Wolf in sheep's clothing

A young woman who had been dancing for seven weeks came to her first social dance, a new milonga in the country which had had limited advertising.   

- Did you hear about this milonga on Facebook?

- No, I'm not Facebook

- So how did you know about it?

- By talking to people.

She had good instincts.

You dance fine, you will dance a lot if you go to the main milonga in the city. But go with friends, it is easier that way.  

When I caught up with her, it was her second trip to the city milonga. She had already danced with one of the better, choosier guys. 

Well, there you go, dance with him and you can dance with anyone.  

There was live music that day but the ronda was a mess even during the recorded music.  It was a struggle to get behind someone who danced socially, who didn't weave or crowd their neighbour or dance distractingly. At these moments the search for peace can force you into the middle yet you are stuck between another rock and a hard place, for now you worry about bashing couples on your right or the other ronda refugees in the middle with the beginners, the wild dancers and the people who can't stick to the line of dance.

There was one guy who danced quietly, taking just enough space for himself and his partner.  I looked for his distinctive shirt.  He was right behind me.  I moved into the middle to let him pass, but the guy, perhaps politely, thought I had momentarily lost the line of dance and waited and waited for me to continue.  Maybe he just didn't want to be next to my neighbour in front but I think his was the type able to keep their composure wherever.  Eventually we circled back, took our place behind him and all was well.

Later, I chatted with the young woman, mentioning the ronda and this guy with whom I had also danced recently.  With me he had been safe, correct, no sparks but then no trouble either. 

Oh, yes, he gave me a kind of backhanded compliment.  When I told him I had only been dancing for two months...

My heart sank.

.... he said "maybe tell people you've been dancing for three".

The disconcertion and shock I registered no doubt she had also experienced.  Perhaps he meant it as a compliment but it was a deeply patronising comment.  Such is the power of someone outwardly correct; one can be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. 

And he told me I was stiff. 

My face reflected the same disbelief and dismay I had seen on the faces of my friends when they heard a guy (outside the milonga) had called me "cuadriculada" - but said it wasn't a bad thing.

Don't take that crap, I said.  Just walk away. And yet, when the guy had made the cuadriculada comment to me, I hadn't walked away but rather puzzled over it, wondered what he'd meant and so on, back and forth.

The guy in the shirt may not have been, strictly speaking, a wolf, because these types are conscious of what they are doing and I am not sure he was, but that is really no better.  

We couldn't continue this horrifying, fascinating conversation because a guy who couldn't dance, walked up, stuck his head into our conversation and suggested, verbally that they dance milonga. And off she went...

Follow my lead!

When you follow from fear!

A:  "But why do you think you "go wrong" in dance and make mistakes?"

B:  "Well, I feel I don't do what they want.  And the men tell me.  They say I'm 'not following their lead'."

What kind of interpersonal relationship is that - when someone keeps telling you you are wrong?  What kind of relationship is it that as someone embraces someone else they criticise them?    This piece was drafted back in 2016.  The following year the #metoo movement took off with the Harvey Weinstein allegations.  Since then we are perhaps more alert to abusive relationships. 

People follow best through trust, not fear and the body is more truthful than the mind.  A female body does not want to embrace a male body that keeps telling it is wrong or is going wrong.  No"body" wants to embrace any"body" that keeps being told that.  Small wonder then when you see class dancers in an open or semi-open dance "hold" instead of an embrace.  Ironically, it was an experienced teacher who once told me you be able to tell which couple will dance well from the way they first embrace.    

If the "follower" is being lectured by the "leader" there will be no true embrace and the hold will be more like a vice in which he can do unpleasant things to her.  If we don't want to be tempted by biscuits that are bad for us we don't buy them in the shop.  If we don't want to be treated badly, why accept men who lecture in dance and push us around like shopping trolleys?

 "You are not following my lead" is a cruel and tragic commonplace akin to "You are not doing what you are told". This is about control more than dance.  If people tell acquaintances and strangers on the dance floor that they are "doing it wrong" one wonders what they say to their employees, children, partners.

Criticism and feedback

@mohamedhassan22302

Recently, I have been on secondment as a trainee and on this secondment, the culture has been to criticise the newbie.  Criticism is killing. It creates self-doubt and uncertainty, cuts swathes through self-esteem and worst of all creates a climate of fear, especially fear of trying.  Unremitting criticism, is, in short, paralysing and deadening.

