Tango crushes

And there is no doubt that an embrace that is too deceptively beautiful can be emotionally dangerous for an overly sensitive and boy-crazy girl like me who spends so much time crushing on someone unattainable or mourning a relationship which ended sadly. The tango embrace is only a simulacrum, the holodeck version of intimaccy.

--"Terpsichoral," the Tango Addict: "Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you."

Oh boy, can I relate.  So, I suspect, can many others, because, as she also points out,

If you find someone attractive anyway, how can you not crush on them, when you are holding them in your arms and gliding around the floor in a daze of tango happiness?

--Terpsichoral: "Dancing and crushing."

It is so reassuring to know I'm not the only one--that, in fact, it may be very natural in a dance like this. But there is something important to try to keep in mind:

What many dancers are searching for is that magical connection on the dance floor which is not a means to any kind of an end, but just a beautiful thing in itself.

--Terpsichoral: "Dancing and crushing."

I leave by myself. All that I have of him is the memory of our dances and the scent of his cologne that lingers on my dress.

The iconoclast

I'd come to think of him as a deliberate contrarian; the faster the music, the slower he dances, until creeping to a complete stop in the middle of the floor, in the middle of the song, holding some pose with his partner. I'd ruled out dancing milonga or vals with him, his languidness had come to irk me so; to me they are hardly worth dancing if they don't feel different from a tango. I was sure he could feel me pulling against his embrace, trying to urge our movements onto the strong beats.

And then with smooth, flowing orchestras like Canaro--"Poema," still my favorite of all--hopping up and down, or doing polka steps. To "Poema"! I recall it with chagrin. Other times, whipping his partner around into sudden, sharp boleos, while the music flowed gently along.

Fine, I told myself; he believes in experimentation, and sometimes that takes him beyond what I find appropriate to the dance. He could do that if he liked--but I began to be careful of the music that I would choose to dance with him. I figured that we stood the best chance of mutual compatibility with moderately rhythmic, mid-paced tangos. At the very least, only tango, not milonga or vals.

At the last milonga, he asked me to dance to a tanda of DiSarli tangos. At first, I thought I was going to have the same frustration I'd had before, his smooth, slow leading not fitting with my feeling for the rather strong rhythm of the music. But I surprised myself: I found that his long pauses gave me the chance to play with the rhythm with my feet.

At one point I was able to extend my free leg back as if to start a step, stronger than the little toe-taps I mostly sneak in, to match an interlude of particularly accented beats in the song. I enjoy it when a skilled leader who knows the music well can lead things like that--but this was unled, I'm pretty sure, though not contrary to his leading. He just gave me the time to figure it out for myself. It was all mine then, and it really seemed to fit the music and our dance.

I felt as though I'd made a breakthrough in learning how to follow him effectively--and enjoy myself with him. What had annoyed me could actually be an opportunity. Maybe his slowness didn't need to hold me down after all but could ... create a chance for play? Experimentation? Collaboration?

At the end of the tanda, he pressed my hand in both of his and bowed a little bit. "That was beautiful," he told me. (Praise from him still always surprises me.) And I wholeheartedly agreed.

Echoes

The other day I was sitting in a local cafe, when a particular blues song (that I'd first heard as part of an alternative tanda) started playing, immediately followed by electrotango. I looked around to see whether DJ Oblivious was working behind the counter.

If there was any question

Here is a hint, ladies of tango: When you kick over the vase of flowers on a table at the edge of the floor, your boleo is too damn high.

(Or, possibly equally, the leader is a pretty poor navigator.)

And a tip for everyone: When it happens twice in one evening, you're not at a very good milonga. But we also knew that from the hopping (!) couples, the floating tango à trois going on at various times throughout the evening, and the music that shifted nonsensically between alternative and traditional within the same tanda. (Even the DJ started to get the message when couples cleared the floor, thinking that his next song was actually a cortina. Looking embarrassed, he faded the music out and went into the next tanda.)

