Part Five: Kizomba

I was around thirty when I started kizomba. By then I had already moved to another country, where, in a manner of speaking, I was starting over.

The new country was a closed place to live. Emigration narrows your world in a way no one warns you about: my whole circle of people was my colleagues, and outside the office there was almost no one. Two years in, one of those colleagues asked me to come with him to a trial dance class. I went to keep him company, though my interest in dancing was moderate. But I understood what I was actually being offered, which was not dancing — it was an evening among people who were not from my office.

I liked the first class enough to pay for a month. The month became more than a year.

The fire I carried in was small: I arrived mildly curious and mostly lonely. Over the months the dancing became a pleasant hobby — a way to meet people, a way to put the workweek down. And the small fire grew: it was fed by quick progress and by the skill of the man who taught us.

I should tell you where even that small warmth came from, because it was not the dance. Years earlier, before the move, there was a girl. She was important to me. Her university held a ball, and she asked me to come, and I told her the truth, which was that I could not dance. So she taught me. We met a few times, and she showed me the basic step of a waltz — the simplest of the dances at that ball. I never told her what it all meant to me. Dancing has reminded me of her ever since. So when I say a small warmth came into that class with me, that is its source — not an appetite for the art, but a few waltz steps, taught by someone I have not quite managed to forget.

When my colleague asked me along to that trial class, I already knew well what I wanted from dancing. I had no intention of becoming a serious dancer and competing. I simply wanted to dance with a partner for the pleasure of it.

Hold the size of that fire in mind. Nothing in this story is going to be done to it. No one starves it, and no one bars its way. This is the one story I have where the room is kind from the first day to the last and still I never take the step into the release.

The teaching began the way dance classes usually begin: with the basic step. We learned to walk in time to the music — the teacher showed us how, put on a track, let us try, then told us where we had gone wrong. After a few lessons we moved to the basic figures. A step forward, a turn, a step back. Kizomba is a social dance, danced in pairs, so every figure was practiced with a partner: he and his own partner would show it to us as a couple, and then we would break into our own pairs and run it again and again until he stopped us.

I had been through lessons like these before, ten years earlier. The aikido training followed exactly the same plan. I have told you already that the dull repeated work is what digs the riverbed, in any art. Here was the digging again, for the fourth time, and I knew its texture by now.

But this room had something of its own: no one came here for results, and no one asked us for any. That did not make the work any lighter, but no one was reproached for not trying hard enough. The people around me had come, as I had, to set down the week and feel something pleasant for an hour, and that ease was the thing I loved most about the place.

The man at the front had been a professional ballet dancer, and when that working life ended he had turned to teaching — opened his own school, gathered a team of strong teachers around him, and led most of the lessons himself. He would show you a thing and then leave you room to find your own way into it. He corrected, but never once pressed his own manner onto your body — and when a student began to move a little differently from the way he had shown it, he noticed the difference and left it to the student.

By the end of the first year we had been through all the basic figures and a few advanced combinations. Then new beginners arrived, so the teacher had to take the course back to the start, to the basic step. Instead of running us back around the same loop, every week he made new figures, things none of us had seen, so that even the old students walking the beginners’ material again were learning something. It was extra work, and he did it for us. Handed the most natural excuse to loop, he refused it. I am still grateful to him for that.

After about three months, the teacher began inviting us to what he called parties.

They were, in plain terms, discos — evenings where the people of his school gathered: students, former students, friends of the students, friends of the teachers. No one came in off the street, so the evenings stayed closed and familiar. A DJ played the music kizomba is built on: rhythmic, counted in four. I went to the first of them with my friends from the class, and it was held in a place I already knew: a small bar down a flight of stairs, below the street, where we had had several lessons.

I can still see the room. It was dim, with colored lights moving over the walls. The music sat at an easy, talking level, and most of the tracks were ones we knew from the lessons. The faces around me were faces I knew. My own teacher was there. Nothing in that room put me on edge. In a place so warm and so familiar, the evening felt like an extension of the class.

I asked a partner I knew to dance, and we stepped onto the floor. I did the basic step, and then the few figures I had, and then I came to the end of them. The dance was not over, so I went back to the beginning and did them again. Two more dances went the same way: the small handful of things I had learned, run through, and then run through once more. By the end of the party I understood something quietly and without much pain — that my technique was too thin to carry an evening like that. I noticed it the way you notice the weather turning. But the fire only grew from it: it seemed to me that everything came down to the number of figures, and that once I had learned more of them, I would be able to dance a whole evening.

