Flourishing

This piece sits somewhere between the loose tango theme of The Outpost and the rather more dangerous flotsam and jetsam currently strewn about The Intertidal Zone at present.

 Just over ten years ago, in February 2016, I started preparing a series on The Outpost on how good dancing and good milongas depended on certain conditions which was to run over a series of pieces. 

Much later I noticed, among the hundreds of draft pieces, I had never published the set, partly because it was so important.  I had wanted to get it right. I have a vague memory of noticing someone else writing on a related topic the week I wanted to publish and didn't want to coincide.  I now think this was a mistake. Other topics took over but the theme has persisted in tango and in life.

In essence, the conditions  were things like the host, the welcome, the lighting, room size and shape, good lines of sight, the seating, tables, the music, technical management of the music, the sound system, the floor, adherence to milonga codes, maybe more. The key was that these were often essential before finding a great dance partner for that sublime experience. This won’t be the case for everyone and Why is it so for some and not others? is an interesting question. Why are some people so difficult to please? or, in the common tango parlance “so snobby”?   

The themes of necessary or good conditions and of flourishing have often appeared since in The Outpost in various guises: gardens, growing vs building, emergence, uniqueness, things of that sort. Later that year there was a post on eudaimonia, a concept in the branch of ethics that considers what is a good life, a life well lived, famously explored by Aristotle and other Greek philosophers.

I noticed the themes of emergence and flourishing and of what contributes to flourishing were appearing in response to my experience of trauma, extreme stress and anxiety.  Partly, it is because when fear colonises so many corners of a life, a way to counter that is to expand agency.  The fear can be acknowledged but when you are gardening, fear can takes up less space. When enough of your mind is occupied on a task, or when meditating for that matter, but when, in some way you are focused enough in the present that your mind does not wander into the future or the past, agency increases and diminishes the power of fear. 

What the health sector calls “self care” is even more important I suspect than is often suggested in that industry.  The sense I have there is that drugs, therapy - things that can be professionalised - are the main things, but actually, I feel it is key to health to do things not only where I feel safe or “safe enough”, but that I enjoy, that are interesting and exciting.  Sometimes they are physical like Glasgow Magic Cycling club, which is  like Critical Mass but with more social time, less politics, and happens more often and with more people than the Central Belt can usually command for CM.  Sometimes that special thing is conversation with someone unusual or intelligent, or it is something creative. But the really special activities, the ones that I notice not only improve my health stats but also make me feel great have an elusive kind of spark to them. There is healthy relation and response, reciprocity, generosity, stability, play. Critically, ego is absent. Other people will be restored by different things, no doubt.

In the past, I had been interested in what the conditions for flourishing were. Flourishing of many kinds - a dance event, in a person, a mind, a group, an organization, a town, society, or in nature. In recent years, having experienced a stalker, a narcissist, someone who tried to extort me while I was stuck abroad with COVID, and, most recently, someone with an immensely destructive dark triad personality, together with the complete indifference of organisations whose mission is purportedly, to help and protect, I had experienced, like a plant in storms, the forces that impede flourishing or cause it to fall away.  Unsurprisingly, these were among the old themes in the darker corners of The Outpost and the Intertidal Zone pre-trauma: control, tyranny, money, manipulation, power.

I see now that the conditions that allow a dance, a garden, a person or a community to come alive are also the conditions tyranny, domination and control most reliably destroy.

So does that mean that flourishing is not decorative or indulgent, the cherry on top, but a matter of survival? And yet don’t we think about flourishing as more than survival? Flourishing is the flower when it blooms.  But then if the flower doesn't bloom, we wouldn’t say it had properly lived or flourished, because it hasn’t fulfilled the form of a flowering plant, it hasn’t “been a flower”. It certainly hasn’t produced fruit and had an opportunity to carry forward life. So I'm inclined to wonder now if flourishing is not just "the best" of something, but actually, integral to the definition of surviving at least when we consider plants and perhaps people too.  What life and survival flourishing meant seemed at first to be separate thing but now I'm not so sure.

The rain is mundane, sunshine is commonplace, the dirt is…dirt and yet together they create life from the miracle of a seed  So, too, the small practical conditions that let life recover in people are not trivial at all. There is a follow-up piece, Living Conditions, on The Intertidal Zone.

Technique!

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.” 

- Martha Graham

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On social media: "There is always competition in tango so we have to keep our dance practice up if we want to dance and not belly ache about not getting dances." 

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2026: The post after this intro is from 2015.  There are hundreds of posts in draft, that for one reason or another didn't get published (yet).  Prompted by a reel I saw recently, I was sure I had written one on "Technique" and found it languishing in draft.  I have written extensively in various posts on why I don't think technique in tango is the meal people tend to make of it, but here I suppose was one of my earliest forays into the topic.  My view hasn't really changed at all even while reels proliferate of the latest up-and-coming young thing, in beautiful shoes, practicing intricate barre work. For one of the funniest tango quotes I've heard on this subject see Doubt and Kindness. 

Over the years, I have found reading other people on tango largely depressing and so I don't tend to do it.  Nonetheless this reel caught my eye the other day. For when this link breaks, it's by Marco Aurelio El Tupungatino.  Now, I didn't know this until a minute ago when I looked it up, but Tupungato is near Mendoza, in Argentina, far nearer Chile than Buenos Aires.  Argentinians also tend to speak more sense about tango than people from other countries, even sometimes when they are teachers. 

