Zouking by the Water - Gui & Valeska - Deixa by Lagum

One more video from 2018 =) Below the original text I posted this video with on Facebook: I still remember the year when everything changed for me when it comes to social dancing. In 2009, after two years understanding and investigating the roles that comfort, softness and care take on the dancefloor, I traveled to Buenos Aires for the first time. I wanted to go to the land of Tango to figure out the science behind close embrace and how they managed to keep their upper bodies so calm and relaxed while the legs were going crazy. It didn't take long to understand...My first Argentine partner was a short, old and cute lady, with white hair and glasses with a thick black frame. When she hugged me, I had my first epiphany and suddenly it all made sense to me. We then did the pattern of the class, the "giro" (spin), a pattern that people from my classes and team in Rio struggled to do, the lady did as if we were stepping in clouds without losing an inch of the contact we created with the embrace. Second epiphany. The social started and after some time another older lady gets into the room. She had a beautiful posture and short hair that had the color of red wine. She only had time to put on her heels, because she would not stop dancing for the next hour. I was intrigued and when the opportunity presented itself I invited her to dance. After all the invitation rituals, she connected her chest to mine and swaddled me with her left arm and as I closed the embrace she closed her eyes and rested her forehead on the right side of my jaw...Third epiphany. Things made even more sense and I understood it all: they were letting me take care of them. They were just trusting. They were saying something like "here is the key, you drive and I will take a nap. Make sure it is an easy ride okay?". They were taking the initiative to trust and letting me deal with the line of dance, the people around and all the rest. And that was amaaaaaazing. I was aware that there was a very important cultural aspect in all that that I experienced and when I came to Brazil, I spend some time reverse engineering the trust creating process and all that comfort that I felt. I wanted to take care of my partners and make them feel that they were being taken care of. That became my goal and everything mattered, from how I was stepping to how I was inviting people to dance. And a few years later I think I reached my goal when one of our students told me after we danced "I think I took a nap just now, that was so relaxing". Partner dancing allows us to connect back to primary human characteristics: physical interaction and socialization. And in this era of solitude, anger and polarization, partner dancing also allows us to take of each other, bring each other comfort - both physically and mentally -, peace, joy and fun.