Video - An equal improvisation

This is the embrace I was trying to describe in An Equal Improvisation.

My friend kindly allowed me to show these videos which were not planned. We had initially just gone to dance informally along with another local guy at a village hall on Saturday. It was a kind of practica I suppose. It occurred to me suddenly that this was a great opportunity to capture this kind of embrace with someone who has never done it before and who has almost no experience of trying to dance in the other role.

R has been dancing a year or so (in the woman’s role). Her experience in the other role could (and still can) be measured in minutes. After a stop-start beginning I have danced in the (traditional) guy’s role for about a year and a half and in the woman’s role for just over 4 years. It was the first time she has tried this embrace, my third. I am a bit hesitant about the embrace because it is so new and also perhaps just because we have not danced together that often.

So much for background. The main point is that in this first video she primarily, is initiating movement. Yet see how well she dances and it felt even better than it looks. She was so smooth, so aware of the partner and with awareness too of the music. I think of nearly all beginner guys who try to learn to dance in class and there is simply no comparison.

The difference I think is largely one of the approach to learning and the method. When I started to feel, from my own experience, sceptical about the effectiveness of learning to dance tango in class and by chance found someone experienced with whom to discuss this and music, process I was told, influences product. For a long time now I have found myself in agreement.

In the vals, the idea was she initiated movement but in fact what you notice with this kind of embrace when you dance is how much the next step seems almost mapped out for you, by where your axis is, perhaps or just...I’m not sure in fact by what. Things are slowed down, are very relaxing. But very often the next step just happens and, with this partner at least it wasn’t at all clear to me who initiated even though I was in a way listening out for that.

Ambitious from the get-go at the end of this clip I think R had asked how she would get me to turn around her.  

These trials I suppose giving confidence she was able to take the traditional arm position of the other role and dance such that that felt nice too.

In the milonga track she initiates and after a minute or so we swap. I find this milonga quite hard, because of its rhythm. It turned out she did not know it.

Intercambio: this wasn’t planned, as these things almost never are in my experience.

A very experienced guy friend never swaps roles yet is full of fun and a lovely, courteous, aware dancer for me. That same evening he tried this same “no arms” embrace in something between swapped roles and intercambio and it was fun and surprising.

I like this for many reasons partly because I sense character even more this way.

This is such a safe embrace. That is why I think it is great especially for people learning to dance in the (traditional) guy's role. You can retreat if you are uncertain and the other person takes over. You can be more forward, initiate movement. There is besides much scope for jokes, play, the unexpected.

Maybe you'll try it!

Something alive

Walled garden, Crathes castle, Aberdeenshire, Summer 2016

A milonga is a precious thing.  It is something alive, an organism, an ecosystem.  

When it is healthy, its various parts work in harmony, its atmosphere makes it glow.  An example:  the cortina exists to clear the floor so that partners can see one another to invite by look for the next tanda. If dancers dance the cortina or stay on the floor during the cortina, they undermine its purpose  and prevent others from finding partners.  

Another example: invitation by look is the most efficient, discreet way to invite, allowing men to save face if rejected and to accord women true choice.  But if seating, lighting or room size is poor, or dancers do not respect this system all of this suddenly is broken.  

If seats are taken by others, partners struggle to find you, the calm flow of the evening breaks up as you hop from seat to seat leaving a scarf here, a bag somewhere else.  But seating appropriate for friends, single dancers and couples is like nourishment or oil to this system - it helps it to function.  A host in a well-attended milonga might show you to a suitable seat, knowing which is your spot, if a regular, or where might be best if you are new or a stranger.  This accords the host an authority which is useful when s/he has to manage situations of for instance, dangerous floorcraft.  And it tells everyone that this is your seat, your host with the benefit of their experience placed you there, with care. 

A milonga reminds me of a habitat.  In fact I suppose it is - it's the habitat of dancers. Healthy natural habitats can grow wild:

Allean Walk, Queens view, near Pitlochry, early summer 2016

They can be cultivated, as in the header photo of  Crathes castle:

Or they can grow in the most unpromising places:

Banks of wildflowers growing inside/below a huge roundabout/intersection in central Manchester, summer 2016

They can be connected to other, special things:

Kitchen, herb and flower garden, Pillars of Hercules, June
2015

Cultivated wilflowers in the strawberry field/outdoor cafe at Pillars. August 2014

     


They can develop under gentle supervision and benign neglect:

Wildflower meadow behind Doune Castle, Perthshire, July 2016

A healthy milonga can be completely killed off by its system becoming so broken it no longer functions well.  Or by noxious influence, falsehood, politics, disillusion, lack of faith.  It can become a mere carapace, essentially dead inside.  It can become mechanical.  

