Great Moments in Tango Teaching: Corina, Part II

In my church, we call the disabled “differently abled.”

This is--let’s say it--stupid.

Sibling Five-of-Six’s legs have been disabled. She has not been gifted with a different ability to make up the loss. When she fell in an icy parking lot last fall, she did not find herself differently abled. She found herself stuck.

I, on the other hand, am differently abled.

I can write like a fiend. Can you? We are differently abled.

Five-of-Six can reach girls whose minds are so messed up they wish they were dead. In this way she is differently abled.

You can <<>> like nobody’s business. You are differently abled.

Some teachers are differently abled. Corina is one. I have resisted singing her praises too loud, lest I offend.

I have written circles around this. Rond de jambs. Turnabouts. Crop circles. Orbits. At the center of it all, the nut: Some teachers have a gift. What is its nature? I don’t know.

How is it that Corina, stopping me after a half-step, could say, You are having these troubles in tango, and here are the reasons why … and trace it not to a mistaken application of technique but to the way my body skews standard technique … and advise me on what to be aware of in my body so when I listen to teachers, I can alter their instructions to sit well on me. And how is it that she tapped into the whole discorporeal bit?

I think Corina has intuition and a gift to see the world in the certain way. When a person has a gift, that’s not something added onto their being. It is their being. They are not differently abled, they are differently existentialed.

Corina is a dancer and so she receives the world as movement and space and rhythm and relations and who knows what else. But she also has intuition, radar of the heart.

I think what makes Corina an exceptional teacher, what allows her to put her finger on everything all at once, with so little visible evidence, is that she senses and receives in the artists’ way—before or beside seeing and analyzing as teachers do.

In the fable The Little Prince, the title character says, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Like I said, I don’t know. I’m making all of this up. Based on my own experience, which is not necessarily relevant to her. Maybe they teach this in BA tango-teacher courses. Maybe she was just guessing.

I am not writing any more circles around this.

My private lesson with Corina was a Great Moment in Tango Teaching because it was art. If I am not enough of a writer to express it, so be it.