How class dancers dance

Perth museum

I was looking for a visual idea of harmony to contrast with what some of this post is about.  I took this photo today because I like the space which I once thought about using for a dance.  We were in Perth Museum (picture), one of the oldest museums in the UK.  We went to see the new Cradle of Scotland exhibition about a breathtakingly large pallisaded enclosure - one of the largest in prehistoric Europe -  near here, the iron age hillforts which developed nearby and the Pictish royal residence of the ninth century.  This is the arresting image used to advertise the exhibition.  What a difference colour makes.  The exhibition is co-directed by Steve, who dances tango and so does his wife, Kate.  He is an archaeologist and Kate a Celtic specialist. We always have interesting conversations. Plus they keep me right during wine tasting when I get distracted by just such good conversation.    

Actually the harmony I want to refer to is perhaps less well illustrated architecturally because it is more of the human kind. I see it best in my boys, in togetherness, in movement, in a sort of shared being.  Yes, of course they fight too!

This was yesterday on our way across our gorgeous if currently rather sodden park, the “North Inch” to the other museum here which is about the infantry regiment called The Black Watch and since 2006 a battalion in the Royal Regiment of Scotland. 

My elder son dances tango. The "little" one still likes to be picked up for dance which these days doesn't happen often.  When we walk arms around one another the elder falls in step with me, and I shorten my stride He moves to tango music, two as one so naturally, with a sense of shared axis despite our difference in height. I guess he gets, they get, that sense from practice through being so often attached (literally) to one another.   

It isn’t true that beginners are always rough to dance with.  Beginner girls, even beginner guys can be lovely when they don’t get - inevitably - ruined by going to class.  It is true though that class dancers make great partners for other class dancers.  I don’t mean beginners, I mean that subset of beginners who dance in classes.  But that separation keeps them away from social dancers. That would be useful - particularly so they don’t screw up the ronda, as class dancers more than any other invariably will.  It would be useful if it were not also such a shame, such a waste, such a lost opportunity for new dancers who want to learn to dance tango and for the existing dancers who want to dance with them.  

It is also true that I find class dancers stiff in dance; worried about all the things they aren’t doing “right” as if “right” was the standard currency in this improvised social dance.  It is - but only between other class dancers, but then they don’t do much true improvising. Such dancers hardly embrace - look at the photographs taken in most British milongas - of couples, one awkwardly “driving” the other, usually at a distance, the other awkwardly tolerating it.  They don’t dance the way other dancers, class-free dancers do.

No surprise that when class types encounter the resistance they feel in social dancers who they try to force into “moves” they find them a bit stiff too.  But to me class dancers  can feel robotic, contrived, insecure.  They feel stressed so they try to push through that by pushing you into the moves they’ve learned. While they are dancing they are simultaneously trying to remember their classes on Technique, Grounding,  Posture,  “How to Embrace” (!), Connection - as if they have a hope of connecting with all that going on in their heads.  They feel and look worried as the contradiction between the dancing they want to do and the thinking in which they have been instructed finds expression in that obvious tension.  They think about dance instead of listening to the music and responding to the individuality in the partner they are with their own.  You only need to give the other person your attention, to listen, to dance with them, not at them not by doing moves done to them.  We can do  it untutored, naturally if we only turn off the jabber of the class teacher who wants us to do it their way.

I had a message this evening from someone I don’t know yet.  It finished  “I'm very much of the learn by dancing "school", and learning by experimentation.”  It’s just lovely to hear things like that.

The boys, by the way, walk, run, stand move like this all the time. It's natural.