How I wish I were making any of this up.

The pianist

I haven't had the time and energy to write much lately--nor the inspiration, because life events have been so busy and often tiring that I've hardly been able to really reflect on anything very much. This is just a quick note to breathe some life back into my poor neglected blog!

* * *

Today, tapping my fingers as I listened to tango music at work, I remembered--in that intense way that the body remembers physical sensations--dancing with a partner who is also a pianist with some tango in his musical repertoire. That night, I felt him tapping the fingers of his left hand where it rested on my back. Hoping not to make him self-conscious, I asked him about it between songs.

"I guess I was playing along with the music," he told me.

The language of following II: Accompanying

Both Jan (here) and someone calling himself Bill in Oz (here) have recently mentioned an idea of the follower in tango accompanying the leader, as a way of resolving the problems of possible negative connotations of the term "follower." I've been giving this some thought...

At first I thought it seemed belittling as well, as though the man is a star musical performer and the woman is only the backup band.

But often, I think, it's actually the other way around: Sometimes the leader barely seems to move, but the follower gets to do some lovely step--and adorn it if we wish--that looks and feels wonderful. Then we look like the stars, while the leader certainly does his share of hard work, without necessarily a lot of flash. It must take a lot of practice for a leader to achieve a level of skill where he only needs to slightly shift his shoulders to lead his partner to a turn or a cross. Lord knows I couldn't do it, the few times I've tried to lead, in practices. But it's a feeling I enjoy very much as a follower.

Then I thought about the way that a skilled accompanist can be crucial to the sound of a piece of music. Even if you can't specifically hear a piano playing with a full orchestra, for instance, its sound is present in the texture of the music, and if you took it away, the overall effect would be poorer. With a vocal performance, a rehearsal accompanist can be very important to the learning process--and if the piece is accompanied in performance, the feel of the song can completely change from a capella  run-throughs in rehearsals. Suddenly things that had been difficult may become easier, and a piece that had seemed awkward and disjointed might start to make sense.

Finally I thought about the social sense of accompanying, in the most traditional context I could think of.

(I was trying to avoid using gendered language here, but it was getting way too clunky, so: patriarchal heteronormativity ahoy! But I know this is not the only way the scenario needs to go. Are we all okay? All right then.)

A man invites a woman to do him the honor of accompanying him to an event. Both probably get dressed up nicely and make sure that they are on their best behavior. The one who made the invitation has a special responsibility to help make sure that the other person is at ease and enjoying their time together. But, although we can imagine it happening some other way for some reason, no one would really want to spend that time with someone they actively disliked, right? So hopefully, as a matter of mutual consideration, each has an interest in the enjoyment of the other, regardless of who invited whom.

And I think that much of the time, this too gets reversed, so that, again regardless of who invited whom, the woman may be said to be accompanied by the man. Similar to the idea of lead-follow-follow?

In the end, maybe the idea of accompanying is really a pretty good way to think and talk about the follower's role in tango--as long as we don't get trapped in that knee-jerk reaction I first had, of thinking that accompanying is, by implication, less important than leading. Both are essential for a good dance.

The language of following

This started out as a reply on Tango Therapist's recent post about the inadequacy, as he sees it, of the term "follower." Then it got too long to be a polite comment, and it always was rather tangential to the actual discussion in his blog, so I decided to bring it over here, so as to be able to rant freely about it.

The discussion on Tango Therapist's blog is about the reductive nature of calling a woman "a follower." I hadn't yet gotten around to fully considering the merits or demerits of "follower" (other than that its gender neutrality is helpful for dancers who do not fall into the man leads/woman follows model). In general, though, it has been something I've been vaguely uncomfortable with for a long time, as I've wrestled with the problem of how to reconcile my feminism with what I do in tango. The discussion in Mark's blog is interesting and useful, with many thoughtful points raised in the comments.

