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The Journal of Brief Therapy Network. Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall, 2003.

Greetings from Europe!
Therapydance

Tapio Malinen

I have been dancing Argentinean tango for the last two years. At the moment, tango is a martial art for me, where the goal is to win yourself. This dance, born in the harbour quarters of Buenos Aires, is a continuous return to yourself, zeroing, constantly coming back to square one.

The Argentinean tango is a danced play in which a woman creates a fallacious illusion of power for a man and the man tears off his role as one who is weak and seeks genuineness in himself, something that cannot be defined through others.

Tango does not teach anything. Instead, it allows students to discover something that is already within: lightness of heart and the ability to take things seriously, passion and humility, fury and openness. It also shows that the human being is ex-static, continuously transcending in one´s body and consciousness something that has been given to us.

But above all, it shows that learning and becoming aware is not found in achieving, but in giving up. Giving consent allows the surge of life to flow through the dancer – he/she is not dancing in order to achieve anything but to express that which already exists.

For the novice dancer, chaos and structure are always dancing together. Sometimes one is leading and the other is following, sometimes they are reversing roles. By giving one´s consent without fear to this process of unpredictability, playfulness and letting go, we notice something special. In this continuous dance of chaos and structure, the self and the world are reciprocally affecting each other, creating each other all the time. And seeing reality does not mean to comprehend the structure but to allow oneself to simply let the unpredictable process of change happen.

Recently I have also been thinking of tango as a language game connected with body. The movements of the dance, after you have learned the basic steps, create a wholeness where special meanings typical with the tango are born. The language of movements conjure a reality on the dance floor, a reality in which the woman is realizing the desires of the man and immediately responding to his suggestions. This reality is created as the man has premonitions of the woman´s hopes, and his firm hold leads her towards these hopes. Recently, I have realized that you cannot learn to dance the tango if you spend all your time playing chess.

Collaborative/constructive psychotherapies are institutional discourses, stories of rhetoric in which people recognize each other from the agreements characteristic of the institutions. We often get lost in the film of life because we forget that the projector, light and the screen just create an illusion of the reality. A living, running man is not the same man that we see running in the film. Instead of the process, a film only shows a series of still pictures. However, because of how we perceive, we don´t realize that it is an illusion. In the same way we will not find any permanent or unchanging “self” under our skin – we discover only the constantly changing flow of thoughts, feelings and experiences – there is no fixed, creative work process separate from the world. The illusion of constancy and fixed structure results from the way we use language and from our tendency to identify.

Different therapy approaches are institutional rhetoric or language games – they are both conditions for understanding and elements that limit our understanding. In psychotherapy we talk ourselves into the thick descriptions of our preferred stories and identities by changing the way we speak and by focusing on the alternative identity projects that are always already present in our dominant narratives. When used skilfully, language uncovers the same thing as dance: life happens when people create meanings that abandon suffering and give opportunity to the construction and deconstruction of more satisfied, creative and productive lives.

During these moments, form is also emptiness and emptiness, form.

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