Wisdom, peace tables, and a fun new game

Welcome back to Awaken Tango, an innovation-focused tango newsletter. If this is no longer part of your life, unsubscribe below.

Hello everyone! There are so many beautiful conversations going on on Substack these days on the topic of wisdom and innovation and how to balance these.

Last week, Peter Limberg’s piece on moving from high agency to wise agency made me reflect on the tango hustle. And Andrew Murray Dunn’s rallying cry for a network of schools of wise innovation opens the mind in so many directions! How can we deepen our wisdom as tango practitioners?

One aspect of wisdom applied to tango, I believe, is engaging interpersonal frictions skillfully. Today’s newsletter offers three ideas for this. Also, you’ll learn about the origins of a tango game, and get a final chance to participate in an important survey.

Interpersonal friction among tango folks

Friction between members of a tango community is common, and we are all resourced differently for engaging it. When someone does little things that make you grumpy, or confused, or mad, often we avoid: avoid the issue, avoid the person.

But unhealed little frictions tend to get more and more abraded and inflamed. They can become fractures and, unaddressed, turn into tragic breakages that damage not just the ones involved but the whole tissue of relationships in the community.

What if we could each engage interpersonal frictions early, when they are still tiny and containable, before they fester and explode? What could community leaders do to foster a culture of repair — and bring out the peaceful, curious, collaborative aspect of each member?

Over the years I’ve experimented with this. Here is my conclusion: a culture that encourages people to engage in self-facilitated conflict engagement will have 1) a designated place where this work happens, and 2) a clear protocol for working through the process.

The place needs to be safe and private, contained and beautiful. And the protocol needs to be simple and short, something anyone can do without special training. Here are three examples:

1. A labyrinth. I experienced the power of the labyrinth to heal conflict firsthand when I initiated a conflict-resolution labyrinth walk with a friend I had fraught relations with. Even a finger walk or handheld labyrinth can bring two estranged humans back to resonance.

2. Montessori peace table. In our coliving house we’ve experimented with an adapted Montessori peace table protocol, a sacred space dedicated to heartfelt listening, sharing, and finding solutions.

3. A walk. Instead of sitting opposite from someone and dissecting an issue, a long walk can soften things and get you looking in the same direction.

I would love to hear how it goes for you if you try these in your community. A future newsletter will provide resources on how to stay in discernment when unhealed interpersonal frictions turn into community fissures.

If you’re interested in a PDF of the peace-table protocol, please reply. And, I am a Veriditas-trained labyrinth facilitator. If you’d like me to facilitate a labyrinth walk for you or your community, please get in touch.

An experimental game enters public playtesting

For at least 14 years, I’ve been working on a project that brings together two of my tango interests: 1) creating a usable tango notation system, and 2) fostering more deliberate practicing. It’s turned into a game that facilitates tango discovery through chance operations.

This week, encouraged by friends and colleagues I respect and admire, I’m taking the big step of moving the project from private R&D and playtesting to “building-in-public” mode. I am excited to share the fun — and to keep learning, evolving, and co-creating this game with the community. Here’s a snapshot of how it began!

The impetus to start researching tango notation

While visiting us in LA, over a sushi feast in the late aughts, Jaimes Friedgen told us a story that bewildered me. As I recall, he said that at milongas in the Golden Age, a couple gave an improvised performance — and then a second couple would get up and perform the exact same performance perfectly from memory.

This blew my mind. What kind of tango brain would that second dancers need to have, to pull that off? I studied memorization, learned about memory castles, and pondered the challenge. I don’t know why, but this simple story, possibly apocryphal, ignited some weird curiosity for me.

Finally I concluded that it would be impossible to do this without having a simple, easy to use notation system that would compress the density of tango moments into short, memorable words or images. Then, in 2011 I invited LA tango friends Jennifer Bae and Dave Lampson to start exploring notation systems together.

I’ll share more about the journey, and other notation systems I’ve learned about along the way, in future newsletters.

Join the early access community

Early access players are starting to organize workshops and playtest practicas. We’ve had them in Northampton, and they are coming up in NYC this weekend and SF next weekend. Please reply if you want to learn more about the game!

Final call: What does your tango community need?

📢 Calling all teachers to share your perspective

Thirty six amazing, passionate caring local tango teachers completed the Tango Teacher Survey so far. Thank you for taking the time to share how it’s going for you!

To understand more about the patterns of needs and challenges teachers face in tango, we need to hear from more of you! The goal is 100 completed surveys. We’re accepting responses until May 31st. Hope you’ll find 10 mins to contribute your POV.

Tango Teachers, Take the Survey

The intention is for this newsletter to foster high quality conversations related to growing and evolving our tango practice and communities. As this publication grows, we hope to create containers for such conversations, online and off. For now, Comments are not available.