrained, amusing interaction like disturbing another person, often in the context of learning how to tease each other better.
A step is more than a step. The dynamics which are built in dancing, work at the same time as points (heartbeat-centres) and as waves (heartbeat-pulsation circulation-movement), physicist call it a paradoxical functioning.
Immobility is not the absence of any movement: it hides in her a prodigious complicacy of overlapped movements. The agitation which they cause cancels each other out mutually in perfection.
This symmetrical heartbeat of building and demolition is necessarily made from knots. Embraces which are at the same time centres of building and demolition, so that it works as a heartbeat of stationary waves. Due to this perfect symmetry, both effects cancel each other out permanently: nothing more moves, nothing more takes place. These heartbeatcentres will be able to act as "points of departure" on which will be built a new cycle. With each step the dancers are getting more involved, more engaged with each other through the music. Performances are becoming more and more cyclic, which means that things are moved from real life, arranged in patterns and performed as dance, and then carried back into real life through embodied knowledge, so creating a cycle. A living act in the moment as it happens.

Tension, charge, discharge and relaxation is the beat of the body. It has a perfect tempo, not the same as the mechanic time-pitch of a metronome, perhaps more like Taiko drums, which have a religious role, are used to intimidate the enemy during battle and to communicate.
The capacity for surrender to the flow of biological impulses without any inhibition, is one of the mysteries of the organism.

Tangowals tangovals clip
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Energetic Bodywork

The physical effort to create sound is part of the music. Even when listening to sounds of musical instruments, a part of the listening experience is a notion of the bodily activities that produce the sounds. A player's sense of a musical style is primarily felt in contact with the instrument. The bandoneón, originally ment as a small church organ, needs the musician's whole body to express a boundary-transcending sound. A musician is expressing himself through his instrument and connecting awareness to the whole body. To realise the desire of bodily expressing the music, to turn it into a real event, energetic input is needed. In couple dance, bodily contact means energy. Corporality with it's energetic input, is an important factor that explains the extent to which a sensory experience will appear as being truly sensory. The movement power is generated from the lower abdomen and legs. Upper body strength and muscle-tonus extent the act of expressing the music, expressing it with a stream of enegy waves.

Through this bodiliness or corporeality, the twitch of a muscle produces a change in the signal coming from your partner, moving your body will immediately affect your partner. Because any change affects the sensory input, the other person is forcibly present. Bodiliness is one aspect of sensory stimulation which makes it different from other forms of stimulation, giving it an intimate quality. From this follows the realness of the ongoing experience. Ongoingness means that an experience is experienced as occurring to me, or happening to me here, now. Someone is aware of an experience because he is interacting with it in a conscious way. In a pair dance, partners need each other energy to make it real. Couple dance is about sensitivity, mutual understanding and partnership.

Leading and following is a mutual, energetic conversation. It is a challenge for our over-polished contemporary aesthetic values. Modern western men may find it uncanny to step out the corner and to guide "the direction" in a self-confident, dominant or socalled macho manner. For years, the man's dancing role is directed into something like "An Officer and a Gentleman", which is in some way the classical dance picture. In traditional ballets, the male dancer was secondary to the ballerina. His job was primarily to lift the ballerina and support her balance without drawing attention to himself. Breaking with tradition, Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993) reinvented the role of the male in ballet. As a dancer he started early and conscientiously developing the possibilities available to male dancers, proving that a principal dancer can be just as gracefully subtle and expressive as a ballerina without any loss of virility. One of the secrets of Nurejev’s success comes from the fact that he did more than was necessary in everything he undertook. Rudolf Nureyev made a great contribution to the reappraisal of male ballet and, by working with contemporary choreographers, went far beyond the "classical / modern" divisions. He was always attracted to difficulty: How could I dance if I didn’t force myself to do things that I can’t do? Rudolf Nureyev personified the school of life for a dancer: enrich yourself, open up your mind, look all around, take it all in, and put yourself in the position of understanding and interpreting the choreography, not just performing it. Nurejev danced with impressive athletic power and gained prominence for the male dancer at least equal to that of the ballerina.