Some time later, I went to the teacher for help.

The trouble I brought him was the difficulty the first party had shown me. In class, what we were given was more than enough. At a party it was not: there you dance one dance after another for a whole evening. From one dance to the next I repeated myself; I did the same things in the same order, and then I did them again. So I asked the teacher for new figures.

He understood the problem, and he gave me an answer that was not the answer I had come for. He said the trouble was not the number of figures: what mattered in the dance was to listen to the music and to improvise. Most of the advanced figures and combinations we had been learning, he had made up himself — and, as he put it, I already knew enough to begin making up my own. In class he went on showing us new figures, but they were not his answer to my trouble.

I took what he said seriously. I walked away turning it over.

I did not recognize it then, but I had been handed this exact thing once before, at another school, by another good teacher who knew when to take his hand away. At a keyboard, at fifteen, a man had refused me a hint and told me instead to solve the problem myself first. Here it was again, years later, in a small, well-lit studio after a dance lesson: you already know enough; make your own. Twice in my stories a teacher walked me to the edge of what he could give me, and then stepped back and, with almost the same gesture, pointed me onward, to go the rest of the way alone.

A few weeks later there was another party, and this one was not our teacher’s.

It was held in a different school, in a hall I had never set foot in, among people almost none of whom I knew. My own teacher was not there. Someone from our class had told us about it: he had found the party on social media and had little idea himself what it would be. We arrived together but lost each other at once. From the first minute the place was unfamiliar in a way the basement bar had never been — a large hall with a high ceiling and mirrors along the walls, so that the crowd of strangers was doubled in the glass and seemed larger than it was. The music was loud, too loud to talk over. And the level of the dancing was high: a master class had been held there just before, and many of the dancers had stayed on from it, so the floor was full of people who were really good. I remember the thought arriving clearly: I might be the worst dancer in this room.

I had to dance with women I did not know, some of them far more experienced than me, who expected a partner at their own level. My first was a beautiful girl. Beside her I was shy, and clumsy with it.

And then, dancing, I remembered the teacher’s words. Listen, and improvise. Make your own.

So I tried to. I bore down and began to think — hard, deliberately — about the next figure: how to enter it, how to lead her through it, how to come out the far side of it and into the one after. And the thinking swallowed everything else. While I was building the next figure in my head, I could not hear the music; I could not hold the beat; I could not even keep the basic step clean, the simplest thing I owned. One partner stopped in the middle of the dance and said, plainly, that it was not working, and that was the end of that dance. Another told me afterward, more kindly and more fully, that I was too stiff — that I did not move naturally, and that a man who moves like that cannot be danced with.

She was right, and I have thought since about where the stiffness came from, because it did not come from nowhere. I was trying to do too many things at one time. Listening to the beat. Leading her on it. Inventing the next figure while the present one was still running. All of it at once, in a loud unfamiliar room full of better dancers, among the mirrors, with a stranger in my arms. And my body did what a body does under that much load. It locked. The shoulders came up, the steps went wooden, the breath went shallow and high. The harder I reached for the dancing, the less of it there was.

I did not dance well with anyone that night. I went home disappointed in myself.

Let me stop a moment longer on what was actually happening in that hall, because it is very easy to walk past.

What I was reaching for, when I bore down and tried to improvise, was the release. The thing this book is about — the copied hand starting to do what the dancer means, the fire finding that the channel is finally deep enough to carry something of its own. The teacher had told me, correctly, that I was ready for it. He had built my hand to where it could hold the release. And then he had stepped back and opened the door and pointed me through. Everything the first stories said a good teacher should do, this one did. But that night I could not walk through.

The release is not a technique. You cannot perform it. It is a letting-go. I told you near the start of this book that the release is the moment the watching self goes quiet and steps out of the room, and the hand proceeds without it. What I did in that hall was the exact opposite of going quiet. I took the release — which is a loosening, a stepping-back of the very self that grips — and I tried to make it happen by gripping harder. I set my planning mind to manufacture a thing that exists only when the planning mind sits down. I reached for looseness with a clenched hand, and of course it would not come: my reaching was the clench. The stiffness the partner felt was not a fact about my body. It was the shape of a man trying to force a thing that can only be allowed.

