Once, in a single day, two different students told me: “I have a psychological block about starting the giro to the right.” Picture my face as a “puzzled” emoji. Another student, after I told him not to take so much care of the partner in the embrace, remarked sorrowfully: “This is a problem in all my relationships. I adapt to my partner to the point of losing myself completely.” And after I told another leader not to run away ahead of the partner, he exclaimed: “Story of my life! Run first, think later!”
It seems like at some point a vast number of people realised “in tango as in life” and figured out that our psychology has a tremendous impact on how we dance. And therefore changes to our psychological makeup must inevitably reflect themselves in our dance. And isn’t it sweet to imagine that we can dance better by doing something else than practicing?
I remember a young woman coming for a private class. She was a beginner, rapidly falling in love with tango and eager to dance well. Shy and soft-spoken, she had a general attitude of someone not willing to attract attention. I was showing her some exercises to open her chest, relax her shoulders and present an upright, proud, “here I am” posture. “See, how beautiful you look.” She glanced at herself in the mirror and quickly turned away, instantly slouching, tears filling her eyes. “Oh, I could never hold myself like this,’ she said. “This would be pretending I am beautiful… and I am not.”
Tango seems to have this uncanny ability to confront us with our insecurities and to unearth deeply buried beliefs. Often tango is literally the only thing capable of doing this, especially if we live a life we no longer question. Teachers joke about classes feeling more like therapy, especially with couples. Students, too, tell me that learning and dancing tango often feels like more than just dance. Tango brings up issues that have been in dire need of a resolution our entire life or – surprise! – something we thought we already resolved in other areas of life.
One of my students tended to rush into each step with so much zest that she frequently stressed out both herself and her leaders. I suggested to slow down and to complete each movement within its given musical time. It immediately changed how she felt inside the embrace but also how she looked. Instead of excessively tensing her muscles she was now calm, graceful and perfectly on time. Not only did it dramatically improve her technique, it revealed a different side to her as a human being. “I always thought that as a follower I had to be subservient,’ she remarked. “To show my leader how enthusiastically I am willing to do what he wants. When I complete my movements I feel like I am dancing for myself, just to feel good and to look beautiful. But inside me there is a voice saying: you cannot be that egoistic!”
Tango has a capacity of reflecting ourselves back to us with an almost unbearable clarity. I vividly remember the moment in my first year, watching a crowded dance floor, when I realised that I saw every single person in that room exactly the way they were in real life. It was as if I could literally see into their souls. I believe that improvising with another person takes up our attention so entirely that we have no energy left for pretending to be somebody else. And because in tango we mostly focus inwards, into the couple, we stop paying attention to what kind of an impression we make on people around the dancefloor. Once in the “flow”, we cannot help it but be who we are. Even if we hide parts of ourselves behind a mask, in tango we will be exactly that: a person trying to hide behind a mask.
In tango, our innermost personality is stripped naked for everyone to see. Or at least for those who know where to look. It then becomes tempting to seek psychological explanations for various problems in dance. I know people who over-psychologise every dance problem, making it about their “issues” rather than skills. They would say things like “I freeze because I don’t feel confident enough to express myself.” Or: “I lose balance because I am not a grounded person in general.” They judge others the same way, saying: “He tries all those complicated steps all the time, he must be very insecure.” Or: “Her embrace is rigid because she can’t let go.” The dubious statement “everyone dances the way they make love” is of a similar kind.
Psychological ideas sound very deep and true but aren’t necessarily, not every time. Daily we are bombarded with all kinds of psychological and neuroscientific knowledge, some of it sound, some blatantly inaccurate. Teachers and dancers praise themselves for knowing the “real” issues behind somebody’s behavior but the reality is rarely that simple. And even dancers with a background in psychotherapy can get it wrong. So how does understanding our psychology help us to dance better?
To analyse this, we need to divide things into different categories.
The first is about INSIGHTS. They come in a flash and feel exciting, no matter how grave and sad their nature seems to be. Insights are never only intellectual, there is always a strong feeling about the situation and yourself. If an idea crosses your mind but excites no emotion then it’s probably not an insight, it’s an educated guess. Or maybe not so educated. If realising “I always take too much care of the other person” releases a sudden avalanche of feelings, memories and realisations about life experiences, then we can talk about an insight. It makes you stop and wonder in amazement. It feels like you suddenly connected some previously separate bits of information. And, most importantly, it feels like you could do something constructive with this new understanding.
An insight helps you get results. No matter how serious it looks at first, an insight is inspiring, even if at the beginning you have no idea what to do. There is always something SPECIFIC about it. As a next step you can work on your psychological well-being and see it reflected in your dance and you can work on your dance in terms of technique, movement and musicality, and see it reflected in your personality. The latter is often much easier!
