Dance Floor Navigation: A Private Conversation In A Public Forum

In my last article I emphasized that Tango relates to the verbal conversations that we share with each other. It is a physical conversation that takes place in the company of others; thus it is important that we understand the boundaries and manners that come along with the communal aspect of dancing. One of my students came to me on Friday mortified that she had kicked the visiting teacher, apparently rather hard. She had been dancing with someone else and felt responsible for hurting an `innocent passerby’. Her main concern was figuring out how she could avoid anything like that happening ever again. I didn’t see it so I asked her who her partner was and as soon as she told me, I understood what had happened.

When we talk in our own homes we have the freedom of privacy which allows us to discuss topics that other people should not be forced to overhear. When we are in public, whether we’re at a restaurant, a play, in the park, or on the dance floor, we have to adjust our behavior to be appropriate in that setting. It is the same in tango.

Nevertheless, while there are many similarities between tango and talking, there is one very important difference: in tango we have a leader and a follower. Although there are defined roles and responsibilities that come with these positions which predominately put the blame for collisions at the leader’s feet, as a follower there are some important things that you can do to avoid being a part of causing pain to other dancers.

Have you ever been in a room with a group of people where there is one person who insists on talking twice as loud as everyone else? It can get to the point where that person disrupts everyone else’s dialogs. We can do the same thing as leaders when we try to do big explosive maneuvers, dance erratically or change direction suddenly amidst others. Carina Losano, one of my teachers, used to talk about being able to dance big in a small space. Some leaders think that they have to cover a lot of distance to have fun, but that isn’t what Carina meant. “Dancing big” isn’t about hogging space.

When we learn balance, control, and how to pivot, we can execute the same dramatic `big’ steps, but do them within the space that we already occupy. This doesn’t mean that we have to take small steps — just that we have to maneuver ourselves and our partner so that we work within the area we already occupy. It is equally important that we try to stick to the lane that we are dancing in and dance in such a way that others on the floor can predict where we will be. When we are dancing, our fields of vision are limited and to some degree we need to know that other dancers are moving in a pattern.

When you decide to move into an area you have to recognize that anyone whose back is to you is unaware of your presence. Space on the dance floor is a vacuum, it gets filled quickly. Generally, however those who are closest to it have the most legitimate claim to it. If a leader decides to quickly move somewhere from far away, he (or she, as the case may be) needs to be ready to vacate that space, just as quickly, when people who were closer in proximity, and are unaware of his presence, decide to move there themselves.

I was at a festival recently and one of my former students told me a funny story about how he first got started with tango. His parents danced tango and would put on music and dance in the living room after they had put the children to bed. For reasons that one can only guess at they decided that it was more fun to dance in the nude. As anyone who has been around children knows, curiosity is a strong motivational force, and my friend and his brother would sometimes sneak downstairs to see what their parents were doing. One day when he was a little older his parents asked him if he wanted to learn how to dance. He agreed and started to strip off his clothes, much to his mother’s chagrin. They had a talk and everything worked out fine. That is just a cute story, because his parents were doing it in a private setting, but what would we think if they showed up to a milonga naked? They, presumably, liked the way it looked and felt to be nude dancing, which, given the right circumstances, many of us probably would, too. We can all agree, however, that their personal preferences for private behavior are secondary to the code of the public forum.

One example of this in tango is leaders or followers who insist on holding the off-hand (the one on the open side of the embrace) high up in the air, or with the elbow pointing backwards, or with their arms sticking straight out to the side. Some of the premier dancers will hold their arms up high and people like to imitate them. Javier Rodriguez and Gustavo Naviera are two of the best leaders on the planet and you see them performing like this all the time. It looks great but needs to be done with care on the social floor. There is a huge difference between contact with someone’s hand and their elbow. When we hold our hand high or stick our elbows backwards, we are positioning ourselves in such a way that sooner or later we are going to elbow someone and it is going to hurt. Pushing the arm straight out does two things, it doubles the amount of space we are using, and serves as a wrecking ball. If anyone doubts the importance of keeping the elbow low and in, just ask and I will be happy to give a gentle demonstration.

