Contempt

Djgriffin7, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Might they think 'contempt' is a bit strong?, I wondered, after the last piece. Yet only the day before I had been chatting to someone who said how unpleasant it was dancing in London.  I agreed.  Egotistical, arrogant, rude, impersonal is more than sufficient to convey the idea.  I remember one basement práctica where I had felt transparent, invisible.  I think it might have been with reference to London that he told me that he invited a woman to dance only for her to look him up and down, sneer at his shoes and spit out, 'No, you don't have the right kind of shoes'. I clarified and yes she actually said that. 

But it wasn't just there.  The guy was a confident dancer, musical, fun, not fancy. Even when he sat with tango champion friends, women would sometimes still treat him with contempt.  

Yet the same guy talked to me about the  "tango community" worldwide. Inasmuch as people attending milongas make community, I guess. He was generous spirited. 

The tango elite

 

rodimuspower

Elite has always had connotations of male power, vigour, and superiority: the elite guard, elite condoms perpetuate the idea. Search for 'elite' these days and the images that come up are of transformer type creatures, non-human, powerful, un-relatable, lacking personality because, well, they are not persons.  They are aggressive-looking and very well defended. 

So it is ironic to see a comment that tango attracts a kind of elite person. That wasn't the word they used. No, they said the kind "ready for" tango, having "a certain maturity" & experience who has "loved and lost" and experienced the melancholy and betrayal heard in the plangency of the bandoneon? 

Connection through dancing tango is such a profound , embodied and human experience that it is hard to see the parallels with what is meant by elite in popular culture today.

This portrays tango dancers as "special", in a world apart, who have made it, even if only through experience. In the microcosm of the milonga there is at least as much in the way of every unkind and awful thing that happens in the world outside.  There is no elite.  There is just the same kind of human behaviours as everywhere else.

I am now into my thirteenth year in the milongas and in that time I have seen men lecture women, minor and major harassment of both sexes, manipulation, lies, cruelty, bad manners, a friend mentioned  "the nastiest things being said about other people".  I have regularly seen dangerous and selfish dancing including by many teachers. There have been infidelities, broken engagements, divorce, power politics by teachers and organizers, organisations and groups that claim to be for the community without every holding elections, snubs, cutting out, cutting in for that matter, obsessive control and extraordinary acts of revenge.

Then there is common or garden unkindness, selfishness, crassness, pushiness, and the things the milongas are famous for: snobbery, arrogance, vanity, ego and contempt. 

And consider, these, in the UK, are largely the middle classes: academics, artists, professionals, therapists - the irony, or perhaps they are there for the need.

Sure, there are instances of kindness, good manners, volunteering time to help out and  occasional generosity. The milongas are, on the whole, places I like to spend time, listen to the music, watch the dancing and the miniatures dramas of human behaviour play out, where I regularly have interesting chat and occasionally some great dances. But in no way does all this balance out to make tango dancers some kind of elite. Quite the contrary. 

When I have a conversations about porteños with other latin people, they are invariably mocked and  disparaged for arrogance and untrustworthiness. Sometimes I see photographs of Argentinian dance teachers where it is all there: immaculately dressed but with a steely, cold haughtiness.  That seeps into the milongas.  Not all of them and not all the time.  But in a place where invitation is by look - the look says everything.

Dancing tango can be a special experience. But let's not kid ourselves. There is no rarefied elite that dances tango.  We are just as morally bankrupt and corrupt as everyone else. And the people bandying around the word "community" generally have an interest in people believing that is what they are part of. It is an easy sell, if not a true one.

There are just groups of very different people who get together in loose agglomerations, mostly looking for dance and connection, sometimes accompanied with simpering and self-congratulation when it all works out and sometimes with tears, upset when it doesn't. But for the most part, in the milongas, people live out their enjoyment, friendships, loneliness or insecurities, quietly.

Shallow seas

 

I saw this reshared by a friend on their social media.  Part 1 was a paragraph on 'How to bring new and young people into our tango?' which is a question apparently doing the rounds just now.  This feeding off each other's ideas in the blogosphere, which soons turns into forms of plagiarism, is one of the reasons I rarely read most tango opinion blogs, and then only from those I feel have scruples and who have the backbone to do their own thing. Still, it is a valid question, or would be if it specified about bringing them where, exactly. 

Somewhere, apparently - the writer didn't say where, there is "the idea that we should make tango more “fun”, “party-like”, and create an atmosphere of dance club, in order to attract new dancers." Anyone who has danced salsa, or even forró knows that a traditional milonga is a more sober experience.  