At some point in my life I realised I held an unconscious belief that I could never be really good at tango because I was, well… not Argentinean. Not a Latina, to be precise. Didn’t have the fiery temperament nor the proud stance nor the sensuous curves. I was a skinny, pale-faced, serious-looking Russian-born Northern European woman with an introverted temperament and a love for ballet. Where was I and where was Argentine tango? And then I said to myself: it is not about who I am and how I look. It is about how I move. I can put all the fire, joy, passion, sorrow and depth of my soul into movement. I can live this music the way I feel it and in dance, I can be a tanguera.
Quite different from insight is JUDGEMENT. No matter how true it sounds, a judgement always makes you feel bad about yourself. When you pass judgement on another person, it gives you a smugly superior feeling of knowing-it-better. A judgement disguises itself as an insight. However, an insight inspires you to look further, whereas a judgement makes you want to smash your head against the wall. It feels like it could easily trigger depression. It feels like there is something fundamentally wrong with you and always has been, you were just too stupid to see. Realising that you have a limiting belief is an insight. Telling yourself “I will never dance well because I am not from Argentina” is a judgement.
An INSIGHT into the psychology of another person makes you feel compassion for that person. For a split second you are looking “in” from the outside and the truth of what you see makes you feel the suffering of the other person as if it were your own. The same is true when you get an insight in your own ways of being. You see your own suffering, paradoxically, as if you were another person looking into it with compassion and understanding. A JUDGEMENT, on the other hand, sets you apart from other people. Both as a judge and as the one being judged. Unfortunately, growing up we all develop a severe inner critic. Any compliment or encouragement bounces off a wall of disbelief: “I surely can’t be that good!” We live our lives convinced that everyone else judges us just as harshly as we do ourselves. The internal pressure this builds can become so debilitating that learning to dance takes twice as long.
A judgement is always an attempt to explain in simple terms what in reality is very complicated. It’s the Dunning-Krueger effect in action. Judgement, when passed by a teacher, can literally destroy a student’s self-esteem. Judgements passed between dance partners can wreck their collaboration and poison the romantic relationship. Being too hard on yourself can push you to improve but it will also make you stagnate regularly instead of progressing. A judgement never yields an improvement, it just produces a high level of stress, the bad kind, and consequently blocks movement, sometimes quite literally.
At some point I made an interesting observation: people who consciously or unconsciously believed themselves to be ugly, struggled to move in a smooth manner. Their movements had a tendency to be jerky. Believing they were ugly created a permanent background of slight stress, resulting in tension which in its turn killed the flow. This doesn’t mean that all people who move jerkily are convinced they are ugly. There could be other reasons. Yet the people who are convinced they are not handsome find it very hard to have a relaxed flow in their movements.
You see, to flow requires you to feel “okay” about your body. To take sensual pleasure in simply moving around to the music. To not be overly self-conscious. To feel that you are allowed to exist, to dance, to play around, to take up space, to make a fool of yourself. Inner judgement makes you feel unworthy of all this. It makes you check your every move, trying to control it, and control is the opposite of flow. Control is also the opposite of mastery. Mastery gives you freedom, control takes it away.
Next to insights and judgements we have EXCUSES. They treacherously parade as insights and sound very convincing, yet do nothing for you whatsoever. At first an excuse brings a kind of relief, but excitement never follows. They serve, basically, to ward off judgement: your own, but especially that of other people. An insight gone stale can become an excuse. You carry it as a white flag, glad to explain to anyone why you are incapable of doing such-and-such. There is a sad comforting feeling about an excuse. Like judgements, excuses tend to be very GENERAL. Both judgements and excuses sound like there is something wrong with your whole life, whereas an insight points to something in the situation.
Let’s look at some of the examples in the beginning of the article. Both leaders who claimed to have a “psychological block” in truth had nothing of the sort: they simply lacked that little bit of skill that would allow them to initiate the turn to the right. We fixed it in five minutes. This lack in skill felt, for them, as stress, insecurity, a flaw. They judged themselves for being incapable and looked for an explanation in their psychology rather than skill. It was therefore a judgement, not an insight, and sometimes it served as an excuse not to try turning to the right at all.
The student who realised she had the tendency to rush, had an insight. Her eyes lit up when she realised it and when she tried to do things differently it brought her a direct result and an “aha” moment. She could also easily extrapolate this insight to a normal-life situation, such as waiting for a person to finish a sentence before rushing to the conclusion. If you do nothing with an insight, you might be tempted in the future to use it both as an excuse and a self-inflicted judgement. “Yep, the story of my life! Always running ahead of the train. Silly me.”