So this guy was exhorting women not to go to classes to learn steps, but to go straight to the milonga  where they would become better dancers by dancing with guys who could dance.   This is a view I share, but it is strangely unusual, particularly in a teacher.  

I think the guy is a teacher. He talks about introducing the tango embrace to Hong Kong in another post and in another he is referred to by someone else as a "maestro" who will be giving tango dance tips.  Curiouser and curiouser.  If he's famous, well, I'm a social dancer and only tend to notice the people dancing socially on the social floor. 

The point is also that this video has, at the time of writing 288 likes.  I was flabbergasted., never having seen so many people agree in one place on this, at least previously,  controversial point.  Controversial that is to say, in Europe and among Argentinians who have been taken in by the tango industry. Eleven years ago, this view in the UK and Europe was very unpopular.  I would write about in Facebook forums and was slammed over and over, in much the same way that El Tupungatino has received criticism in the comments.  I also commented about it on other blogs until, along with friends, I got fed up with these kinds of comments being censored simply for not being in line with the author's own view.

I don't know whether the difference is time, or that he's male, or that he made a video, or is Argentinian, or a teacher or some combination of these, but I am very glad that people like the point.  

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2015:

I like dancing with people I like, more than I care about their level of technique or attainment.

The technique that comes from stuffing your head full of things to remember in lessons is stressful when, in the milonga, you try to remember all the things you are supposed to be doing: "Stand up straight!", "Reach up with the chest!", "Open the throat area!" "Be grounded!" "Connect!" "Loosen your arm!", "Don’t collapse your arm!", "Reach back from the hip!", "Move fluidly!", "Engage the core!", "Relax!" I gave up. That's when I really did relax and then I started to learn to dance.

Contrary to popular belief, I haven’t found that it’s really about technique. Or perhaps I just don’t care to spend my time balancing on one leg in a workshop. I don’t think it’s important . I think dancing well is more an awareness of how it feels for the other person and how it is to feel them. How on earth would you go about teaching that? When did you ever go to a class that talked about feeling? Who would buy that? Why would you when you can just do it?

[2026 footnote, apropos "what goes on in classes": I bumped into someone I knew slightly, a friend of a friend, the other day, in a Cuban cafe in Portobello, Edinburgh's seaside littoral, some fifty miles from my home. Stranger still, it turned out this person had been unwittingly taking tango lessons with the Stalker, about whom enough has been written elsewhere.  It turned out the new person didn't know the first thing about social dancing, literally, not a thing, which tells me they are learning steps. We discussed more about the fascinating subtleties and traditions of the milonga in a 10 minute conversation than she had in any of her so-called lessons. ]

So I think it’s about how it feels for the other person. As the girl that would be to be close, but not heavy, relaxed and not stiff, the kind of embrace which is natural yet allows for dance movement, an impulse to move together to music that you know. These are the things I think of as technique. And this comes simply from awareness, listening, in a word, and practice. From listening comes feeling.

These things are very hard to teach, largely because they rely on a natural desire to want to embrace another person, which is not the case in class situations. That is an artificial environment, where most embraces are contrived. And yet I remember a teacher telling me something which I thought was probably true at the time, although I had yet to understand it: that you can tell who will dance best simply from the way they embrace at the start.

Ricardo Vidort said something I find very sustaining:

"Today, people teach methodic ways and tango, the real one, does not have a method because it is a feeling. Technique and choreography? It’s only for performance. It is a tango that has been learned for hours and hours for show business."

Even when people agree that step and sequence based teaching is not so great, they still cling to the idea of technique. But it doesn't make you feel better to your partner. Good feel comes from plenty of dancing with people who can dance where you both listen to the music, each other and your own bodies.

Hosting - an invisible craft

"God's eye" basket in progress

Recently, to expand my experiences in crafting, which form a cornerstone of getting better through topping up your cup, I went to a couple of hours of basket weaving, something I've wanted to do for a long time.  It was at a place where the focus is community, spirituality, healing and practical skills. I'd like to be able to share the name, but since the stalker has had a distasteful and uncanny habit of turning up at things I have mentioned, and so I can't as I like to go there worry-free.

The young host and leader was delightful: fun, bubbly and enthusiastic and on the professional side: competent, prepared and helpful.  During the event, I mentioned to her what a happy sound there was in the room, people laughing, chatting and relaxed as their hands were busy.

 

- Those good vibes, they come from the host, I said, because I like to give compliments. 

- Oh! she said, pleased.
- You must have noticed that at events? I said. 

- No, she said, I don't go to that many events. But it's true, that's my life's ambition. 

- What is? 

- To create good vibes. 

- What is it in the host, I said, that you think that makes for good vibes? 

She thought for a minute and said: 

- The welcome. 

- Yes, I said.... 

[If have read much of The Outpost, you will recognise a theme.]

...The host's welcome is the number one thing that sets the tone. 

- And...making people feel, yes, welcome, happy to be there, to be themselves.... she said, feeling her way, somewhat to my surprise. 

- I agree, I said. It's something to do with the people being able to do what they came to do or be who they want to be, or discover what they were hoping.  

I thought later that all of that is an kind of enabling and to do with a genuine care for the people that is separate from a financial motivation. It will come as no surprise then, that, this workshop was free or by donation.  She didn't even advertise, as far as I recall, her business.