Choice

"A 'professional' telling two regular people how to feel about each other is actually perverted. And so leads to the perverted dance that is class tango."

From Interference.

“ I was still dancing steps in class trying to mesh the woman's step with the man's step. Whether someone looked at you was neither here nor there - and no-one did because they were all being directed.”

From Games and Players

Choice was never part of tango dance class. You were put with a partner, or you rotated partners or you just got whoever was left, like at games, in school. I went to a dance class once where you did have a kind of choice of partner.  You wandered about until you found someone, but that still isn't a real choice.  In a class, ultimately you have to pick someone.  Choosing who to embrace isn't part of it. But then in dance class, there is no real embrace.   Like automata, participants act out the mechanics of whatever the teacher directs and sets in motion.  In life, whether a kiss happens or not is in large part, down to the right moment.  A different atmosphere creeps upon the couple, like an enveloping mist, the rules change or perhaps they fall away, and there suddenly, you are.  But it is something private, something that grows between two people and is easily disturbed.  Thus it is with an embrace, in dance or in life. A kiss, an embrace, a mood between two people all have their own, delicate timing. These things cannot be forced, built by others or decided for you.  Why are so many gulled into thinking they are directable operations?  There is no "being directed" in dancing tango.  Where that happens in class, participants are just cogs, grinding badly with other cogs. There is nothing natural about that; it is just some sorry, distasteful, lurching simulacrum that has nothing to do with dance.

Freedom and the creative process

Those moments where good choice comes to fruition, where something glimmers then grows because the environment is healthy and natural, are by no means limited to interactions between people.  I heard a writer describing how, if all is well, the creative process is something that happens largely unconsciously.  Eventually, you come to write down what has been growing away, forming itself at the back of your mind and it almost writes itself.  But on one occasion he arrived at the point where he was supposed to get the writing done - perhaps there was a deadline for a book - and there was nothing there.  The unconscious creative process hadn't happened.  I had to jerry-build that section, he said, and it was hard work.

Distraction

I went to milongas early on, attracted by being able to choose who I danced with, when, and to what music.  But I was too shy to look at guys I might have liked to dance with. If someone had looked to me, with a notion of inviting me to dance, I wouldn't have noticed anyway.  I was already so absorbed with technique and dance homework. Those guys were too good, anyway, so I thought, to want me although this feeling changed as I discovered some of them did. 

Doubt

Doubt is a feeling familiar to many women in the milongas, especially beginner women. The same is true in life, if you ask them. Doubt, hesitation is more characteristic of women than of men. It goes with our biology. We have to choose, are careful. A hesitating man will never make a great hunter. It did not matter much - most people seemed to arrange dances with their friends. In Edinburgh, the environment was not conducive to an invitation by look, to dance. The light was dim and cortinas were not played at the end of a tanda, which causes all sorts of problems around invitation. Instead, I chatted, gradually met many people and thus became known and danced. Sometimes, in my first year, I would beg for tango miles. It is embarrassing to think about it now, but if you are not brought up in a good environment and, as happens in many places, you are left to sink or swim, you won't know what's what and you will just try to find your own way. No wonder people choose the supposed security of class compared to stumbling about on their own.

Control

But in class one was told who to embrace - sometimes forcefully: Come on, embrace him!, I was ordered, my hand pushed around the man's shoulders, my chest shoved against his, as though we were the filling on some abhorrent sandwich made by the teacher's hands.  Come on! -  no matter that I had seen how my 'partner' liked to rove his hands all over young women, or smelt or was just Eugh! I remember talking to a guy about how dance class could be dreadful because having to rotate partners, there was no free choice. He said: "Oh, I don't find that. Few girls are unembraceable." In that moment I realised that girls don’t necessarily feel the same way about guys.  Yet this week, a man, a non-dancer, someone for whom nuance is important, made the point: 

I think men are not all the same...