Shall We Dance?
For the past few years my passion has been the Argentine Tango. I’ve always loved the music (and listen to it when I’m writing, in fact) but it was when I started planning a quartet of historical crime novels around the theme of dance that I took things a step further. I’d been reading up on Stanislavsky’s meticulous approach to acting and decided to throw myself into the method school of research by learning the tango.
Tango dancers in Buenos Aires
I wanted to feel what my character would feel when she stood, ignored, in the corner of the dancehall; I needed to encounter that moment when you totally immerse your body and soul into the rhythms: I yearned to inhabit the music and for the music to inhabit me. I have now experienced all those things — and more. I hadn’t bargained for the desolation of spending a whole evening without once being asked to dance or the mind-numbing difficulty of the steps. My inability to relinquish control and allow myself to be led frustrated me (and still does) to the point of wanting to stamp my feet and cry; and I hadn’t realised how permanently tense my muscles have become with stress. But I had also underestimated the exhilaration, the freedom of abandoning myself to the moment, the sheer heartbreaking joy of expressing with my body what could never be said in words.
I’ve been dancing to a very different tune when it comes to the efforts I’ve been making to transform myself from a struggling writer into a soon-to-be-published author. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow is the tempo dogging my footsteps. Just when I’d think I’ve learnt something about incorporating a widget into my website or classifying metadata or grasping the principles of marketing via social media . . . I’d find I’d misunderstood something vital and have to go right back to square one.
Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.
So my progress has been that of a snail. A drunken snail, at that, as I zigzag over the ground I have recently covered. Only, of course, time isn’t moving at the same speed. The spring flowers are blooming already, the blackbirds preparing to nest, and the weeks on my calender to publication day are disappearing fast.
It doesn’t help that I keep telling myself how exciting this should be; how much I’ve always relished a challenge; that I’ve decades behind me of beating tight deadlines. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow thumps through my head and destroys my natural rhythms. I need to learn some new moves, some nifty footwork that will restore my faith in my ability to face the music and dance. And writing this has been the first step . . .
What sort of a dancer are you?
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