Music, pause, silence

This year I came across Miloš Karadaglić playing classical guitar.  It is his most understated playing, the playing that includes pause and silence, that I most enjoy.  The local guy I met in Salon Canning, was the one who told me about Gavito talking about the silence between the steps:  El tango está entre paso y paso, allí donde se escuchan los silencios y cantan las musas.  (Also referenced here)

Gavito, also said, apparently something like: "A good dancer is one who listens to the music. We dance the music not the steps. Anyone who aspires to dance never thinks about what he is going to do. What he cares about is that he follows the music." I can't find a reliable Spanish version or source for this but I am glad somebody said it, because "anyone who aspires to dance never thinks about what he is going to do" rings true for me, when I dance in the guy's role. 

In the woman's role I can tell instantly when a guy is thinking his dance and when he is not.  Based on dancing since 2012, I can say that most guys dancing socially here in Europe, think dance to a greater or lesser extent. Vanishingly few dance the actual music and that, I think, is a direct consequence of the tango dance class industry. You generally have to go to a country's top milongas for good dancing and even then it can be a question of hunting for it.  Or you go to the international events around Europe. Other than that you're generally looking for the one or two guys at regular milongas that can dance.

The tango dance class industry is something countered by prácticas where there are no classes, no steps taught or techniques. Experienced people dance with new people albeit some unfortunately do teach steps. Nonetheless, at the one I run I'm pretty sure the new people pick up that, listening to our partner, we dance the music.

Postscript: Just after finishing this piece I bumped into one of the new, young dancers who have come to my práctica. He said that listening, following the music in dance, rather than thinking about steps was the thing he had taken away from his visit and that it had informed his approach to the other dances he does too. Music to my ears. 

Right and wrong

I met and danced in swapped roles with a guy, a beginner.  I shared a story about the contradiction in terms of teaching an embrace (third paragraph) in an “open hold”. He told me in reply that indeed, he had seen in milongas men "driving" women as though driving a tractor. He illustrated what I have seen so many times, in class and in the milonga, by class dancers. 

In the photo above there are no embraces.  You could pretty much drive a tractor through the huge gaps between the guys and the girls.  So what are they doing if not embracing?  Steps.  They are practising steps learnt in class.  People who do this move like zombies.  Typically, they take one step, together, pause, then they take another.  Then he tilts his chest.  She obediently pivots.  Lead (pause) Follow.  Their dance mimics the roles they have accepted.  Obviously, the music - if there is any - is irrelevant.  Speedy zombie version here.   You could argue that music like that doesn't help at all.

It could be so easy.  If only they would embrace, listen, not think.  Not listen hard, not try to walk on a beat, not even listen - just allow themselves to hear the phrasing.

In fact this practica (in photo above) was more like what we in Britain would call a class. There (ART. 13) I saw only one couple embracing. You can see similar things by browsing the photos of milongas near you or that you are thinking of going to on e.g. Facebook and comparing whether what the dancers are doing looks more like the photo above, or more like the embraces here at the Encuentro Porteño in Amsterdam.  Of course the EP dancers are more experienced, but it isn't that. What they are doing is in essence a different dance.

The instruction model based on right and wrong ways of moving means you get class types who (if you were to let them get that close) would "drive" you the way my friend described. Meanwhile, such dancers insist or imply you're “doing it wrong” or that you're not really good enough for them. Inexplicably they still want to get their hands on you. No surprise then when they inherit from class this perspective of “right” and “wrong” steps. This “rightness” and “wrongness” is a strange idea.  The dance is improvised and social, we do it for pleasure. It is not sequenced, choreographed or for performance where “rightness” and “wrongness” of steps or technique might be more relevant. 

But class dancers are quick to criticise “wrong” movements - even on the floor and to lecture you in how to fix them.  At that point you might as well give up.  Many do - the healthy ones. Or they go to the milonga instead.

