Cora / Gary

Cora in 1971.

Early in her tango journey, Cora partnering with James at Liberty Plaza outdoor milonga on Pennsylvania Ave, DC, near the White House.

Gary’s senior year high school yearbook photo.

Present day Gary.

Cora’s roots in dance predate her birth—her parents met at a social dance in post-WW II Honolulu. She’s never stopped moving. At five she started with hula, at twelve she moved on to ballet, which she continued in the Hemenway Gym in Radcliffe Yard. In New York and Tokyo she studied with sensei teaching Bon Odori, the Japanese folk dance performed at the summer Obon festivals welcoming ancestral spirits home, and Nihon Buyo, the classical Japanese dance with roots in Kabuki.

But Cora found her greatest satisfaction in that paragon of partnered social dancing, tango. Her first taste at a party hosted by a friend who danced in Robert Duvall’s tango community in Virginia didn’t take. But while on a visit home she enrolled in a boot camp led by the man who brought tango to Honolulu and became “addicted” to what she describes as “the eternal search for a high, when you have a good dance.” She even made the pilgrimage to Buenos Aires for a three-week tango festival—classes all day and dancing till four in the morning.

Cora and Gary Mathews talk about how “tango is like life”—a mutual conversation through movement (no talking while dancing!); switching between the roles of leader and follower; the joy of improvising with a partner you may never dance with again; and most profoundly, learning to find “the pauses and stillness that the music calls for.”

It’s this meditative quality, what Gary likens to the Japanese concept of Ma—“those moments of stillness that give more meaning to moments of busyness,” that has meant the most to Cora in what she embraces as “a long journey and a forever journey.”

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You can hear Gary Mathews talk about what movement in dance and Noh theatre have brought to his life in his PasstheMic conversation with roommate Yan Chow.