Talk: "Mistakes"?

DAVID:  You don't make mistakes usually…

- Sorry. Something distracted me.

DAVID:  No, it's all great but no mistakes means I don’t really have any material to work with.

***

- There are guys so insistent that they are in charge that if you make a mistake they will not follow you into it and move on.

WILL:  It is not insistence. Even guys without naturally insistent characters stop listening to the woman when they adopt, along with the leader/follower idea, the companion idea that the woman, as follower, has nothing to say. So in the dance the reason he doesn't go with your "mistake" is he doesn't actually know you've made it, until what initially wasn't actually a problem at all does become a problem, and then it is too late.

- Oh, I think they often do know there was a mistake. They just don't or can't accommodate it which is unpleasant for everyone.

WILL:  They know when it becomes a mistake. Before then it is not a mistake. It is just her saying something unexpected. Without which the dance would be as boring as hell. As it normally is with people who’ve learnt patterns.

- It's all about the mistakes!?

WILL: They are not mistakes! They are the woman saying what she feels! To call them mistakes is like calling an unexpected answer in a conversation at a cocktail party a mistake. Only if in fact this conversation was scripted for say a film, would unexpected be a mistake.

- So scripting is what in tango dance are called sequences, patterns, steps, moves. Anything where the guy has an idea and “decides“ he is going to do “this” to the woman, instead of inviting her to share a feeling?

WILL:  In the real world, the unexpected is actually what makes the conversation. If the conversation had been scripted, no-one would bother having it. It would communicate nothing... 

Photo by Duncan Hull via Creative Commons licence 2.0.