As for tango addicts..
... I believe that the
stage of addiction is absolutely necessary if one is to become a good
tango dancer. And the longer it lasts, the better.. I suppose everyone
emerges from it, eventually, because it IS rather exhausting in the
long run; but it is something one simply has to go through, no matter
how nutty it may seem from an outsider´s point of view. Or, as a friend
of mine, a much more experienced tanguera, once put it: ´In tango, you
have two kinds of people. There are those who take classes, but rarely
go out dancing because it is too time-consuming / exhausting if one has
to work the morning after, etc.. - these people go to advanced classes
and know many figures, but they never become REALLY good dancers. And
then you have those who become hooked and dance like crazy, hardly ever
miss a milonga and stay out late although they have to work in the
morning - and these eventually become very good dancers.´
Basically
it just boils down to whether you adapt tango to your life or your life
to tango. And in case someone finds that way-out, I would like to point
out that there are tango dancers who simply cannot understand how
someone can NOT dance.. It all depends on perspective.
Like I said,
however, one is bound to sober up eventually and take dancing easy,
ideally content with one´s technique and becoming one
of those cool, self-possessed and lofty dancers you sometimes see at
milongas, who apparently no longer feel the urge to dance or will only
do so for special occasions or partners. But I wouldn´t know, would I,
being still a happy addict myself..
I
have a private theory about the next and ultimate stage of dancing the
tango, a sort of a dancer´s nirvana: the individuals who reach it no
longer NEED to dance in order to experience the ecstasy of a perfect
tango; the man and the woman simply look at each other and in the split
second when their eyes meet, they KNOW what it would be like, they
experience between the two of them a perfection beyond the imaginable
and the feeling in itself is so intense that there is no need to go
through the whole exercise physically; they just sigh contentedly and
lean back to recover from it. I have not so far met any such
individuals, but of course they would be very rare. Which is lucky, as
an abundance of such illuminated tangueros would make milongas
extremely dull for everyone else.