But part 2 sets warning bells jangling with "the mouthpiece"  speaking for "the community". And then the trite and self congratulatory comment about what is required to be a tango dancer, reveals more of the character. As the shallowness of the thought it depressing it is another of the reasons  I avoid reading tango blogs and pronouncements. 

To answer the question: the way to get more people into tango is obviously to bring friends to practicas and milongas. The dropout rate for classes is stratospheric.  And the reason might very well not be that people are "not ready" for tango.  How did people learn to dance tango in the past, before its commercialisation? In conventillos, with the people they hung out with, the people they were around already.  There were no teachers.  So they probably didn't drop out the way or in the numbers they drop out of classes today. The reason - god almighty, why is this so very hard to grasp, so extraordinarily controversial? - the reason people drop out might it just be: the learning method? In the milonga they see the real thing.  Those being guided learn in practicas and milongas by dancing with people who can already dance.  Those wanting to guide learn to be guided first and then practice walking in milongas or moves, if they want them, in practicas with people who already have those moves.

DJ "authenticity"

Leo Reynolds

For the record, I completely disagree with you, but I don't play or dance to the music you like. But if I did, I would still go about the same way as I went, which is to say, I had the offer of music, I had Chris's set blog to go by, and I reacted very much the same way as you at the time. And I remember saying something like, 'Yeah, but if I just play your tandas, it's not authentic. And: Who says you get to decide what's good music?' And he said, something like, he didn't, it wasn't him, it was music he heard in Buenos Aires and in traditional milongas that has been played for a long time, and stood the test of time since it was first played. And I struggled with that answer for a long time. 

Eventually I came to a gradual peace with it because they are among the best sets I have heard in terms of: a lot of tandas I and others like to dance.  Not totally.  There are some tracks I think are missing.  I'm not so keen on some of the milonga choices. There are a few tracks I personally dislike but accept as part of the standard. On the whole I think to have those top tandas and and setblogs public, and free is invaluable for new DJs and both interesting and useful for others. 

He also said that he knew of people who did play his music, whole setlists and he didn't mind, probably on the contrary and I don't think it's to do with ego.  When I had the 'Larga las penas' practica here, years ago, the kids were young, I was relatively new to DJing and didn't have much time, I sometimes played them.  I think he just wanted there to be more traditional music out there. And whether that was by people finding their own way or people using his tandas.  He knew it was easier if people could copy his tandas or use his tandas as a starting base for their own. 

When [redacted] started DJing, he thought that setblog was an absolute goldmine and said it saved him so much time. But I didn't do that when I played in the city. I did refer to C's tandas, but I made my own because I felt it wasn't honest otherwise or I wasn't learning properly.  All that was wrong.  I think once he said something about making life hard for myself.  It was true. And he said something along the lines of what would I be doing next time,  playing the instruments? 

That's when I realized a lot of that stuff, about, "Oh, it has to be authentic, it has to be mine, it has to be creative", that is the ego speaking, even while I resisted the label "DJ" with my name as having too much ego . And, you know, the DJ is this tiny element. The DJ is nothing, really. The DJ is just there to put the music on the speaker. There are a few skills involved in that to do with the volume and the gaps between tracks and yes, not fucking up your tandas and playing a balanced set that suits the people in the room, but really, playing tango music, and this is how it's put to me, is the simplest kind of DJing there is. The way DJs at events are billed you'd think there was some mystic art when it's really not rocket science. 

There are famous tangos that are regularly put together. So, you know, if you try and mess around with all that, you're just messing up, you're just fucking up things that already work.

If you play for people who can really dance well, you're playing for people who are more likely to know and care about the music.  So that's your yardstick. Unless it's not, I suppose. Most DJs I see don't play like that.

A lot of milongas don't have people who can dance well, but most have some.  If you play for everyone else, they don't typically care that much. You can see it in the dancing. So you play traditional music by listening to the tandas you've heard that work and, if you are smart, learning from published setlists.  It could not be easier. 

The thing I find confounding is how often this simple process is fucked up.  So it's not that it's not that it's a mystic it's just that it's just that it's a pretty easy skill that is bizarrely beyond the reach of most people. I suspect it's usually. on the part of the DJ, overthinking, ego, boredom or an overly pedagogic instinct.  The number of supremely arrogant DJs who want to educate dancers rather than play for them to dance, is depressingly high. 

And then there's people who play the music they themselves like.  What about the frigging dancers?! It's like saying "I love American food" so I don't care what you like, you're all going to eat American.  I suppose that's OK if you know for sure they like American or if you're a closed shop, the kind of place where teachers have "milongas" only for their own students.  That isn't a milonga, that's brainwashing.

That was blog #500.