The health of a milonga depends on the conditions in which it grows and thrives.  If it is run by teachers who refuse to allow anyone but their own students, or it cultivates that sort of atmosphere, it will be stunted and never thrive. If it is run by teachers who teach moves without music (here are 50!),  teachers who give primacy to movements and technique over music (and nearly all do) then the milonga will produce unmusical dancers and these are not dancers.  There are endless problems that can beset a milonga: the venue size, shape, acoustics, temperature, the music, the sound, the floor quality, the tables and seating, the lighting and lines of sight and perhaps most importantly, the quality of the hosting. Variations in these will attract dancers accordingly.

I am puzzled if people (usually hosts) say there are too many milongas. New milongas come into being because existing milongas are failing to serve a need.  This is why only weak and insecure hosts try to see off, dissuade even kill off competition in all the many ways they do.  Strong, secure, confident hosts just concentrate on what they do well.

Searching for an equal improvisation

At a milonga a woman I know was interested in dancing the other role but never had.  I know how daunting that can feel.  An easier way in is to dance "more equally" I suppose is how I think of it - with more neutrality, or perhaps ambiguity over who is in which role. Besides whenever I have done this it has been a lot of fun.

How then to remove the notion of a dance role - how to reduce the idea of one person necessarily  “guiding” most or initiating movement?  How to allow more opportunity for the newer partner to explore that while still able to return fluidly to the role they already know, but perhaps make forays in to the other role?

For my own part,  I suspected the dance might change very much and was curious to see how.  Yet I have found no matter your intentions, if the arms take the position of a traditional embrace, the person in the guy role is more likely to “guide”.  The only person with whom this has not been the case is my (now) nine year old son and that is because despite that we take traditional positions they seem irrelevant to what actually happens.  With him I am able not to think about or be influenced by them and I am not sure he  knows which role the traditional arm positions signify.  

My friend and I opened the embrace and danced with only our forearms clasping. It was fun.  We did things I normally would not have the nerve to do - but they just happened.   I realised the person whose arms were on the outside was still the “guider”. Or, when one person’s arms were underneath, they became, naturally, more often the guider.  

On reflection, I realised the only way to remove this slight inclination to guide would be to dance in an embrace where there was no “hold” between the left hand of one person and the right of the other.  It would be an embrace as you embrace a friend  But such an embrace sustained over three minutes is very close.  The slight extension of the man’s left arm and the woman’s right in a traditional dance embrace gives a formality (and stability) to the kind of hug you would give your family or friends.  Still, I was curious how this kind of embrace would affect who “guides”. I wondered idly who I could do that with, not really imagining it would happen.

The very next week, I danced with S.  At first I was in the other role.  Then we swapped.  It was busy, we are both tall and she said she only wanted to “guide” one track.  Then I asked if we could try the way O and I had danced.  It was a lot of fun, again.  Still,  the Counting House in Edinburgh is a small room and the atmosphere of what’s “right” and what’s “wrong” can in some quarters be quite  oppressive.  I was aware in the milonga that, even if we were just dancing, out of the embrace we might look like we practising, which I don’t feel right in a milonga.

I also became aware of the thought that we were perhaps doing what I have seen couples doing -  “queering” the dance is how I have heard it described.  I have never been altogether sure what that means.  When I swap roles I do not feel I "queer the dance" but I did a bit with S.  I think it was to do with the open hold and the experimental nature of the dance. The "queering" was definitely something I felt within the context of others around us, from whom we were dancing differently in that they were mostly in the embrace.  I was enjoying the dance but the context I found confusing. Though I swap roles in all sorts of combinations and am tall I don’t usually feel I stick out, whereas I felt we did now. I said to my partner only that it was curious such a small thing as whose arms were on the outside of the hold or the underneath of the hold could suggest more the guiding role.

She said the only way to avoid that is to embrace would be to dance in the embrace I described above - each of us with both arms around the other. So we did that, changing role seamlessly and by feel again.  It was indeed more “equal” - who guided and when that changed was more intuitive and not determined by arm position. It was surprising and delightful, the most fun thing I have done in dance in a long time.   It was a sort of heightened listening, heightened response.