I used to have a friend in college who was hilarious. He would tell the funniest raunchy stories and have everyone in tears. In those days, I did a lot of volunteering at a family shelter and one time he asked if he could come along. I was shocked when, within 30 minutes of arriving, he started to relay a story that involved subjects that children should not hear. I went over to him, pulled him aside, and with a few words stressed the importance of not talking in that way in that environment. That worked for a little bit, but then he was back at it. Once he got a story in his mind it seemed like nothing was going to stop him from telling it.

We have some leaders in our community who seem to have a lexicon of sequences that they dance over and over again. Some people feel more comfortable with prescribed patterns. This in itself is not inherently hazardous, but what makes it dangerous is when they are determined to complete those series regardless of who stands in their way. Just like my college buddy, they need to recognize when it is time to drop that idea and move on to another.

The sad thing about my friend was that he didn’t change. The organizers of the volunteer group realized that asking him to come to the shelter was tantamount to asking him to talk about sex with 5 year olds. So, of course, we stopped asking him to come. It is hard in a community this small but saying “no” is one of the responsibilities of followers. If you are at a dance and you know that dancing with a leader is likely to result in a collision, it is your responsibility to say no. You don’t have to give an explanation — all you have to say is, “no thank you, I am going to sit for a bit.” If you find yourself dancing with someone where you feel like he is asking you to do something that is dangerous for others you can try to redirect his lead into something else.

In tango we vote with our feet, both as leaders and followers, and saying no is how we encourage people to make changes in the way that they dance.

Reply to: Never get asked to dance?

I wanted to post a reply that I got to my article, as this is indicative of exactly the kind of thinking that I want to address. I edited her response to ensure she remains anonymous. I still don’t know too many of the followers names, so I actually am not sure who she is myself. I wrote this article because I want everyone to have a good time at the milongas. I firmly believe that everyone can be fun to dance with, as long as they are willing to put the work in. I remember the problems that I had when I started dancing.

———- Edited reply ——–>
What a great article. Thank you for such a wonderful story. I am an attractive woman, I am elegant, funny and happy and in love with TANGO. I started 3 years ago, and I fell in love immediately. I love (other dances) and I do these very well. I love the music of Tango and the lyrics that go with it. I feel the music in my body. I really try to dance the best of my abilities, but, it happens that when I go to Milongas, I sit more often than I dance. I am a good average dancer, according to my teacher “xxxxxxx”. I think that I am a good follower, but when there are young women and sexy women, there goes my chances… I take Tango classes 2 times a week and always try my best to get better all the time. Private lessons are a little out of my budget. So do you have an explanation??? I do like to dance with any man that will ask me to dance, no matter how little he knows because I have been there too…….Here in Raleigh we are mature women that love to dance. And it is not fun to not dance……..So there it goes, If I win the lottery then I will take private lessons. Good luck to you. And one more thing, when you go to Milongas, please dance with the women that you see sitting all the time, forget about the young chicks, they dance all the time. The men do not get enough of them…….Peace
<———- end of edited reply ———-

Making age the problem is one possible answer, but I just don’t think it is accurate. Most leaders will choose the younger women only when skill is equal. Every serious tanguero that I know, however, will ask an older woman with a beautiful embrace before a younger woman with a sexy face. This isn’t even a question. I have seen this to be true in every community that I have danced in, and I think that it is true here too. The only guys that pick based solely on age are the hacks who you don’t really want to be dancing with anyways. Dancers with a problem embrace sit, or do a lot of one dance tandas. For better or worse that is the tango culture.

