Embrace Me: Tango through the eyes of a dancing therapist

By Emma Kologrivova and Igor Zabuta

Forty psychological essays - our personal experience, impressions and reflections as of tangueros and psychotherapists.

About social tango from the inside:
male and female;
loneliness and rejection;
traumas, fears and anxiety;
leading and following;
intimacy and contact.

About the dance changing people and their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Igor Zabuta
• Release date: Mar 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220284899

Book preview

TANGO

through the eyes of a

DANCING PSYCHOTHERAPIST

Igor Zabuta, Emma Kologrivova

Translation: Nadia Gativa

Editor: Michael Lavocah

Table of contents

Table of contents

To warm and to warm up

Who we are and what this book is about

What I learned from tango (Igor’s view)

What I learned from tango (Emma’s view)

Why do men need tango?

In the light of loving eyes

The Ultimate Challenge

If your heart beats

To hug a hedgehog

Tango-body

How tango will affect your life

Listening for the other

Intimacy with a stranger

What does tango teach us?

Return to yourself

What is your body to me?

What gets in the way of dancing well?

Boundaries of contact

Refusal and rejection

Touch

Why are you (not) dancing with me?

On the benefits of sellotape

FF-tango

ММ-tango

Simultaneous loneliness

Active following

Simply, naturally, together

Catalyst of changes

Couple’s face

What are they looking for in tango?

Fantasy and cats

Forbidden masculine

Through the eyes of a woman

Strength and pain, shared in the body

Psychotherapy as a dance

Masculine and feminine

In between

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AUTHORS

To warm and to warm up

[instead of a foreword]

Buenos Aires, beginning of the last century. Ten men for one woman. The brothels are full and the prostitutes work non-stop for many hours. The men are far from home, from their wives, girlfriends, from mothers and sisters. They came with the hope of earning big money and bringing a family over but now they are poor, disappointed or in despair, and the future seems darker and colder than the present. What do they want?

A woman. To embrace a woman. A normal one.

They say that tango originated in the brothels. More cautious researchers confirm it but note that men didn’t dance with the prostitutes. They danced with each other to kill some time while waiting for their turn.  And some say that these are just vulgar and romanticised tales.

It is a fact that men learned to dance tango with men. There were no schools, only practicas. Beginners learned to dance a follower’s role: you cannot lead a figure that you yourself are not able to perform. When their level as a follower was deemed worthy, they were allowed to dance as a leader, with the new beginner men.

They also say that women did not learn to dance. The partners were so good that they could lead anyone, even the one who stepped on the dance floor for the first time in her life. Some say that women learned at home. But no one ever knows the real truth about women.

A few years later, when the leaders became as cool as the Israeli special forces today, the masters led them to a milonga. Then there was a chance to embrace a real woman, completely and wholly female. And if this happened... After several years of dancing with men, after many years of tactile and emotional hunger - it was an amazing experience. Women don’t just feel different. They have an innate ability to follow, susceptibility, they have a completely different energy. Men embraced so much more than just the woman in front of them. In this embrace, there was a longing for a beloved left at home, possibly lost forever, for their mother, sister, daughter. For the warmth and love of a woman.

Maybe that's why tangeros know how to embrace. They don’t just hug the shoulders or the back, and not with the hands alone. They embrace your spine with their whole being. Some hug softly but so deeply that you can clearly feel the shape of your own and another's heart and stomach. Some - gently, reverently, like a breeze but to the core. Simultaneously, sparks in the limbic brain set fire to the crazed butterflies [in your stomach]. You begin to feel the meaning of the words care and respect, and the difference between lust and passion.

More often it is not even passion but acute tenderness. Tenderness as longing for what was or could have been, because it will never come true. A dream to warm someone and warm up yourself. In tango, it can come true for 10-12 minutes. Some of this warmth you can even take with you into your daily life.

Who we are and what this book is about

We are Igor and Emma, psychotherapists and tango teachers. We met at the age of about two tango-years and since then we have danced thousands of kilometers and have spoken millions of words.

I came to psychotherapy from tango, Emma into tango from psychotherapy. Like many before us, we could not help but notice: tango changes a person. However, these changes are a bonus, they do not happen to everyone. Sometimes instead of positive changes, only deeper darker layers of the psyche get uncovered, new traumas happen.

We wanted to use tango as a psychotherapeutic tool and called the process itself simply - Tango-therapy. The complex and unique part was that we managed to integrate tango into the Gestalt Approach in our own way. The experience we received led us to a broader but deeper topic - to the study of physicality in contact.

If you ask a gestalt therapist to explain a particular complex concept, such as Tango-therapy or physicality in contact (and if one of us turns out to be this therapist), he will not talk about theory, but about his feelings, sensations and impressions. He will talk about his personal experience. These essays are our impressions, our experience of tango as a dance and tango as a therapy. An attempt to post-assimilate what we have lived.

Both tango and psychotherapy are delicacies. They, like this book, are for those who love nuances, feel the half-tones, want to prolong their pleasure and relish the aftertaste.

Enjoy reading!

A few caveats:

1. This book has a lot of (self) irony and sarcasm. Do not believe everything you read and do not take it too seriously. Sometimes tango is unbearably beautiful, so we have to discharge the tension.

2. Some of the texts were written by one of us but we don’t remember who the original ideas belong to. They developed in communication and became common.

3. Despite the commonality of ideas, we rarely completely agree with each other. And that’s great.

Sincerely yours,

Igor and Emma

(dancing psychotherapists)

What I learned from tango (Igor’s view)

Tango caught me at 40. Since then, I have covered more than 20 thousand kilometers [in steps]. This journey is a long one, a lot has changed in me. I am trying to figure out what exactly and how.

The Body

I have practised martial arts and yoga and always believed that I was more than fine with coordination and balance. And it was probably fine for the first few lessons.