How I learnt to dance both roles V: milongas and practicas

Now I felt relieved in all senses.  I was on my own but I had some experience of dancing tango.  I was following my instincts about how to learn though at the time I had no idea how much that was a good thing.  Things were starting to make sense - not the dance moves specifically but about what did and didn't work as a learning process.  Learning as the woman was largely about trust, being able to trust guys, to let go, to know which guys to trust.  The classes and the twice or three times a week two hour round trip to get to the classes, the practica and the milonga had been expensive too. I am glad I don’t have that energy or motivation any more.  This was also the year I met someone who told me there was an easier, more natural and more enjoyable way to learn to dance than in class.  The basic idea:  that class is hard but dance is easy and the two are not compatible, already made sense.  But I didn't realise at first how pernicious class is.  From there, and from a natural inclination, a lot of my thoughts around freedom and control more generally developed.

So now there was 'just' the milonga and practicas.  From there I learned by walking in the milonga with kind and generous women. Because I had already danced as the women for about two years I knew what felt nice and what didn't and I already knew the music.  Knowing the music is essential for dancing as the guy. It's that simple - if you don't know the music you can't dance it, at least not well, not well enough. 

 Gradually, much more slowly than the overwhelming 'one new move a week' that guys pay for in class, things started to happen.  I could manage corners of the room in the ronda.  I could manage when a guy in front of me didn't move.  I was getting better at keeping my partner safe.  It could never be said that I have a wide 'repertoire', but the partners I dance with don't look for that.  I was advantaged in that I already knew from dancing as the woman that it wasn't necessarily moves that made a guy feel nice, or at least it wasn't extravagance.  Often it was the quiet guys or the guys who didn't look as if they were doing much  who felt best.

Giros came by themselves, a guy taught me the cross in a practica before a milonga. I didn't get it at the time and then weeks or maybe months later it just sort of arrived by itself.  In a practica I asked a guy I used to dance with a lot in both roles to show me how to do ochos.  But I had to keep interrupting the flow of dance to think about them and he didn't seem to care that I didn't have them so I just left them out and never really felt the lack. Of the hundreds of people I've danced with, only one woman, a young flashy type from BsAs who liked dancing in the Sunderland club, ever complained I didn't lead ochos and that was in my first couple of years in the guiding role. Most people I dance with don't seem to notice or if they do, don't seem to care.  My favourite UK dancer, a superb dancer, said the same thing only a few weeks ago.  And with all that comes confidence which is half of it really. 

As I gained experience and confidence I started to dance more in swapped roles in the milonga for those reasons and because the guys I wanted to dance with (who also want to dance with me) were dwindling in number. Eventually, I (generally) stuck with that role because I realised women were, in general, better dancers than men. A notable exception to this are the queer tango dancers I met from Paris. It’s a growing thing, with women in Europe. The people who most attract me for dance now are those who dance both roles, a few guys, with - usually - many years experience and one or two younger guys with a bit less experience. And new people. I especially like dancing with new guys, particularly young guys, who are happy to dance in the woman’s role. They tend to be more open-minded, slighter and easier to move. 

Recently, I just really wanted to know how to do ochos. I went to a practica and saw a guy I know slightly. He could dance both roles and asked him to show me. He said sure. I asked him to show me another move I wanted to learn. I call it the space invader move where a guy steps into the woman's space and either her foot or her leg gets moved away. Someone told me afterwards they are sacadas but they sure aren't like sacadas the way I saw them taught in class. Maybe they're social sacadas. I liked that when guys did them with me. That’s why I wanted to learn them.

He showed me that too, gave me some time to practice with him. While it was tricky for the first ten minutes, I felt I got them. Later in the evening he very kindly invited me to practice them again in the milonga. I was very grateful.   That same night I danced with an experienced guy with him in the woman's role. He couldn't believe I'd learnt those moves that night. But there's nothing special about me. Colin was the same, he danced amazingly after a few hours. It's simply the effect of learning in a very different way. 

I practised them again with another experienced guy I knew in a practica. The following week in the same pre-milonga practica, when I needed a reminder of the feeling I asked another guy. I hadn’t seen him before nor seen him dance but figured I would also find out how he danced from the experience. He too, kindly agreed.  I said before there is a lot of goodwill in the milongas if we look for it and are open to it.

How I learnt to dance both roles IV: Milongas as the girl, classes as the guy

I started going to the milongas instead to dance as the woman and I danced a lot.  But class leaves you with the psychological legacy that you will forever be prone to bad habits, that you have to work on in class.  It's a business strategy that preys on the vulnerability of beginners and makes people insecure and dependent.  I got so cross once seeing a teacher promote this harmful view, that I wrote Trust me, you need me. 