But many, sadly, do not. They assume the problem really is with them, that they are impaired in some way, that they are wrong and this is what gets to me. Women do this more than men in my experience or maybe more of them tell me. They feel terrible, inadequate.  "I feel so rubbish, so hopeless" they say, over and over.  "I can't do any of what they want me to do in class. The steps and technique are so hard.  It doesn't make any sense to me."  They doubt themselves in just the same way as when the teacher says "Just a few bad habits developing - keep up the classes and you'll be fine".  They don't realise that most people have - sensibly - dropped out because they all felt like that.  In fact they have been wounded.  With many women I meet it's as though they have been wounded in their backs but they don't know where. They just know that they're hurt but they don't even really know why or how or if they've been wounded because none of it adds up.    

The man they dance with who might tell them they're "doing it wrong" - or (more often) the teacher says "Well if you trust me, come back next week and make sure you do the whole course I can fix everything.  And there are always private lessons you know..." Even children know that anyone who says "Trust me" or "Honest!" is as trustworthy as this.

How class dancers dance

Perth museum

I was looking for a visual idea of harmony to contrast with what some of this post is about.  I took this photo today because I like the space which I once thought about using for a dance.  We were in Perth Museum (picture), one of the oldest museums in the UK.  We went to see the new Cradle of Scotland exhibition about a breathtakingly large pallisaded enclosure - one of the largest in prehistoric Europe -  near here, the iron age hillforts which developed nearby and the Pictish royal residence of the ninth century.  This is the arresting image used to advertise the exhibition.  What a difference colour makes.  The exhibition is co-directed by Steve, who dances tango and so does his wife, Kate.  He is an archaeologist and Kate a Celtic specialist. We always have interesting conversations. Plus they keep me right during wine tasting when I get distracted by just such good conversation.    

Actually the harmony I want to refer to is perhaps less well illustrated architecturally because it is more of the human kind. I see it best in my boys, in togetherness, in movement, in a sort of shared being.  Yes, of course they fight too!

This was yesterday on our way across our gorgeous if currently rather sodden park, the “North Inch” to the other museum here which is about the infantry regiment called The Black Watch and since 2006 a battalion in the Royal Regiment of Scotland. 

My elder son dances tango. The "little" one still likes to be picked up for dance which these days doesn't happen often.  When we walk arms around one another the elder falls in step with me, and I shorten my stride He moves to tango music, two as one so naturally, with a sense of shared axis despite our difference in height. I guess he gets, they get, that sense from practice through being so often attached (literally) to one another.   

It isn’t true that beginners are always rough to dance with.  Beginner girls, even beginner guys can be lovely when they don’t get - inevitably - ruined by going to class.  It is true though that class dancers make great partners for other class dancers.  I don’t mean beginners, I mean that subset of beginners who dance in classes.  But that separation keeps them away from social dancers. That would be useful - particularly so they don’t screw up the ronda, as class dancers more than any other invariably will.  It would be useful if it were not also such a shame, such a waste, such a lost opportunity for new dancers who want to learn to dance tango and for the existing dancers who want to dance with them.  

It is also true that I find class dancers stiff in dance; worried about all the things they aren’t doing “right” as if “right” was the standard currency in this improvised social dance.  It is - but only between other class dancers, but then they don’t do much true improvising. Such dancers hardly embrace - look at the photographs taken in most British milongas - of couples, one awkwardly “driving” the other, usually at a distance, the other awkwardly tolerating it.  They don’t dance the way other dancers, class-free dancers do.

No surprise that when class types encounter the resistance they feel in social dancers who they try to force into “moves” they find them a bit stiff too.  But to me class dancers  can feel robotic, contrived, insecure.  They feel stressed so they try to push through that by pushing you into the moves they’ve learned. While they are dancing they are simultaneously trying to remember their classes on Technique, Grounding,  Posture,  “How to Embrace” (!), Connection - as if they have a hope of connecting with all that going on in their heads.  They feel and look worried as the contradiction between the dancing they want to do and the thinking in which they have been instructed finds expression in that obvious tension.  They think about dance instead of listening to the music and responding to the individuality in the partner they are with their own.  You only need to give the other person your attention, to listen, to dance with them, not at them not by doing moves done to them.  We can do  it untutored, naturally if we only turn off the jabber of the class teacher who wants us to do it their way.

I had a message this evening from someone I don’t know yet.  It finished  “I'm very much of the learn by dancing "school", and learning by experimentation.”  It’s just lovely to hear things like that.

