Rabbit in the headlights

This piece might more literally have been titled "The effect of the dance class partner issue"

The problem with class is not just the whole contort-yourself-and-memorise aspect, the whole dance-is-thought rather than connection, music and movement.

Here’s why: when you have lived quite a long time or been on a scene a long time, of the many things you experience not all are honeysuckle and roses. When I was a few years new to tango I remember a teacher telling me that people you know in a community do die, long before I experienced it. Then you yourself witness people becoming ill. Some die. Many leave.

Alongside many moments of happiness and joy you also observe, or experience, people treated badly, cry, be traumatised by unkindness or indifference. A surprising number of people can act in awful ways and for those of us who are constitutionally deeply affected by our experiences, this is, trauma is the word.

At a recent class, harm was there, simpering, gushing, reeling everyone in. There was also a woman who I knew to be grossly, unforgivably tactless. Lastly, there was someone who had been a friend but had turned hectoring, eventually insisting I change all my values and preferences regarding going out, dancing, partners music. I tolerated this for far too long on the basis that they must think they were trying to be helpful. I tried explaining that I had my way and they had theirs but that I had much more experience in the world of the milongas and knew very well what I liked and particularly what I didn’t. When they began to demand I do what they said and became blatantly offensive I installed a figurative but permanent barrier between us as I do in all such cases. In the case of the harm, they just refused to accept the barrier, actually, literal barriers - many of them digital - which is what caused all the damage.

So the concern when you enter a room with history like that is largely the dancer partner issue. I had brought this up with another teacher whose class I had attended last year and been reassured and relieved by his response about choice and respecting limits. In that class, I knew almost no-one. There were no relational shipwrecks, no sharks I was aware of, the historical dangers were much less.

At this other, recent event, I knew, at least vaguely, most people. The first workshop hadn't require partners but I was interested enough in the teacher to be curious about the second, which did. I asked the organiser how that was going to work. The word “wars” somehow came up on my side by way of explanation.

I am regularly flabbergasted by how often people treat others as means to an end. With the Stalker, though I did not recognize it at the time, there were clues all along that our relationship was actually a relationships at all just a means to their own vaulting ambition. Twenty-first century kids might try to respin the exploitation of another as part of their own journey to "personal growth" but it isn't something that can every be justified.

A class partner seems to be seen by most as a mere vehicle for you both to learn something as opposed to another human being whom you value and with whom you have a meaningful interaction. We have understandably transactional relationships with people we pay or people of whom we ask the time or directions, or for information and are suitably grateful. This is not the relationship with a class partner because you need this person and you are going to bond with this person, however temporarily over something you consider valuable, like a learning experience. If you are in any doubt as to the value of it, recall that you have paid for it! But the relationship with the partner isn’t, or shouldn't be merely transactional. Likely we should be minimising those anyway, or at the very least be aware of the nature of our relationships with others.

“I’m sure you don’t have wars”, they said, lightly.

“Many!” I replied, only partly tongue in cheek. There was no point pretending, Some of us are known to be Knox-like, albeit quieter. They seemed surprised, but acted well.

“Cold wars”, I modified, then worried it sounded too nuclear.

They asked who I was happy to partner and after, pragmatically but on my part uncomfortably going through various names and darting off to speak with people, came up with one. This was generous. One doesn’t want to be such trouble. One also doesn't want to be foisted on someone unwilling either so I checked with the partner in question if she was happy with that.

In practise, after every exercise we in fact changed partner. This may not be the case for most people but for some of us it is frankly disturbing and not just because of being left with people you actively will not partner. Experience teaches you just don’t know who you are going to get. For me this really isn’t so much about how they dance, more about how they are as people. But then for me how you dance is all about how you are as a person or, if you prefer, how you are as a person is entirely expressed in your dance. It can be the great joy, that fast and wordless understanding of another being.

This is a why a practica is potentially so much better for learning - you choose to connect with someone compatible with the mutual agreement to try and learn something. The downside is most people use practicas to dance socially, there isn't enough of a culture that values mutual assistance or knows how to initiate it and you need two people who either can learn from each other or one is willing to help the other. None of this is easy to find, on top of which our culture is now such that unless it is done under the "volunteering" banner, helping someone freely has a become an almost bizarre and unnatural concept.

At the very first change of partner I got someone I can remember starting to dance some years after me. They began with a lecture on how to engage in the exercise. I felt a combination of inadequacy but more annoyance which I must have hidden because they continued unperturbed then behaved with such indifference during the actual movements that I just felt depressed.

I suppose one strategy in an environment like that is, at the beginning of each exercise, to proactively rush to find the kindest people or those you find most tolerable to partner but when you are already so overcome with doubts, the other option is to hang back with dread and misgiving, clutching the wall and see who is left. It was the tactless one so I went, unnecessarily, to the loo.

A long-standing teacher in the room, present as an attendee, seemed to have noticed. Was everything OK? I could have just decided to sit that one out instead of hiding in the loo, which recalled my early dance-class days when women would develop weak bladders as soon as a guy they did not want to partner came round. It was the frequence and awkwardness of these moments that eventually did for my attendance at class. But here I was again ten years later taking refuge in the toilet. This time I did sit out the rest of the exercise before spontaneously joining the kind teacher-attendee with their partner.

By this stage this world in miniature was starting to feel crushing. I heard what was said in the explanations, I admired how the demonstration of connection or its absence was so visible in tiny changes of movement, I could see the arc of the lesson and its relation to the theme but in practice, with all this other stuff to do with people going on, engaging with the content of the lesson was hard. Each change of partner was like being in a test with a blank page and next to no memory of the question, of what we were supposed to do. I froze.

Thereafter I partnered two other teachers and the main teacher and did learn interesting things, began to feel a little less under siege. I also partnered a friendly beginner, had fun and played around. But, emotionally, one of these workshops was more than enough.