I still didn't feel I could be good enough.  Now that I didn't do dance class as much as the woman, at the end of a dance I used to ask guys in the milonga if they could give me any pointers as to how to improve but guy after guy said the same thing:  You dance fine.  Just keep dancing.  After a long time, I began to trust in that. I didn't realise though the value of hearing that in the real conditions of the social dance.

Early on I became curious about how different the psychology was when I swapped roles, especially when I had occasionally tried it in the milonga. The different psychology in the dance, but also when deciding who to invite or, sometimes wonderfully, sometimes scarily: being invited to invite!

Ever trusting in authority, not heeding the life lessons I had just learned I went back to the same teachers whose classes I had been to most recently in the woman's role, but now in the guy's role and as a beginner.  It didn't work out at all.  In the first classes I tried on the guy’s side the men simply expected me to follow and at that time there wasn’t as much support from the teachers as there is today. Now some teachers make it clear that if the woman wants to dance in the guy’s role, they shouldn’t be pressurised to dance in the traditional woman’s role. 

I changed class again.  It was horrific - much worse than when on the woman’s side of the class.  There was so much information about the moves and how to contort your body - it was all about thinking - and it was high pressure again.  And of course you had all the responsibility of guiding.  Plus it was a new move each week.  The teacher was a fun, laid back Argentinian but I could feel how stressed the guys were next to me.  Yet there was this sense that no-one could say anything about how hard it was, a very bottled-up, male feeling. The difficulty of what we had to do combined with this unspoken sense of pressure among the guys was so intolerable that I left that too after just a few lessons. 

How I learnt to dance both roles III: Classes

 I first had the idea about dancing in the guy’s role probably late in 2012.  I was in my usual class, there weren't enough guys to dance with, another girl and I had been practising our ochos dutifully for ages against a wall.  I was thoroughly bored.  The teacher talked a lot and demonstrated a lot and there was hardly any time to dance anyway, never mind that there weren't enough men.  So I said to the other girl: let's just try dancing together.  She was worried, I remember.  She didn't like stepping out of line.  That fear was justified - the teacher didn’t like that at all. It was scary, so had been the pep talk about 'loyalty' to one's teachers, so I changed class. If anything it was that talk that made try lots of other teachers.

Once or twice I tried leading in a class in another city. I remember on one occasion there was a huge imbalance of men and women in a workshop with visiting teachers for which we had paid a lot.  I could tell it was going to be swap roles or risk sitting out for most of the time.  It was a milonga class and the teacher was frustrated at how the men were not getting the rhythm.  He got everyone to just walk around the room in a rhythm which was not difficult; so later I teamed up with another woman but she was evidently disgusted.  I know now she has that kind of personality, but I didn't then.  Still, it was enough to put me off ‘leading’, as it was called for a couple of years.  The harm we can do to one another with a look or a remark...  Still, it taught me to be careful about who I chose to invite, and to pick kind-looking, compatible women. In that, it was a valuable lesson. 

My new teachers were light-hearted, fun and experienced in what they did.  One was a born entertainer.  They complemented one another.  I attended the classes in the woman's role. The classes felt more relaxed; the teacher seemed to play more variety of tracks, especially in the practica and early on I began to love the music.  There were more men now and I found that I could dance just by ‘following’ what the guy did.  That wasn't what we were supposed to do but meshing what his step was supposed to be with my female version of the same step was always complicated and fraught.   

If I ignored that and just 'followed', in class, I was happy enough for perhaps over a year.  There were two problems though. If I just followed the guy and he hadn't got his step right he could blame me which was never fun especially as I couldn't use the defence "I'm following you!" because in class terms, since I was "just" intuiting my move from his, I was skiving off my duty to work at my dance and do my role properly. So most of the time I accepted the criticism dumbly and felt confused and sad.   We also had to rotate partners. There were at least a couple of regular guys whose arms, after a while, I just couldn’t bear to have around me.  But the teacher would insist "Embrace him", properly! so I would dash off regularly to the loo when the rotation came round to those guys.  It wasn't subtle.

There were other problems: the partner often didn’t think he was ‘getting’ what he was supposed to do or the teacher said he wasn’t getting it. To help with this and to get out of being blamed for not following, I started to try figuring out the guy’s role, mentally, and literally back to front (as I was still on the ‘girl’s side’ of the room).  This was taxing. I did it to help the guys when they got stuck so that we could both get dancing.  

Soon I realised how insane it was that I was paying to help guys figure out what to do in class to avoid being blamed for 'not following'. I was paying to be a prop to guys I couldn't bear to have near me.  I realised too, in the milonga that if I relaxed with nice guys and just went with it I had a good time. But for quite a long time that was hard with all the class instructions replaying in my head of all the things that I supposedly did wrong and should work on. The two things seemed imcompatible - how could you relax in the milonga when you were so inadequate in class there was a list as long as your arm of how every inch of your body was supposed, according to the teacher, to be in some fractionally different position. 

