Hand in hand

By Bart

Dancing tango is famously "difficult".  Neophytes often ask what the “steps” are.  Some common figures are danced but most of those thousands enjoying the dance socially do not use many.

Regular readers of this blog will know that for years I have balked at the term “guy’s role” (because of women, myself included, dancing regularly, even mostly, in that role) and also against the term “leader” for the way it diminishes that role and the perspective it casts on the other. “The traditional guy’s role” which I used before is just a mouthful. I’m going with the guy / the guy’s role here. No offense intended, it's just shorthand.

So guys use perhaps three moves, socially: the cross, the giro, the ocho. A few others might add the ocho cortado, perhaps a sacada. Some might include the volcada, or the colgada, which latter in particular I admit to enjoying, guiltily. There are others, particularly contrived, you might see on the social floor the barrida, the mordida (sandwich), the gancho, or just plain rough, not to mention dangerous, like the voleo. That’s probably about it in terms of moves you’ll see in most milongas. Those last four form the true banner of the class style dancer. I find them among the ugliest moves and I have usually inwardly cringed any time I made the mistake of dancing with a guy who extracts them gleefully from his tango toolbox.  If that's your thing, there are exceptions to every rule and tango is nothing if not about personal preference and perspective. Some people love those moves.

Recently, I met a curiously reluctant porteño, who apparently knows a lot about the lunfardo in tango lyrics.  He is not a dancer, calling us, fascinatingly, that "corrupt army" and has only once been inside a milonga. I asked him how many steps he thought there were in the dance. Eight, he replied. Why eight? I asked perplexed, but with a dawning dread. He mentioned a workshop and described that travesty of social dancing: the “8 step basic”.

If a new guy is asking about steps I sometimes ask him: What steps do you see here in the ronda?

At this point he is understandably a bit confused. So I might prompt him: Are the guys jumping?

He will say, no, they are walking.

And in which direction are they walking?

Forward, he will reply.

So that’s your first step.

From there he notes that there might be a sidestep (or a half step if it’s busy) each way and a (very small) backwards step. So, there are your four steps. No matter which way you face or what figure you are doing, you will be doing one of those four. The purpose of this conversation is not to come to some definitive answer about steps, merely to highlight, to those who believe that tango must be made up of complex steps, the essential physical simplicity of the dance at its core.  There are questions of shared axis and balance and how to not step on each other's feet and so on, but these are sideshows.

It's a great pleasure to dance with this experienced dancer and it's interesting that most of what he does is walking, forward. Actually, his first four steps I notice just now are exactly those four - side right, back, side left and forward.  Naming them actually over-complicates things.  What he does is (as far as I know) without thinking and extremely simple.  He then takes about 12 steps forward before he runs out of room and does simple, small variations of side, back, forward steps.  This guy has danced for eleven or twelve years and actually has a more extensive repertoire of moves than most.  On this occasion he chooses to use almost none of them, because they aren't necessary.  Other times, he does, but carefully and it's fun.  Here, because he's calm and not flustered or trying to rush around the ronda and do stuff, when something small and unexpected happens he sees the humour in it, accepts it, manages it and moves on. He's halfway through the song before he even does half an ocho.  He's with the music always.  That's a good dancer.  

Faced with embracing a stranger, even connecting with them in an open hold, many people, northern Europeans and north Americans especially, will feel uncomfortable. If you have told yourself you are doing this for pleasure, in, say, a tango class, or even a práctica, the instinct there is often to exaggerate the walk, or the step, to “do” it and to “finish” it, essentially to over-focus on it as though it were work. They will take a clear and distinct step. This person is thinking and doing, not listening and sensing. You can almost hear the cogs whirring. On the other hand, the dancer’s step, especially at the end of a musical phrase can be long and slow, perhaps never quite finishing before merging in to the next phrase, allowing possibilities, extending the moment. This is a grey, perhaps controversial area and depends on the music and on the dancer's own style.  My point is that some people’s whole thinking focus is “the step” even when it’s just walking.  The awareness is not on the partner and the music and so the dance feels mechanical, rote-like, pattern-like, not musical and not actually, a dance at all, but rather mere movement.

Another common symptom of fear in the new guy is he wants to run away in the ronda, get round it, go somewhere, do something, including learning a new step. He can’t be still, enjoy a pause, enjoy the moment. He finds it uncomfortable.  

A few guys are fine with this from the beginning but they are unusual and often not British. I remember being surprised to be asked directly to dance in La Viruta by a very young Argentinian.  I guessed,  correctly as it turned out, he was a new dancer.  Walk-up requests from guys are invariably turned down here but we often indulge the young and I agreed. He was not yet a good dancer, but in his embrace, to my great surprise, I encountered something precioso that I had only found in a much older dancer, a man whose dance experience probably nearly equalled this young man's age.

Sometimes the new guy doesn’t step with you, to the music, even when you’re guiding them. I am apparently a very light lead and admittedly this can be made easier for them by dancing with one of the experienced guys who are stronger and clearer.

New guys can not infrequently tense right up and hurt my arm and shoulder, especially if they insist on or really want to lead, which can be a warning sign. Both the tensing and the ignoring the music are, like the focus on stepping, problems of listening - to the music and to the partner and could well be borne of a stressed state.  Imagine two stressed newcomers dancing together - what a recipe for disaster but not uncommon in class.

I danced with a  new guy who repeatedly tried to move without making sure I was on the right foot.  This is the simplest of simple things to notice and change.  It is not an unusual problem, but it's something most people pick up instinctively, once you do it with them.  It's a clear sign you're not "listening" physically, to your partner, but just doing our own thing. 

 

For years I tried dancing with these new guys, guiding them, being guided by them, trying, wordlessly, to help them find their way, feeling uncomfortable but without saying anything. The idea that had been conveyed to me by someone more experienced was that just dancing with new dancers would be enough to help them get it. I did that and it really didn’t, or not, I felt, enough. It does tend to work with women, especially younger ones but often not with guys and the older or heavier the guy, or the more he has a fixed mindset, the less it tends to work.

I tried swapping roles and showed them whatever the issue was simply by doing to them what they were doing to me.  Often that was enough, but not always. Eventually I had enough of this. My body, my discomfort, my decisions.  You might ask why I do it at all. Why not just dance with experienced dancers?  a) There are not enough good guy dancers b) I want to bring up good guy dancers who, ideally, I can then dance with! 

For some time now, probably even before the pandemic, if it’s like that, I take them by the hand and walk with them, hand in hand, round the ronda until their arm loosens up and becomes relaxed and natural. It’s a trade-off: will they feel uncomfortable walking like that while others are dancing? But this is a práctica and so far it’s worked. It is pretty amazing that it works, considering that, in the UK, walking hand in hand is something you probably do publicly with someone only when you're thinking of sleeping with them, or you already have.  I think it has a lot to do with trust and norms change depending on context and environment.  In Buenos Aires Janis pointed out to me it's different: friends, especially women, commonly walk hand in hand or arm in arm.  

So we just walk together like that, hand in hand, side by side, super relaxed until they tune in, walking with the music, pausing when there’s a pause, not trampling on it, as it was once memorably put to me. How long does this take? A matter of minutes; usually just a track or two. Then, quite simply, they feel the difference: when they were tense and when they were not; what it is to trample the music and what it is to hear it and respect it and be part of it. And actually there still is no need for words.  And then we can try dancing.