Author: Veronica Toumanova

No two embraces are alike, as no two dancers are alike. We study steps, obsess over technicalities, practice feet positions and balance, yet I believe that what draws us to tango are the embraces. After a tanda we rarely recall the steps we danced, but we always quite exactly remember how a certain dancer felt in the embrace. Often this is why we seek that same dancer again and again. This is true for both men and women, although to give priority to the embrace over technical skill is more common for women.

What is an embrace? It is neither a position nor a shape, it is a SPACE. A space in which we connect to each other to create the dance, a space of intense and very private communication. In this space we can find profound fusion with the other person and sometimes profound loneliness. There is no such thing as a “correct embrace”, yet there are embraces that optimally fit a certain style, a certain dynamic, a certain body, certain visual aesthetics, attitudes and temperaments. Despite the variety I can distinguish three important factors that together constitute a good embrace, no matter the style.

The first is comfort. A comfortable embrace means that it respects your own anatomy, allowing you to maintain an active, yet natural posture, free of tension and unnecessary effort. It also means that your embrace respects the anatomy of your partner. For leaders this means providing sufficient movement freedom to the follower and avoiding any restrictive modifications on the follower’s posture. A comfortable embrace is not a grip, it is not rigid, it is rather like a living creature: it needs to breathe. For a follower creating a comfortable embrace means not discharging her weight on the leader, not using him for support in the pivots and not clinging to him in trouble. In a comfortable embrace both partners stand on their own legs, and even in an inclined milonguero position they are still responsible for their own balance and weight transfer. Discomfort in the embrace is, I believe, reason number one to refuse a dancer or not to invite a dancer again.

The second factor is efficiency. An efficient embrace is one that serves its primary purpose: to transmit and receive the impulse. What exactly is efficiency depends on how you want to dance, your style, vocabulary and the intensity of the dynamics that you want to create. This is why embraces in tango escenario are much more firm and rigid than in social tango, for example: they facilitate lifts, jumps and very quick movements. The embrace in tango should not be confused with the connection: we create the connection by our whole being, embrace included. A tango couple can be connected to each other even without touching, the embrace simply adding a “physical channel” to the connection.

Learning to create an efficient embrace is a difficult matter, both for men and women. Its difficulty lies in its subtlety, for to make an embrace truly efficient is has to be first fully connected to the rest of your body, to how you ground yourself and to how you transfer weight, and then it also has to be connected to the body of your partner. In an efficient embrace one has to operate with tiny movements and subtle sensations. You can see it as trying to move water inside a glass: if you move a lot you will spill the water, but if you move a little and at the right moment, you can create a lot of movement in the water itself. One also has to operate on the level of images, intentions and directions rather than mechanical manipulation. Most dancers, even many advanced ones, still conceptualize the embrace as “a torso with two arms to hold on to the other person” rather than something that goes beyond anatomical parts. Therefore in most dancers the embrace is more or less functional, but not efficient.

It is in the embrace that you will notice the “basic principle” of a dancer and the most common is “the man takes the woman and makes her move”. This is a highly inefficient principle, for it gives at once too much responsibility to the leader and takes away the responsibility of the follower. To understand the efficiency of the embrace it is important to realise that it depends EQUALLY on both partners. The inner workings of the embrace are also not to be confused with its shape. Copying your idol’s embrace will not make you dance the same way.

The third factor is the human factor and this is what makes every embrace unique. You can imitate another dancer in everything, but inside the embrace you will always feel like yourself. Your embrace is affected by your unique personality, your experience and the way you relate to yourself and the world around you. Your embrace will also reflect everything about the way you feel about yourself and others at that particular moment, including all your worries, insecurities, ambitions and intentions. And because the joint embrace is such a highly sensitive place, your partner will feel everything, too, even if s/he is not completely aware of it. If a leader is stressed about the difficult traffic, this will be felt in the embrace by the follower. If a follower is anxious about her ability to follow, she will become tense and feel absent to the leader.