Onstage, the phenomenal Fonteyn-Nureyev partnership set a standard for ballet that is still alive today. Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev transformed the pas de deux (dance for two), which is the centerpiece of traditional 19th century ballets. Instead of dancing the pas de deux as a cool, technical display in which the ballerina was the focal point, they created an intimate and intense drama in which the danseur (the principal male dancer) and the ballerina contributed equally. When Fonteyn and Noureev performed, there was electricity between them, both had the gift of translating emotion into movement - the very basis of their art. The tension arising from the 20 year gap in their ages, their opposing temperaments and their totally diverse backgrounds seemed to generate an electricity in the atmosphere whenever they appeared together, and Fonteyn - far from being overshadowed - seemed rejuvenated, even her technique seemed to improve. Margot Fonteyn could make you cry just watching her. How to put something so visual, so potent with theatrical moment that even film cannot capture it, into plain words? How to explain why it is that when, to a particular strain of music, an ordinary mortal steps forward on one leg, raises the other behind her and lifts her arms above her head, the angels hold their breath? Meredith Daneman locates Fonteyn’s extraordinary on-stage appeal in the woman’s personal qualities - her moral as much as physical virtues. Fonteyn’s dark, exotic looks came from her mother’s side of the family. Her father, Felix Hookham, was a lower-middle-class Englishman; her mother the illegitimate daughter of a rich Brazilian businessman, Antonio Goncalvez Fontes, and an Irishwoman, Evelyn Acheson. When Daneman met members of the Fontes clan in Brazil, she understood how Latin family pride had made it unthinkable that a young dancer, Peggy Hookham, a remote relative, should adopt their name as a stage pseudonym. She altered it instead to Fonteyn. The English style of dancing was formed on and by Fonteyn, moulded by Frederick Ashton, the choreographer who made the most of her talents. Ashton’s early roles for Fonteyn show her as a sensual being: the seductive Creole girl in Rio Grande, Tiresias the sexual experimenter. Then he froze her in perpetual purity: Chloe, Ondine, Sylvia, in his postwar ballets, are maidens beyond reproach. Not until Rudolf Nureyev burst onto the scene was Fonteyn able to be anything other than virginal.

Public and Private

When the act of dancing is reduced to its elegant and stylish visual image, it is as making a split between mind and body. Visual channels only perceive visual phenomena, which is a concept for virtual reality, as if sensory illusions are just like real life but somehow better. In dance communication, pulses touch all senses, feelings are explored and experienced by the own body. One can recognize it if one knows it. The key is body knowledge. Raja Amari's movie Satin Rouge touches in a subtle way the ambiguity of acting out reality in front of viewers. As the performing arts uses the artist's own body as a medium, the exhibit can also be called entertainment or a misconduct. Bodily postures express, reinforce and challenge inner attitudes and the audience features as a participant. It offers an entry to another world. This opposition between the public and private sphere creates a tension. It is a dynamic duality.

SATIN ROUGE - Raja Amari SatinRouge Movie Trailer Danseuse de Cabaret

Tangoing as an alternative lifestyle.

The alienation from the natural pulse of the body comes gradually. For most, the desire to dance transforms into the desire to dance well. For perfectionists, and perfectionism is a part of our evolutionary past, it transforms into the desire to achieve extremely well. Gradually, the healthy perfectionism - with a very real sense of pleasure from the bodily effort -, can become a perfectionistic, self-mirrored presentation. The person feels driven to perform in response to an imaged obsession, according to rules that must be applied rigidly and anything less than perfect is unacceptable. At some point, these "neurotic" perfectionists become unable to feel satisfaction because in their own eyes they never seem to do things good enough. Normally, the outcome of dance is pleasure, pleasure is occurring in a natural way.



Thus dance is addictive and humans are human. An addictive thing has a neurological aspect. In dancing, the body is very active. This stimulates the brain in producing more serotonine, endorfine -the person's natural morfine-, which gives more inner safisfaction, peace. The gap which follows can induce a state of craving, a preoccupation resulting in a narrowed perception. This unrest changes the motivation. Coping behaviour or obsessive-compulsive stereotypes appear, alien bodies make the game rigid. Unpredictability is uncanny, unheimlich. Meditation and returning to one's inner source can stop this restlessness, giving a touch of easiness and soul in the movements, dissolving the alienation.