Heart beat, brain waves

Entrainment

There is a quality to the connection and rapid transfer we achieve in the dance that is left in the realm of magic and mysticism. It is that uncanny quality that allows dancers to be so attuned to one another that it seems we are reading each other’s minds, or better, we are simply one body, one being.

Entrainment is to fall into sync, align in rhythmic time, with another system. If many pendulum clocks are put in a room together oscillating at different speeds, over time they will synchronize. When people sleep next to one another, their heart beats often entrain. In tango, we experience a high level of entrainment not only of heart and brain waves perhaps, but of the nervous system itself. We are indeed practicing volition, the desire to move, as if the collective body of the couple were our own body alone. This means at the higher levels of entrainment, there is a rapid or automatic transfer between nervous systems, which during the dance, are operating as one system.