If you have problems in your embrace, then you need to fix them, before you do anything else. Maybe there are other ways to go about this; I can only say what I have learned in my experience, and from the teachers that I trust. I recommend that you take privates from a local teacher that you can work with regularly. Taking privates with visiting teachers is of limited usefulness for this as it takes time and repetition. I want to encourage you to think creatively about how you can fix this problem. If money is an issue for you (which I understand), then think of ways that you can work around that. I am just going to throw out a couple possibilities. 1) Stop taking group lessons and put that money towards privates. At least try it for a couple of weeks. Most group classes are designed to expand your dance vocabulary. If you have a problem embrace, greater vocabulary is not going to help you, you’re just throwing money away. 2) Ask a friend to take the lessons with you, you can take turns dancing and still get a lot out of it. One thing that you need to understand is that the posture/ embrace that works for tango and for salsa/swing/ballroom is totally different. It is often more difficult for someone with experience in other dances to learn the embrace than a total beginner.

I truly believe that this is the only way to address this problem. Dancing with a woman who has the ‘abrazo’ is so wonderful. She is simultaneously communicating trust, connection, receptivity, and freedom. It is the physical manifestation of the perfect relationship. On the flip side a problem embrace is. It doesn’t have anything to do with who you are as a person. The biggest jerk can have a wonderful embrace and vice versa. I like dancing with older women, and whoever you are I want to dance with you (as I am sure almost every leader does.) The important thing is to be honest with yourself about the result the method that you are using to learn tango is producing for you. In the end it is up to all of us as followers and leaders to be responsible for our dancing.

David

The Elements Of Tango

People ask me all the time, “What do you look for in a partner?”

Tango is a physical language where we have a conversation. Just like any other conversation people vary in who they enjoy talking to. Some people enjoy sarcasm, a dry wit, intellectual curiosity, a certain tone of voice, the rhythm of words, we all have different tastes. There are some elements that are fairly universally present in stimulating conversation; opportunities for all parties to express themselves, respect, variety, not pretending to understand what one doesn’t, the sound of the voice, attention, the balance between dependence and independence, etc…

In tango we also have these basic elements that we look for in a partner, and as one would expect they closely parallel what we look for in a verbal dialogue. I used to talk about this subject a lot with my teachers and students in DC, so I want to acknowledge that most of these ideas originated with Joe, Pablo, and Carina. Here is a brief summary of our conversations.

The most important thing, which often goes unsaid, is that your partner has to be someone that you want to dance with, and that more importantly wants to dance with you. This is one thing that is often overlooked. In class Joe would ask our students what the single most important thing in a partner was. We would go around in a circle and people would answer things that are important, the embrace, balance, rhythm, and musicality. While these are critical, and I am going to talk about them later, my answer was always someone that wants to dance with you.

Now obviously this can be such an all encompassing answer as to be basically meaningless, it could be taken to beg the very question we are trying to answer. I mean it in a more specific sense. We have all tried to talk to people that had no interest in talking with us, before we even say a single word; it’s a total waste of time. The same is true in Tango, your partner has to be open to listening to what you are saying, and interested in giving back. So without this basic attitude of openness and attention nothing else matters.

I know it has happened to me, that my interest in talking with someone is quickly extinguished after the conversation actually starts. They look away, turn their bodies’ perpendicular or they can stand too close, and stare. Either of these extremes leaves me looking for an exit posthaste.

The most important element in tango, in order to maintain the connection with our partners, is the embrace. There are elements in the embrace that originate as primarily physical or emotional. In this article I am not going to go into depth on the physical aspects of what makes for a great embrace. A brief summary is that the physical are posture, breathing, torsion, relaxation, tension and compression. One very problematic misconception is that we embrace with our arms, not true! We embrace with our chest, even in open embrace. The embrace is the medium through which we talk.

I want to go over a little bit about the emotional parts. It is very important to be in the moment in our dancing. Oftentimes students get so disappointed/ frustrated when they lose their balance, or make a mistake that they lose their center. They then find themselves in a positive feedback loop, where mistake leads to mistake until there is nothing left but, “thank you for the dance.” Tango is just like life. There is no going back, we can’t fix our last step, what we can do is try to make the next one better.