How I learnt to dance both roles II: milongas in the beginning

Part I

I started dancing as the woman in a class but went to milongas right from the beginning, as soon as I heard there was such a thing as social dancing in Argentine tango.  I remember some of us went to milongas in Glasgow with my first teachers for which I will always be grateful.  Milongas were always exciting even if things didn't always go as you hoped and in some places they could be downright scary.  

I kept going to class because I had already been infected with this idea that you have to keep working at your dance in class to be a proper or better dancer in the milonga.  And I wanted to dance as much as possible.  One day I danced 15 days in a row, between classes, practicas and milongas and the nearest of these was half an hour away. Like many people at the start, I had more than got the bug. 

I remember going to practica when I had only been dancing for about a month and asking the teacher if I could join. The teacher was a harsh type, whose dancing I realised later was embarrassingly grotesque.  They said I needed more experience in class before I could attend the practica.  I see now what a harmful thing that was.  The message was "You're not good enough".  That rule was later dropped.  Later still that practica folded when a friendlier place opened, with more community spirit. 

It took me at least months to go to a milonga on my own.  I didn't ask people I met in the milonga to show me things. I don’t think I thought about it. You get so brainwashed by class you think you can only learn from teachers. Looking back, the milongas felt intimidating, both when I started dancing in the woman's role and then later too, when I danced more in the guy's role, especially as I went alone.  I often made myself go. Sometimes I had a terrible time; sometimes it was great.  It was a different sort of intimidation as the guy though.  It was more a sense of: was it going to be good enough for the girl?  The milongas can be intimidating if you are alone and new and you don't know anyone.  Then the woman learns she is supposed to wait to be invited, so she is in a passive role which can become depressing, especially when combined with the other factors.  I didn't have the confidence to look to guys for dances, never mind good dancers.  

I think the intimidation as the girl, in the beginning, also came a lot from the elite group in the milonga at the time, who sat together in a corner, danced together.  Some of the people in this group even said to me, after two or three years when I'd earned the right to speak to them, that it was exactly about that:  earning the right to dance with better dancers.  That's when I wrote Notoriously Unfriendly.  Looking back, it's amazing I survived that environment.  They would say something like "That proves you were tough enough for tango" which is just not how things are or should be.  Those are the kinds of attitudes for which Argentine tango has a bad reputation. As so often happens with controlling types, the unsuitable people get into power, and these controlled local milongas.  Lots of experienced dancers gradually stopped going and on the few occasions I went over the next three years, the milongas had a transient population of mostly new people and students.  But December 2015 is probably around the time I began dancing the man's role regularly so when I did dance it was often in other places.  

Codes and cues

Clear lines of sight at the last milonga I attended; Glasgow, Oct 2019

I sent The Erring Eye to a non-dancing friend.

"It was perfectly clear that some kind of awful experience was underway, but I had no idea quite what it was - even after finishing the piece.  Some bloke spurned a dance with the sort of all but imperceptible Sotheby's gesture which then panicked you into dancing with someone half as tall as you?"

This was almost spot on so I was puzzled about "no idea".  Maybe it was because the piece was written for a dancing readership who understand a lot of the milonga context that isn't explicitly mentioned.

Told bare, it sounded like a storm in teacup. But being strung out from culture shock, fatigue, heat and homesickness was taking its toll.   And perhaps the piece does not convey the hothouse atmosphere of the milonga, the intensity, the focus beneath the seemingly relaxed atmosphere and the social behaviour.  The consequences of small mistakes seem huge in that world behind the velvet curtain.  Tango can be vampiric.  It has sucked people over to Buenos Aires,  giving up lives, partners, families; sucked them dry and spat them out, hollow-eyed. 

All the senses are in play in the milonga.  We are, after all, animals.  There is only a veneer of civilization in the milongas of Buenos Aires, but it is a very cultivated veneer.  Sight is the sense used for making dance arrangements.  Inside the milonga everyone sees everything.  In this environment there is a whole set of non-verbal accepted cues and behaviours.  It is because the milonga is such a visual place that these work. In 'The Erring Eye' nearly everything about the traditional codes was absent.  

First among these codes, women can't explicitly invite men in traditional Buenos Aires milongas.  It is unthinkable. I once saw a European female tourist try to dance in the man's role with another woman mid-evening in El Beso club when it was packed on a traditional night.  A fight nearly broke out.  You have to stick to the codes in the traditional places.  These two were told in no uncertain terms but they continued and things didn't go well at all.  On another night around 3AM, when a different traditional milonga was emptying and only after my local woman friend had got permission from the easy-going host, I danced in the guy's role with her and even then got a shocked and disapproving look from the guy next to me in the ronda, the anti-clockwise movement of couples around the floor.  