Your human factor is furthermore influenced by your background, which can mean practically anything. I have been identified several times as Russian by the way I embrace. You often hear that Russian (or Slavic) women are supposed to have very deep embraces and Argentinean men very intense ones. There are stories about “powerful” embraces of Argentinean women and “sweeping-off-the-feet” embraces of Turkish men. I am always careful with stereotypes, for we humans are far too complex to be explained by simple categories of nationality and culture. Sometimes the stereotypes are true, sometimes they aren’t. If you come from a culture in which you are encouraged to make yourself physically attractive, to actively pursue and seduce the opposite sex and you feel at ease being this way, then this will give a certain seductive charm to your embrace. If you come from a culture in which it is not appropriate to display emotions but you are an emotionally expressive person, then your embrace will still reflect your personality rather than your background. I also believe that the “intensity” of a man’s embrace is often dictated by the need to hold on strongly to the woman to prevent her from losing her balance and falling backwards in the walk. When a woman gets used to being helped that way, she would naturally want to go back into this kind of an embrace.

Human factor can compensate for a lack of comfort and efficiency or on the contrary, totally ruin it for you. If your embrace is clumsy and inefficient, but you feel like a warm-hearted, open and passionate person, it will still be a nice experience for your partner. If you have a perfectly comfortable and efficient embrace but a cold and distant attitude, your partner will feel miserable despite your virtuoso performance. The embrace is also where your partner will become aware of your emotions and how you experience the music. If a songs sets you on fire, it will be immediately felt in your embrace.

There is another aspect sometimes present in tango embrace: seduction. It is sometimes confused with the human factor, yet it is only a part of it. Seduction does not make the embrace more comfortable or more functional, just more “electrically charged”. If you like the person you are dancing with and you accept his or her erotic attention, then it can add a distinct flavour to your experience. However, if the erotic charge is very strong, the dance itself will become secondary. The EXPERIENCE of the dance can be profoundly blissful, for the couple is not so much dancing together as using the dance to be together. Yet you have to be cautious when charging your embrace with erotic attention, because your partner might enjoy it or, on the contrary, start feeling very uncomfortable or simply bored. The embrace, especially close embrace, is a delicate, intimate environment that can very easily become suffocating and unpleasant.

Ultimately, it is the intention you put in your embrace that will make your partner feel welcome or lonely, judged or accepted. There is one basic intention that will always help establish a good flow of communication, no matter how unskilled you are. It is a “message” that the partners can transmit to each other when creating the embrace and during the dance. From the leader to the follower this message reads: “Trust me” and from the follower to the leader it reads: “I trust you.”

Why is trust so important? It has everything to do with the essence of the two roles.

The leader is responsible for the couple’s movement and the reason teachers tell leaders to “put their attention in the follower” is that it allows them to feel as if they were the whole couple, to think of it as a moving unity. The follower expresses herself in her own movement, for which the design is proposed by the leader, and so her movement is a manifestation of the leader’s intent. This does not mean that the follower is more important and the leader only plays a supporting role, because he still guides her every move. It does not mean that the follower is merely an instrument, either, because she will still move the way she wants and is able to. They are both equally important and would simply not exist without each other.

If the leader’s attention goes too much into the steps and his own movement, the follower will inevitably feel that she is being used as a tool. It will also become important that the steps “work” and when they don’t, both partners will feel like they make “mistakes”. When instead the leader’s attention goes fully into the follower’s movement as IT IS HAPPENING, then it is no longer relevant if the steps work and “mistakes” stop feeling like mistakes, they become part of improvising together. If the follower’s attention goes too much into what she is “reading” from the leader, into consciously understanding the “design”, she will forget her main task: namely, to instantly react to any suggestion from the leader, with complete confidence, and to MOVE. The leader therefore should make the follower feel that he knows what he is doing, that they are going to have fun and that he will protect her in unexpected circumstances. And the follower, in her turn, has to consciously abandon herself to the play that the leader is proposing and be fully herself, while at the same time allowing the leader to express his intent. To dance, a follower needs to be fearless and to help her in this the leader needs to be trustworthy. If the follower does not dance, the leader cannot dance, either.