For myself, I mainly dislike being called "a follow." I don't like "follow" being used as a noun because (a) it's a verb, and I'm persnickety about language like that; I occasionally (used to be regularly) get paid to be. It seems lazy on the speaker's part, that he or she can't be bothered to tack on a single extra syllable to avoid poor usage.

But mostly, (b) because it is used as a noun, it becomes a statement about what I am, rather than what I do, and that comes across as belittling. I am not a follow, with all its implications of mindless lack of volition--and, indeed, lack of humanity. A follow, if it exists, is a thing, not a person. Rather, I follow; I am a person who chooses a particular role in this dance, in which both roles are required in order for it to function.

(It appears, Mark, as though you might say that both the man and the woman must follow the music, but that still depends on a notion of leading and following--albeit with a nonhuman leader and two followers--in order for the dance to be both functional and beautiful.)

Credit where it's due: La Planchadora, whose blog was one of the first I started reading regularly and whose snark writing I miss very much, did greatly influence my thinking on this, although she had a slightly different take on the matter.

So that's my pet peeve about the language used to describe the roles in the dance. Don't ever call me a follow. Also, don't talk about how you or any leader "drives me."*  I am not a car, and if you're dancing like I am, you've got bigger problems than just language.


* Yes, not too long ago I had a leader do both of these things at once, together with a spectacularly rude backhanded compliment. I was so angry I could barely speak. EPIC MANNERS FAIL.

It happens.

"That's one thing I especially like about dancing with you," he tells me, grinning. "We may screw up, but we'll screw up very precisely."

Memoriam

I read Jan's chronicles of the older milongueros and milongueras eagerly, hoping to recognize a face despite the short time I was there and the long and ever-growing time since then--and hoping that, if I do, the dash won't be followed by a recent death date. I don't think I've recognized anyone yet, other than a few who have (or had) wider reputations.

There is one who I know is gone. He was a cab driver and a friend of my teachers. They arranged for him to pick me up from the airport when I arrived, and he went far out of his way to help me overcome the difficulties of that first day. If there was a time when I knew I would need a cab somewhere, I called him. My teachers said his evening schedule was like this: He'd pick up fares until he wanted to stop and dance. Since he was, I believe, an independent driver, he could just stop into a milonga and dance until he wanted or needed to leave, maybe taking a fare from the milonga. It seemed like a very clever way to manage it.

Despite the language barrier, I learned a little about him and his family. His wife, his son--no grandchildren yet. I wanted to talk to him more--and listen more to him--but I didn't know how. At his prompting, I promised him that I would know more Spanish when I came back next time; he promised me that he would try to learn some more English.

I only ever knew his first name. 

When my teachers told me that he had died when an infection set in after heart surgery, I found another sort of language barrier: I did not know how to talk about him. 

How could I explain him to my friends? He was a tango dancer and a taxi driver and my Buenos Aires grandfather/knight in slightly battered but still shining armor. I didn't know his last name, and we could barely communicate. I knew him for two weeks--but the news of his death left a little hole in my heart, and in my thoughts of the city.

I wish I could have more eloquently expressed my gratitude for all his help. I wish I could offer my sympathies to his family. I wish I could tell them how happy I was to have known him, even so slightly and for so short a time. I wish most of all that he were going to be there whenever I next manage to go back.

All I can do is remember him. And even though I am sad, the memory makes me smile.

Shades of gray

I think I need to stop trying to see things in such absolute terms and simply accept the fact that sometimes, in some places, with some partners, I enjoy things that, under other circumstances,* I do not like. I believe this is called being human?

(I feel sorry for anyone trying to guess what I might be open to on any given night, though.)


* That is, the vast majority of the time. In order to be happy trying nuevo/stagy dancing, I have to be in a particularly good, adventurous, confident mood; in a place where I will not be a danger or an annoyance to other couples, or generally clash with the atmosphere of the milonga; and only with certain very good leaders (otherwise I have no idea what I'm supposed to do). The stars do not align this way very often, and I'm mostly happiest with my usual discreet, classic, musical milonguero style.