What can a woman do?  She can send a "mirada", a noun peculiar to women which means to suggest, by look, that she may be available for dance. "Mirar" - not gender-specific - is "to look".  The man then invites, also by look: "un cabeceo (n) / cabecear (v)". This is a term specific to males unless in e.g. Europe or less traditional milongas, a woman dances in a man's role.  Cabeza means "head" so he might nod his head down in a question, or raise an eyebrow or smile.  The woman then accepts with a nod or smile or looks away, so there is no loss of face which is a public, not a private problem.  

Only once she has accepted does he get up and come over to her.  Only when she's certain he means her and not, say the woman behind her, does she get up.  Otherwise, she risks being called "toast", too keen, popping up too early.

The difference between a look that signifies "I am available to dance" and "I am inviting you" is subtle, fractional even, yet absolutely distinct.  

The non-verbal invitation is a practical system that has evolved over time.  It fulfils two functions.  It allows for a woman's refusal probably without anyone else noticing.  This is especially important in a macho culture.  It is also very different to Britain in the 1950s where a guy might walk up and potentially risk the walk of shame, alone, back to his seat or the woman would feel obliged to accept his direct invitation.  

This practice of walking up or shudder-inducing hand-proferring, as an invitation, is seen as gauche in many milongas and in some is explicitly or implicitly not tolerated.  The best enforcers of this code are women themselves. Beginners tend to be keen to dance so the places where you tend not to find the male hand-offer are where there is a level of milonga experience and competence among both sexes. 

The non-verbal invitation's other function is speed and efficiency.  To understand that we will backtrack a little to the end of a tanda (three or four tracks, depending on the music, danced by the same couple), whereupon the guy escorts the woman back to her seat.  This fulfils two purposes:  the guy shows his care and respect for the girl and the girl has a chance to get her bearings.  

Often the woman dances with her eyes closed.  Especially if the dance has been very good when the woman opens her eyes and returns to reality, it is quite common for her to have no idea where she is in relation to her seat.  Typically the guy realises this in seconds and it is a great compliment.  This practice of escorting women is absolutely typical in a traditional Buenos Aires milonga and in many milongas there because that respect for women is part of the culture.  In Europe I have only seen it in better milongas or among individual men.  It happens more in the south of Europe than in the north.  Being left on the dance floor after a dance, especially after a good dance is a horrible feeling.  "Like dumping a girl on her own after a night out," said a friend.     

The man then returns to his seat.  Some non-tango, interim music called the cortina (curtain) plays for a couple of minutes while this is going on, 

In good milongas, everyone at this point is seated. It is both good manners and essential for the success of the next stage.  There is then a second or two of wonderful, anticipatory silence when you can hear a pin drop - and then the next track begins.  In those first few seconds of the new track, non-verbal, visual arrangements to dance are made in seconds across significant distances, depending on the experience of those involved.  If people stand, it blocks the line of sight.  That is why good venues, and there are many outstanding venues in Buenos Aires, are rooms with plain lines of sight and no obstruction.  If a guy had to chase a woman round the room to invite her he could lose half the track and a couple usually wants to dance the full tanda together.   That is the second reason dances are arranged visually and why they are efficient.
 

Have I got the gist? Or is it more serious, and in fact much closer to sexual assault?

He had and it wasn't sexual assault but in Buenos Aires the inkling of something potentially dangerous, or more dangerous than in Europe is never too far away.  In Buenos Aires if you leave a milonga with a guy "for a coffee" it is well known to mean one thing so you had better know what that is.  The Argentines are up-front about these things.  They have long had the telos, the albergues transitorios or dedicated "love hotels".

But doesn't the great game between men and women have that sense of if not danger then something uncertain, something hard to put into words?  Girls used to grow up with that idea of uncertainty regarding men, pulling petals off daisies as they chanted a rhyme.  No doubt men did and do too even if they don't resort to mutilating flowers.  Of course that game and uncertainty can go too far.

On the whole, in those short three weeks, I found Argentine men tactful.  No doubt, they also knew how to spot and try to exploit a sexual opportunity better than any nationality I have ever come across, or possibly they are on a par with the Italians.  There are strong historical links between Argentina and Italy.  Many immigrants were from there.  The porteño (Buenos Aires) accent sounds like a toned down, Italian form of Spanish.  Argentine men, especially men from Buenos Aires are known in other Latin American countries as the players of that continent. But if you were clear about your boundaries they could back off and sometimes hold no grudge.   In dance it was different.  If you refused a guy, that was it, he never asked twice. Almost never.  

So the men would escort you off the floor, stand aside when you passed, show formal respect of the highest order, a respect largely vanished in Europe in the name of equality; but they would do so with, often, a glint in their eye.

Before I went, someone warned me:  "They're not like the men here.  They're wolves."  In Buenos Aires, give a guy an inch, by which I mean, let him keep hold of your hands between tracks - and he might try to take that inch, with teeth.   He is very possibly disreputable.  But there are always exceptions.