The case with the shy beginner is more complicated. She had stumbled, unwillingly, upon a deeply entrenched belief about herself that released a huge wave of emotion. What brought tears to her eyes was the sudden compassion she felt for herself as she was having the insight: it made her feel her pain as if being a gentle observer. Yet the insight was about something so fundamental, something that felt so difficult to change that it made her sad. At the same time, she harshly judged herself for everything at once: for feeling ugly, for thinking she might somehow be beautiful AND for thinking she was ugly, for crying in front of the teacher, for realising she had been carrying this inside her all her life, for not being able to do anything about it right away.
Let’s take another, very common example. Many women tell their teachers in their first year of tango that they cannot follow. Nope, nada, not me. In their daily life they are strong, independent women who make decisions for themselves! And in tango they must give away their agency? So they either rebel or try to force themselves into becoming a “more feminine woman”. The struggle seems all too real, the explanation seems to make sense. In the majority of cases, however, the concept of following is not properly explained and also profoundly misunderstood. People associate the word “follow” with “passively obey”. Once they get the correct idea and feel it in their body, they realise that not only does it not, in fact, go against their nature, but that they do that very thing (following) every day of their lives in many different situations, just as they lead in others. Yet in the beginning telling yourself “I am not the following kind of person” seems to explain away the confusion as well as any kind of trouble.
I like to show women who struggle with the “passivity” of following how real following feels when they are in the leader’s position. I embrace them gently and ask them to walk forward, without even trying to lead me, while I follow walking backwards. They usually stop after a couple of steps and say in amazement: “Wow, that felt so… active! But so connected at the same time!” Because, you see, even a highly independent, stubborn and impatient person is capable of communicating with someone if she chooses to. Capable of creating harmony, of playing together, of engaging in a conversation. Tango as a model of collaboration fits every personality. All you need to do is to learn the ways to do it and this comes through understanding MOVEMENT.
Of all the three categories only insights are truly helpful. An important aspect of an insight is that you get it yourself, first-hand. It can be triggered by something you are told or something you read, but the insight itself explodes inside your head when you are ready. If you are a teacher, I would caution you not to formulate insights for your students. You can’t. It doesn’t work like that. It’s like trying to make someone fall in love: all you can do is create the right conditions and hope for the best.
To teachers I would like to remind that any gratuitous judgement, even a cunning psychological assessment, is a boundary violation. Any unsolicited advice is a form of violence, even with the best of intentions. Especially with the best of intentions, as it becomes harder for the other person to retaliate without hurting your feelings. You are a tango teacher, not a therapist, even if you are a trained therapist but currently in your role of a tango teacher. Therefore you should be very careful about passing psychological judgement on your students, especially if you are a figure of authority to them. I cannot begin to tell how many people come to my classes with their self-esteem damaged by their teachers and dance partners. If students regularly walk out of your classes looking depressed and ashamed, then you are not a genius who opened their eyes to the truth. You are a bully. And you should know better.
Tango teachers are not therapists and should not try to act as such, no matter their training, background, personal affinity or the trust bestowed upon them by their students. This doesn’t mean you should neglect the psychological aspects of your student’s well-being (or your own). Body and mind, as we come to understand it, are one complex system in which everything influences everything else. It is very good for dance teachers to be knowledgeable in psychology and other bodymind related areas. But you are there primarily to teach people how to dance. So next time you feel the urge to tell that quarreling couple in your class: “You know, tango always brings up all your relationship problems!”, remember that you will pass an unnecessary judgement on two people who are already struggling, giving them no help whatsoever.
“There, Vero, tell them how it is!” you might be thinking. But I am sure you have passed judgement on other dancers just as freely. You might have drawn conclusions about somebody’s psychology by feeling their embrace or watching them dance. You might have been right at times and wrong at others. Maybe you terrorise your dance partners by judging their every move, convinced you can shame them into improvement. Maybe someone does that to you. Maybe you are that person who feels like the “know-it-all” after two years of dancing. Maybe you are convinced that the majority of people’s dance problems are in fact character flaws. We all fall prey to easy conclusions about complex phenomena. It’s not always our fault. Even this article is an attempt to describe in simpler terms something that is infinitely more complex.
Tango, like therapy, helps you realise things about yourself that can lead to positive change. Like therapy, it causes intense and often unpleasant feelings. The point is to process what is arising, allowing yourself to move further in your personal development. Tango offers a playground for this inner work, however, unlike therapy, it will not provide you with the tools to do it. You will have to figure them out for yourself or ask for help. Teachers and experienced dancers can coach you through these transformations by being a source of information and emotional support. So, if right now tango feels like therapy to you, congratulations! It’s a powerful catalyst for personal growth because sometimes, in tango as in life, it takes two to know thyself.
August 2, 2019
Veronica Toumanova 