When we, as followers or leaders, get nervous, have doubts, let uncertainty take over, desire control, we develop misplaced tension or compression in our arms and shoulders. This feels emotionally distant, excessively clingy/needy, or just downright uncomfortable. One common example is when we lose our balance. If we don’t accept it, we try to deny/ compensate for this by using our arms to lean on, or push our partner, which makes them lose balance, and then there goes our dance.

If we can stay centered, be patient and understanding of our learning process, we will give ourselves the freedom to take the step to where we have our balance, and then move on. Most of the time this is hardly noticed, and the dance just moves on. One of my students said to me once, “but I am frustrated, disappointed, upset, how can you tell me not to be!” I learned in another venue the adage, “fake it till you make it,” and this is important in tango. Don’t let those feelings take over, focus on the positive, and eventually they will go away.

Some people have interesting ideas but their grammar is so bad it is nigh impossible to understand what they are saying. They mutter, speak in incomplete sentences, and add unrelated words. Even though they have interesting ideas, are personable, and present we make no progress. In tango we have to know how to walk, balance and pivot. Balance and pivoting are the building blocks of movement, and we need them to be able to maintain a comfortable embrace.

As I mentioned, some people when they are standing still have a wonderful embrace, but as soon as you take a step they lose their balance and start pulling and pushing you. In the movie `The Tango Lesson,’ the star is dismayed when for months her private lessons are all about her walking around the room individually. While this was in a movie it is a common experience of people that go to BA. Individual work is a key to learning tango.

There is a saying, “In order to be in a healthy relationship with someone else, we first have to be in a healthy relationship with ourselves.” The same is true in tango; if we can’t execute the foundations of movement on our own we won’t be able to do them with a partner. In our individual work we learn the structure and grammar that allows us to maintain a conversation once it starts.

In order to have a conversation we have to agree upon a topic. It can be a confusing, and surreal experience when we witness a conversation where the parties are talking about different things. f I am talking about who to vote for in the presidential election and you are talking about what to eat for lunch things are going to get confusing pretty quick. It is the same in tango, we have the bass, melody, vocals, rhythm section, and the various instruments, and these are the topics that we discuss.

The structure of leading and following is such that the leader determines what aspect of the music is in the primary interpretation. One of my teachers used to say that leaders have options, followers have opportunities. It is very important that the follower recognize what part of the music is being led and dance to that element. If the leader is dancing to the melody and the follower is stepping to the bass things aren’t going well.

At the same time we need to remember that tango is a conversation, not a lecture, and both parties are equal contributors. As followers get more comfortable and confident they are able to both add in their own rhythm with embellishments, and pick and choose moments to steer the leader to a different aspect of the music in how they time their steps.

I have done a lot of international travel, and I know that even with only the simplest of words it is possible to communicate complex ideas. It is, however, much easier with a broader vocabulary. It is fun to dance with someone who is comfortable with a variety of steps. What you often find is that a follower with the embrace, technique and musicality will be able to naturally follow movements that they are unfamiliar with. The last time I was dancing in DC I had several followers say something akin to, “I’ve never done that before, and I have no idea what you did, but it worked and was fun.”

For leaders they will find themselves creating combinations organically throughout their dancing. We all see the leaders that seem to do the same move over and over again (oftentimes regardless of fellow dancers and the music). Their foundations are limited to
the point that that is all they can do. What we need to realize is that in order to expand our vocabulary we have to first work on the other elements of Tango. Once we accept this idea it changes our philosophy of learning.

David

Why do we have people in our community that never get asked to dance?

