Toxic inheritance

Dannyboi-UK

Support, about how new people are welcomed, helped, integrated reminded me of when all that goes very wrong.  There are countless other stories here of guys coercing, harassing "teaching" new women but leaving them troubled, in tears or just with the mistaken belief that their dance has improved when in fact it has gone backwards.  

Somewhere in the archives here is a story I can't now find about when one of the old guard of tango dancers in the city, who have now nearly all moved on - and an organiser themselves - told me that the good experienced dancers didn't dance with new people. At two years of experience I was not quite as new. They didn't dance with new people because nobody had danced with them as beginners. Man hands on misery to man / It deepens like a coastal shelf. People had to learn the hard way, prove themselves and have something to aspire to. This of courses was not true. Most experienced men danced with new women. Though it was about ten years ago I still remember my shock, dismay and horror at that conversation - and hiding it because I knew, even before it was proven to me and everyone else, several times that this was perniciousness - very substantially - embodied.

This was the same attitude - some call it tough love - that I experienced on my second placement in secondary school. Deliberately not helping the student teacher, undermining them, piling scores of points of of criticism per week on them and calling it help", fake smiles, making life hard for new people, as if it wasn't hard enough already. After the stalker incident put paid to that anyway, I just felt enormous relief at not having to go back to that most toxic of environments. It was sad that such an

outdated attitude still persists in organisations in the twenty first century and frankly appalling that such people are in charge of young minds.

I think, I pray, such "welcomes" are mercifully rare, yet I fear they are not.

Like new plants, new people are vulnerable and need support and probably company.  Otherwise their life in whatever it is they are beginning to learn is short and stunted, they soon wilt, die off and the only ones left are the lonely, imperious royalty.

Support

John Bebbington FRPS

This is the story of needing help, as a beginner and fading out.  I wrote most of it last year some time and was reminded of it by accompaniment.

It was crossbody salsa, where the woman doesn’t go around the man, as in Cuban salsa, but stays on an invisible “line”. He, in contrast, can go around her. It felt a bit, scary and imprisoning: stay at the kitchen sink; do as I say, not as I do. You are reminded this developed in the seventies, after all. The other main difference: you dance not on the obvious, “one” beat, but on the second beat. It was all news to me, I just danced at socials blissfully unaware of the faultlines and blamelessly uncriticised. Most guys dance Cuban style because it's easier. I discovered though that crossbody guys get a bit irate if you don't stick rigidly to your invisible line. I think it was the chilled out guy running the event who told me all the better dancers dance on the second beat, and that it makes for a less hurried, more syncopated dance so, well, there was that to aspire to. Crossbody originated in New York where much of the best salsa emerged between the late 60s and the 1980s.

Much later a Latin American guy in a milonga said he used to dance salsa all the time and still loved the music but he travels a lot and when he went somewhere new the whole Cuban /crossbody confusion got too intense. He didn't want stress when he went dancing. He wanted to dance wherever he happened to be without fuss so now he just dances tango.

I was attracted because it was a practica. Salsa class, predictably, had not gone well. At a social in the city, admittedly a great Cuban dancer had invited me, but that was all. Most women knew the guys and walked boldly up to them to invite or entice them on to the floor. I couldn't go to my more local salsa socials any more. The stalker now went which gave me the heebie jeebies. Besides, the attention seeking thing was still wildly evident plus the general vibe anyway just wasn't for me.

But a salsa practica - half social, half learning environment, more free, that was more like it. Many of the dancers at crossbody seemed good and experienced. After he had invited me to dance and when he wasn't dancing with other women I chatted to a relaxed, very quiet Colombian about his country and music. When he was I sat on the floor, watching his feet beat out the ceaseless, seemingly innate rhythm on the off beat - one two one.  I discovered he had been a dance teacher but had none of the ego that often accompanies it. His dance with soft, sinuous, patient, immensely attuned to the partner and with that totally reliable, instinctive rhythm.  I complimented him on it.  Mucha práctica, he said. It always is.

Last time I had been I had received two good tips from a British guy I later heard had had a salsa school abroad.  Although not an especially prepossessing example of male virility he was as a light to moths. Women stood around him or walked up to him to ask him to dance.  He danced with the young ones.

This time I might as well have been a wall. Consequently I felt too old, too new, too gauche, too everything, too dismissed.   That all but one of the other men - and he seemed shy - danced with me  should have been the thing to remember, but I had travelled far for a short event to sit often and wondered if I should in fact rather just go to the socials which were at a more convenient time, for longer, with more people, a bar and seats. 

Maybe the guy was waiting for me to ask him questions, to ask him to show me something.  I have always been astonished that so few new people ask any questions at all.  But if he didn’t want to speak to me then I didn’t want to bother him.  But maybe people don't ask not through a lack of imagination or initiative but from shyness, a sense of respect towards someone with experience, a sense of needing less to ask but rather to be shown.

There are many people I didn't dance with at my own tango practica, but they were not new.  Wherever I find them I make a point of dancing with new people.  They are the expansion and continuation of a group of people who want to dance locally. I don't say community, because that implies more cohesion and good feeling than there often is. 

I didn’t “save myself" only for people with lots of experience or with whom I am compatible, not least because if I did I would barely dance. I didn't "save myself" either for when the new dancers become good because of the staggering arrogance of that assumption. Perish the thought that I or anyone would be something for them to "aspire" to. Quite the contrary, I hope they find their own dance by first dancing with experienced people who just dance with them.

Accompaniment

People have anxieties about all kinds of social things, starting dancing, even chat. I was one of those who couldn’t be pulled onto any dance floor, still feel uncomfortable dancing solo in public and usually avoid it.

Five months on, why still go to the folk nights in the local pubs?  Sometimes a singer seems to reach out for connection.  Sometimes there's a sense of compatibility or the song is fine. There are good voices, good playing, good humour, new songs, the craic with Chic, listening at the bar.  A neighbour drops in or or a musicians wanders over for chat or passes the time of day while buying a drink.

Still, I prefer folk music from Latin America.  There is not as much "singing with" as I thought and perhaps, noticing through its lack, hoped for.  There seems rather to be a respect for and expectation of singing solo.  Sometimes relief washes over an instrumental number.

Mostly though I realise I go to hear quiet George, the bazouki, mandolin and banjo player who has played for over fifty years.  The distinctive sound of his bazouki speaks for him and his accompaniment is sublime. No one else complements the others so well nor so effortlessly.  Beyond his accomplishment, George supports a weaker musician with his music, never taking over, so that what they play or sing is enhanced, as if by magic.  When he wasn't there last week the gap in his customary place looked, felt like a missing tooth.  You can in fact, hear absence.

George, the kind host, Dave in the forest, anyone really with tact and kindness are essential for beginners or people who ill at ease to get started or they will disappear. That help is not necessarily overt, it can be subtle thing, creating the right feeling, for which I doubt there are rule books.  Maybe it's innate, maybe it's picked up through watching, listening, sensing.