The boys, by the way, walk, run, stand move like this all the time. It's natural.

    

  

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.

“Leading is hard”

Or “The consequences of thinking dance”

A: I have been dancing with a beginner a lot in the last few months. He is young, can't do that much as far as steps go and has terrible posture but, strangely, I have a wonderful connection with him on the dance floor. 

B: It is a common observation. Beginners have lost less of themselves to classes.

A: Leading is hard though. I know because I have started leading in the last few months. You have a lot more to think about

B: It is sure hard if you think :)

A: ...and your focus is necessarily outward 

B: That is indeed fatal. But understandable if you're not in a ronda but instead in a chaotic circulation of people struggling with steps that they have to think about.

A: I find classes as a follower the most frustrating things. And I end up just learning the lead part on the side. And then the lead and I work through it together when he gets stuck. Which I think is how it should be..? 

B: It should be much easier. Try it without the teacher! :) 

A: When I lead I just try to move the follower with me in very small, very simple things to the music. If I feel we can move together we can create things in small ways and without thinking about it too much. 

B: That's the trad way. 

A: I have no desire to learn steps, not now at any rate. I suspect that takes you in the wrong direction, ultimately. 

*

A: I'm so tense....I've got all these things in my head that I ought to be doing.

B: Like what?

A: Well, I'm thinking about being more grounded. The teachers tell me I have to be more grounded. I'm trying to think about that.

B: It isn't homework you know. It's a dance.

A: Shall we just dance then?

B: It's all I ever had in mind… :)

*

From a Facebook forum:

“In El Beso last week I stumbled then apologised. No problem said my kind, friendly, pleasant, competent, non judgmental, argentine lead. This is a dance, not an exam - we're here to enjoy it. Now there in a nutshell is the difference between dancing in BA and dancing in Europe.”

*

A: I was at a very high anxiety level learning tango for quite some time. To try and socialise and dance, to try and switch off the brain and dance what I feel - these are real weak areas for me. It's been awhile since I've felt flow in my dance. Overthinking!” 

B: Anxiety is common in the scene in various contexts. Having gone to class in both roles & over the course of many conversations with different people I have discovered one high stress context for guys is in class. For girls, stuffing your head full of things to remember in lessons is incredibly 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 and went to the milonga instead. Then I really did relax and then I started to learn to dance because dancing and thinking don’t mix. 

For girls it is also stressful dancing with guys with poor dance - worst, in class, but also in the milonga - or who solicit for dances or, worse, who try to tell them what they're doing "wrong". A third high stress context is a milonga with an unpleasant atmosphere. 

In the high stress class context students give teachers money in exchange for what amounts to a mental list of things the teacher thinks the students should improve. Inevitably people think about the things on that list when they’re dancing instead of enjoying the moment with their partner. It is a recipe for stress! That method is also undermining and disempowering - you need to come back to the teacher to fix all the supposed problems you think you have. 

And yet, if you asked twenty partners you enjoy dancing with what you needed to improve upon in your dance in my experience they say "nothing" or say different, probably contradictory things. If you are bent on that sort of focused "improvement" that is a far more realistic, reliable and useful way - if unnecessary imo. 

It is rare that I find “problems” that won’t be fixed in guys by dancing the other role and in girls by dancing with nice guy dancers. Far more long-standing and pernicious problems are created by learning figures and sequences of joined up figures, and, for guys, by giving the move or sequence (which comes from the teacher) priority over the partner - what they do and how they feel and respond. I think self-consciousness ruins this dance and classes - and other things - cause self-consciousness. But in dance we can lose self-consciousness and be natural, be ourselves with all the individual variety that suggests. Who wants the homogeneity imposed by figures? I reject the idea that says it is wrong to learn to dance in the practica or the milonga. Why is it wrong? I believe the best and fastest way and the way closest to real life is learning by doing. The milonga is fun, cheap, democratic and you have freedom of choice of the music to dance and the partner to dance it with. But I think the only way is to learn in the girl’s role first where it is about not thinking. 

* 

- Can you show me how to do those turns we just did!
- Turns? I’ve no idea! I don’t plan movement. I don’t think about or remember it. We just do what...happens. :)