Although I realised it was more radical than the way we had danced the previous track, I was less concerned about context now, perhaps because we were back in the embrace. S is naturally musical, fluid, creative, spontaneous.  She told me that - like me, and my son - she learnt the other role without lessons.  I couldn’t help but notice some young guys from the Pannonica quartet watching us, attentively.  They had had a brief spot that night while one of them, Lucas, DJd for us.   They looked Argentinian.  I couldn’t tell what they were thinking.  With presumably much experience in the milongas, or perhaps just natural tact, they were suitably expressionless.

Lovely manners

It strikes me now, the good taste, the manners in the traditional, central milongas in Buenos Aires were generally much better than they are here. There was a kind of natural courtesy and respect that I think is aligned with the warmth of the people. I don’t mean the men - the behaviour of some of the men (and perhaps some of the women) can be something else. I mean some of the men can try it on in ways I have never seen in Europe. And some of the men can be harsh and very proud. And I know there are many problems in Buenos Aires, not least I sensed a deep lack of trust between people in society. But as a social group of men and women I liked the behaviour in the milongas.  

I mean this: People do not talk when you are trying to arrange a dance, fewer guys walk up to ask for dances directly and if they are local I think they are thought of not as unaware of how things are done, but as sharks, preying on women who will tolerate that behaviour. Sometimes I have heard tourists report the excuse "The men tell us they do it because we don't understand cabeceo/mirada " but I think that a ruse. All the tourist women I saw were perfectly au fait with how things are done. After ten minutes in one of those milongas, how could you be otherwise? And most men know it.

They are polite in other ways too. People do not block your view during the cortina, they don't bunch together in corners to invite. Some of the women may be heavily made up and dress in ways that apparently attract men that we might not in Europe, or not as we age, but I cannot for a moment imagine women prostituting themselves on a stage to get dances the way I have seen women of the same age do at the multi-day events in Eton, or - admittedly younger - at Corrientes in London. Also, people don't take your seat.

I know the traditions, the structure of the milonga, how the seating is arranged and how you are given a seat to keep all help with these things. But why don't we do things this way?

I know many of us would like it. I know from the numbers who keep going back to Buenos Aires, from those I hear in internet forums who in fact like to get and keep their seat, who want a table for their drinks, who object when people block their view in the cortina. I know things are moving that way. I see it when I see good dancers attending milongas that are well-set up, with music and sound that is better than average. I know it is just a question of time. I know we are trying when organisers publish rules to make people behave in ways they think are more like Buenos Aires milongas. But rules are not the way. There are for example no "lanes" in Buenos Aires, there is just a ronda, moving like river.

It is the social habit that make the Buenos Aires milongas formal yet relaxed, structured, yet warm.

“I’ll dance with anyone”

I hear some women say this. I hear it quite often.

There are many women who just want to dance, they don't really care with whom. But for me the interest is when someone wants specifically to dance with me - not not with just anyone who will have him or her, not someone who will just move them about.

Girls, did you know guys can often feel when the woman doesn't care that much who she's dancing with, that she just wants to be up on the floor, moving? On the other hand, when the dancers actively choose each other for any of the many reasons individuals do choose each other, nothing could feel clearer. 

Buenos Aires milongas: everything is different

What can you do when you are not dancing?  You can watch and listen! There is so much to see!

Everything is different:  how people arrive, how they are are greeted and seated; where singles, friends and couples sit, the birthday party groups; who changes their shoes and and where and who does not ; what people wear, how they have their hair and make up; what they do with their keys and bags; how they wait and watch; how they invite and accept; where and how they meet to dance; how they join the ronda; how they embrace; when they start dancing and how they dance;  how and when they greet their friends; the signals they make with their hands; when they chat; the music, the tropical or otros ritmos tandas; what is permissible and what is not; how men interact with locals and with tourists...and neither type by any means come in one model.  Even the ladies rooms are completely different there.  When I was becoming more familiar with the milongas and paying more active attention to the tracks, dancers and DJs asked and laughed and joked but did not seem to mind me writing down tracks on napkins and scraps of paper. There is lots to do if you are not dancing - never mind figuring out which of the many guys there you want to dance with, which probably takes up most women's time.