And here the good teacher matters in a way I did not see for years. He had done his whole job. He had walked me into the art, and handed me to the floor, and let go — which is the teacher’s real work, and the hardest thing a teacher does, and he did it gently and at the right time. The step into the release is yours alone. No one can take it for you, because it is exactly the step of doing the thing yourself, with no one there. My teacher could open the door. He could not walk through it wearing my body. Beyond even the best teacher there is a short stretch of ground you cross alone or do not cross at all. In the mirrored hall I came to that ground, but I could not cross it.

There is something here, too, about reaching for a thing and so making sure you will not have it — about how the dancing came only as the by-product of listening and loosening, and died the instant I made it the goal and went at it head-on. That thought comes back in the next story. For this one it is enough to say: that night I tried to seize the release, and the seizing was what kept it from me.

After the mirrored hall I had not yet decided that dancing was not for me. There was only a doubt, the first in all my months of classes. I doubted two things: whether new figures would help me dance more freely at a party, and whether I was capable of learning that at all.

For the next several months I went on as before: at every lesson I learned the figures the teacher showed us.

Toward the end of the first year I went to a party once or twice more — small ones, with no professional dancers there. The stiffness came back there too. The new figures did not take it away. There were more and more of them, they grew more and more complicated, and in the middle of a dance they only tangled my thoughts further. My dancing still would not turn into improvisation: I went on running through memorized figures.

Little by little I understood what I had not understood after the first party: in class you can learn figures, but you learn to really dance only at a party. For that I would have to ask strangers to dance, dance badly with them in front of everyone, come to the next party and dance badly again — and so on, until one evening the grip loosened on its own. That was the price of the step I never took in the mirrored hall — the step from memorized figures to free dancing.

Every summer the teacher ran a dance festival. He took his students to a seaside resort for a week and organized it all himself: the flights, the lodging, a hall for the lessons. In the daytime there were master classes, and after them parties, and so on for the whole week.

About a year after I started, the same colleague who had once taken me to that trial class signed up for the festival. He pressed me hard to come with him.

I did not go. Money was tight for me then, and I did not want to risk a week of my vacation and that much money on a venture whose outcome I strongly doubted. The mirrored hall had already shown me where my trouble lay. This is how I pictured the week: if the stiffness did not let go in the first two days, on the third I would stop going to the parties. I could not have borne three days of failure in a row. Perhaps that is simply my character: after a failure I need time to recover and find the strength to go on. A week of failure, every day with no respite, would have broken whatever wish I had to dance.

My colleague went. By the second day he wanted to leave: nothing was working for him, and the women he danced with were unhappy with him. The teacher talked him into staying, but the trip brought him no joy. He blamed no one for it but himself. In his story I recognized what had happened to me: neither of us had learned to dance at a party. It would have been easy to conclude from that that the fault lay with the teacher and his method.

But other students from our class went to that festival too, and some of them danced noticeably worse than I did. All week they worked hard in the master classes and did not miss a single party. At the parties it went badly for them, but they did not give up. They came back from the festival as quite different dancers: it showed at the very first lessons afterward. A couple of weeks later, videos began to appear online showing them at parties in the clubs of our city, dancing easily, without running through memorized figures. And a year or two after that, one of them began teaching classes at a dance school, alongside a day job.

In the second year, beginners joined our group. I watched how awkwardly they learned the basic figures, and how quickly I picked up the new ones the teacher made up for us. But at a party that skill — picking up figures quickly — did not help me at all. That gap between the ease in class and the failures at parties weighed on me. I did not understand what to do, or where to put my effort, to prepare for the floor in advance. A month or two later I stopped going to the classes.

The final conclusion about myself took shape not in a single evening but gradually, over those last lessons. It was a verdict on my own nature: I have no ear, and I am too stiff. Relief came with it. I understood that a thing that has long refused to work can be put down, and that I would not much regret it.

Notice that relief: in my case, it was what gave the false verdict away. It is not always so: when mockery or a cold room puts a fire out, a false verdict can hurt like a wound. Mine did not hurt; it settled me. It gave me permission: the door was not mine to walk through, and so I did not have to. The not-having-to was the quiet relief.