No doubt, the intention is to be helpful, from which you are supposed to formulate long lists of "areas for improvements" for bedtime reading. What I notice though, is that if I self-flagellate to my critics, a technique straight out of Chairman Mao's playbook,  it goes down remarkably well.  Why?  I think it's to do with power - it is an acknowledgement of your lowly status with regard to others and this makes those above you feel good. I think it is an utterly toxic and macho culture - perpetuated, surprisingly, by ardent females. I dared to say last week "Did I do anything OK?  Did you not think perhaps that X went quite well?"  The leader snapped back the savage retort: "We are not here to massage your ego".  I notice they have moved on to "your bag was in the wrong place" or "you missed off the letter 'p' in this word".  I take this scraping of the barrel as a sign of progress. 

I cannot describe the shock and sense of demoralisation I felt encountering this value-system and culture where detailed technique is particularly valued.  Outside of this environment I tutor, (I hope as more guide, than teacher) one to one, non native speakers in English and in French, I volunteer teaching English to refugees and I run a tango practica in which I largely just dance with new people and answer their questions based on my experience.  Most happily, for about a year I have had regular conversation exchange with native Spanish speakers where there is more equality and therefore more freedom.  My starting point in all these activities is always how well this person is doing - how motivated they are just to turn up, to participate, to interact, to try.  

The very last thing I want to do is to criticise them or even say, well you need to work on this and this and this because it's overwhelming and unhelpful and depressing. Conversation Exchange has been curious in this respect.  Often people say they want you to correct their English; being fairly literal-minded I have taken this, for months and months at face value.  But I suspect the reality is more often that they just want to speak.  People, I find, will ask you, if they are unsure and if they really want to know.

My mother was a great practitioner of the power of praise, and there is no one you could call less patronising. To praise without patronising is a sublime art. There is always good stuff and that is where I go from when new people rely on me.  People, when they are new to something feel good, from praise and it can be as subtle as a smile or a nod.  But if you are in work situations where you are obliged to "give feedback", there is a saying in primary school:  "two stars and a wish" - two good things and something to work on.  I find this good advice applies across the decades.

Feedback is a vexed and complex subject.  Academic theory shows that is can be be the most valuable tool for development but this is a blunt comment - it depends who you are talking to.  Hints, faint suggestions, people who know more than me taking time to ask me questions which get me thinking have been among the most powerful forms of feedback for me, personally. Unwanted feedback, feedback you are obliged to accept to "progress", from people you don't know, or worse, still, don't esteem is one of the vilest things.  Worse still is when you have to contort yourself to prove you have taken on board and changed things about yourself or your work to fit these people's perceptions of what you should do or should be. It is an extreme form of control.

Feedback assumes an inequality, someone "knowing better", which is a phrase that ought to send shivers down the spine, and in my experience that explicitness does not help human relations.  It is the people with most experience and from whom we can learn most who have least to say, least to prove, least need to give feedback, who are more inclined to answer questions, or rather, to ask them, rather than to give unsolicited advice.  Sometimes, they won't even give solicited advice, a clue that the question is wrong, or even that it is not the moment for it. We choose our best mentors, mutually, or they happen to us, fortuitously, almost like grace.

With things like dancing tango, which is so much not about feedback and analysis, but about sensation and feeling, anything, including feedback, that makes you think, is not likely to be helpful, however much you are convinced, as a neophyte, that you need it.  Mostly, what is needed, is more listening, more awareness and simply, more time.  Mostly, what is needed, is patience.

A desperate stance

The good news is that telling people they’re not good enough - that their dance naturally deteriorates with time instead of as with most things we do naturally improving with experience is a last-gasp effort. When the suggestion is the non sequitur that people who enjoy natural dancing are “too proud” it is obvious there is an ulterior motive - money.  

Criticising something as personal and individual as the social dance of someone experienced, particularly a dance you haven’t yourself felt, particularly the dance of someone you yourself have taught yet blaming any supposed flaws and "bad habits" on them and not you, is a desperate stance.  It suggests falling class numbers as people realise the better dancing, the better learning and most of all the greater pleasure in learning a social dance is to be had by dancing socially. Such dancers realise that it is merely a small but tellingly vocal group who to try to monopolise how people learn this dance (in class), which process all but destroys new social dancers. That process makes them “think dance” which for me is not what dancing is about, not what allows, not what frees the things that do make dance happen. The shrill counter, that "Oh, it (i.e. moves) becomes muscle memory" is spurious. That just means a dance initiated through "thought" not feeling is one which has becomes automated and robotic. A dance that is thought out, drilled in, constructed of steps and moves is not a dance that comes from the music and so is not really, not usually, for me, dancing, not at any rate dancing tango.

The dance seems to me more and more an expression of character and of the various wordless interactions of two people.  Although it happens in a social setting it is a personal interaction - one which has nothing to do with a teacher. When you criticise their dance, you criticise and undermine their character and that personal interaction.  Unless such comments have to do with him hurting her or lecturing her (and lecturers don't criticise lecturers - they beget them) what place have they?  And surely she is the one to let him know.