[First posted: Sat 2/9/2008 4:13 PM to the [triangle-tangueros] yahoo group. The group is based in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina, USA]

Author: David Fleig

I started dancing in the DC community, where unlike our scene there was an excess of beginner leaders, and a plethora of highly experienced followers. I started out doing contra dancing. In that scene the culture was clear- you danced with whoever asked you. It was both simple and easy. I went up to a woman asked her to dance, and she said yes. Or she would say that she had a partner (which was the case) and I asked someone else.

Well I soon learned that this was not the case with Tango.

At my first dance I took my time and scoped out the good followers. At the end of that tanda I started asking women to dance… things didn’t go as I planned. I heard “My foot hurts,” “I’m resting,” “I don’t like this music,” and “no thank you.” In one version or another, this was all that I heard. Not to mention that ten seconds later all of them were up on the floor dancing with someone else. This was quite a culture shock, but I resorted to the tried and true method of asking women from my group class and had a good time at the dance.

I wasn’t satisfied, however, and started running through the list of possible reasons that I was getting turned down with such alarming regularity. I had just taken a shower and was wearing clean clothes, so that wasn’t the reason. It was happening at all of the dances, so it wasn’t that a particular location was cursed for me. The same women were dancing with a variety of men including older gentlemen, so it wasn’t based on looks or age.. I finally decided that it was because I didn’t know enough moves so I decided to start taking private lessons with Pablo and Carina.

I went to my first class with a list of moves that I wanted to learn, drags and sacadas. Needless to say in my first lesson I didn’t work on these things. Actually for the next two months twice a week, once with Carina, and once with Pablo, I worked on my embrace. I was completely frustrated. I wanted to be learning these complicated figures, and instead I was spending almost $200 a week going over my embrace. After 2 months I was almost ready to just call the whole thing off. I couldn’t do any steps that I hadn’t learned in my group classes. Then I had one of those magical tango moments.

There was a milonga every other Friday in Cabin John Park. It was in this little cabin full of atmosphere. That night there was a tanguera from Seattle, and she just happened to be the first woman that I asked to dance. She was older than I was, probably around 55 (I was about 26), with grayish curly hair. So not exactly at the top of my `women I want to date’ list, but WOW, was she a good dancer!

The tanda was great. I spent half the set dancing with my eyes closed, without collisions; she had that perfect nice soft breath caressing my ear. I was in heaven, and then it got better. She whispered in my ear, “You have such a nice embrace, let’s dance again.” Well she didn’t have to ask me twice. We ended up dancing every set together and at the end of the dance she told me, “I just felt so comfortable in your arms.”

My enthusiasm for private lessons was renewed. Not long after that we started to work on the kind of steps that I had originally wanted. One by one all the followers I was originally rejected by asked me to dance, and I started to feel just as comfortable in the tango as the contra community.

The very reason that I love tango so much is why I got turned down so much to begin with: in tango you share an intimate embrace with your partner, one that lasts for 10-15 minutes or longer. When I dance with some followers now, I feel what those DC women wanted to avoid. For one reason or another there is something wrong with the embrace, and that tension is transmitted to your partner. Sometimes after just one dance it can really hurt.
Speaking from personal experience, if you are going to dances and not getting asked to dance as much as you want there is a 95% chance that it has nothing to do with how old you are, where you are dancing, what you are wearing, how many steps you know, or any of the other reasons that you can conjure up. The reason you are not getting asked to dance is that there is something wrong with your embrace.

There is one way to fix this problem, and group classes just won’t cut it, especially if you have been dancing for awhile. Most of us do not come to tango dancing with the natural talent to have a good embrace. What I learned in my own dancing is that there was no middle way with tango. I either had to give it up or put in the effort to develop a solid embrace. The best way to do this is with private lessons. This community has lots of teachers who give privates: Dan, Dimitri, Gulden, Jason, Tito, Xavier, myself, and I’m sure I’m forgetting someone. Pick one of these teachers and tell them you want to work on your embrace. It’s worth it and you will see the results on the floor.

David