I had felt that exact relief once before. Fifteen years earlier, a boy at an easel decided he had no talent — and felt, when it was over, not loss but a weight going off his shoulders. This was the same relief, in a man of thirty. The wrong conclusion, drawn cleanly from real evidence, and arriving as a permission rather than as a wound. That is one of the ways this kind of fire goes out: in a quiet verdict.

Both halves of the verdict were false. I did have an ear: I stopped hearing the music and the beat only when my head was busy with the next figure. Nor was the stiffness a fact about my body: it came every time I tried to force a thing that can only be allowed. So why did I really quit dancing?

Here is the answer, and it is not the one the earlier stories prepare you for. This time the room had nothing to do with it. I quit dancing because the crossing had a price, and I did not want the thing on the far side of it enough to pay.

It was not a steep price. The ones who went to the festival paid it, and among them were people who danced worse than I did. They danced badly for as long as it took. In the aikido story, few made it all the way through a room gone cold, and an ordinary fire, real and strong, could hardly get through it. Here the teacher opened the door and stepped back, and the most ordinary students made it all the way through.

Every student in our class faced the same task, and it was equally hard for every one of us. Some took it on and kept failing until they succeeded. I backed away from it. The difference between us was not in how hard the task was, but in how much each of us wanted to get from memorized figures to free dancing.

I knew how to pay that kind of price: I had paid it for years at the easel and on the mat. And here I weighed it against how much I wanted to dance, and found that I did not want it that much. I decided not to pay the price of the crossing on the day I did not go to the festival. After that I was only looking for a way to prepare for the floor in advance — that is, to learn to dance at a party without failing there. The fire was modest. It grew over the first months, but it stayed modest. A modest fire, shown the price, declined it.

In the earlier parts I have told you more than once not to trust the verdict a cold room passes on your fire. From that it is easy to draw a false conclusion: that every time you gave up a pursuit, a room had harmed your fire, and that you are obliged to go back to each one you ever gave up. That conclusion is false.

When I say a fire was harmed by its room, I am naming what a room did to a fire, never what a teacher meant by it. No teacher in these stories set out to harm me; each was trying to give me something, as best they could. A teacher can mean nothing but well and still harm a student’s fire — because they teach the way they themselves were taught.

But sometimes the room does not harm the fire at all — as in this story. Then it was not the room that made you stop: your fire for this art is modest, and you chose not to pay the price of the crossing. From the outside the two cases cannot be told apart; both end with a person walking away from an art. You can tell them apart by asking what the room actually did to you. If it laid a hand on top of your work, if you copied the same things in one lit corner and went no further, if the room ran the dead lesson year on year and gave your own reaching nowhere to go — then the quitting was not really yours, and the verdict you passed on yourself is worth tearing up, and there may be another room you ought to go and find. If the room did nothing to you, nothing was taken from you, and there is nothing to reclaim.

In the second case you are allowed to stop: to love a thing modestly, for an hour on a weeknight, and drop it when staying would cost more than you care to spend. Only do not let that right become a convenient excuse. A modest fire is easy to mistake for an unwillingness to work, and here is how to tell them apart. Every art asks the same price for the crossing — failing in front of others, repetition, long work with no sign yet that it is paying off. Look at whether you pay that price anywhere else, for something you truly want. If you do, you know how to work, and in walking away from this art you are only admitting that your fire for it is modest. But if you will not pay that price anywhere, for anything, the size of your fire for this art is not the issue, and calling it a modest fire would be untrue.

Stopping is not the trap. The trap is in telling yourself you stopped because you could not, when the truth is you chose not to. When the fire is modest, could not is easy to say. It sounds like a good reason, and it lets you quit without a pang. You walk away and soon forget the thing you dropped — nothing hurts. But if, years later, you do remember it, you will remember it as something you could not do. And no one goes back to a thing they believe they are incapable of. Chose not to is harder to say. From the outside it looks like laziness, and you begin to wonder yourself whether you have the right to drop a thing only because you do not want it enough. But this sentence leaves the door open. If one day the fire grows, you can come back — because you want to. For a long time I remembered the dancing in the could-not version too: I had no ear, I was too stiff. The true version sounds different: I could have, and I decided the dancing was not worth what the dancing would cost me, and I have not missed it.

There is one more art I have yet to tell you about. The fire was not modest there. The price was one I paid without ever once feeling it as a price. And the release came, not because I reached for it, but in the only way it ever comes: when I at last stopped reaching. I think I would not have understood it without the failure at the dancing. That is the next story.