One of the best feelings a follower can give to a leader is that of COMPLETE FREEDOM of expression. Complete freedom does not mean freedom from the follower, paradoxically it means complete “togetherness” with the follower while still being two distinct individuals. This sense of freedom comes from the feeling of every suggestion being completely understood by the follower, and not only understood, but amplified and further developed. Tango is a conversation, and for it to be a fulfilling conversation one person needs to start and the other needs to understand the idea and to carry it on.

One of the best feelings a leader can give to a follower is that of having his COMPLETE ATTENTION. I often hear women say: “I wish they did not try all those fancy steps, but simply be with me”, which does not mean that women do not enjoy steps in tango, it simply means that they don’t like being used as a tool. But isn’t there a contradiction, you might ask? How can a leader have all of his attention in a follower if all he wants is complete freedom of expression? Yet this is exactly the point. The follower’s movement IS the leader’s expression. If the leader understands this, it all starts making perfect sense. This also explains why some leaders claim that they can make the follower dance the way SHE wants to dance, for they have tuned their attention so well to the follower’s movement that they feel her “inner logic”, the way she interprets the music and plays with her energy, and are able to feel in advance how she would want to express herself.

In theory the three factors (comfort, efficiency and human factor) sound like separable criteria, yet in practice they are not. They influence each other and also compensate for each other. A comfortable embrace is not necessarily efficient yet an efficient embrace is usually quite comfortable. Human qualities such as attention and sensitivity will help you create a much more efficient embrace simply because you are more aware of your partner’s movement. And a comfortable embrace usually has a nice human quality to it just because it respects your partner’s posture. The embrace in tango is a complex and challenging matter to teach and to learn, but a fascinating one. More and more dancers everywhere realise that our playground may be in the steps, but our home is in the embrace and this is where we want to go back to every time.

RUSSIAN, ITALIAN, VIETNAMESE, BULGARIAN, GERMAN, CHINESE, CZECH, ROMANIAN, POLISH, HUNGARIAN, FRENCH

March 14, 2014

In one of my articles I wrote that the most difficult thing for a tango teacher is not teaching the correct movement, it is getting people to dance. So what is it that we teachers (and dancers) find so difficult? Common dictionaries define dance as “moving rhythmically to music, typically following a set sequence of steps”. On the surface this definition is correct and according to it every single person on the dancefloor is dancing. But soldiers marching to a military song are also moving rhythmically to music. Intuitively you always recognise people who are dancing and who are just “moving rhythmically” when you are in a milonga. You will always prefer to watch those who dance.

So what is it you like watching?  What is dance? Let’s first see what it is not.

Dance is not technique. You don’t need the perfect technique to dance, it is actually the other way around. You need to dance to build a skill. Dance does not come from the understanding of shapes, balance and dynamics, nor from the physical ability to create those shapes, balance and dynamics. You need the technique to make your dance effortless and expressive, but even a small child can already dance. In great artists you admire the technique, but it is the dance that touches you emotionally.

Dance is not physical movement. Or, to be precise, it is not ONLY physical movement. A purely physical exercise is common in sports, for sports are about getting a result. Dance does not strive for a result, it strives for expression. Like pushing piano keys is not necessarily music, so moving in space is not necessarily dance. Dance is not effort, either, it is effortlessness, which simply means effort that is adequate to the task.

Dance is not the embrace, the embrace is where dance is created. Tango is known as “the dance of passion” and historically shows a sensual play between a man and a woman. Sensual or sexual tension is not necessarily present between the dancers, it is merely expressed. A common confusion in tango is that this sensual connection, or in simpler terms a flirty attitude is the source of the dance. However, embracing a man or a woman sensually will not create a dance. The connection in tango goes much deeper than a sexual connection between a man and a woman, it is a profoundly human connection. Sensuality can enrich the dance, but not replace it. This is why tango is possible between two men or two women or between a female leader and a male follower.

Dance is not your connection to the music, either, although your musicality is an important factor in creating a dance. Whether you are able to translate the way you hear the music into movement depends on many things, but like the embrace, music is only one of the ingredients for the creation of a dance.

Dance is about your energy using your body to express feelings and ideas that originate in how you hear the music, associated with a specific movement vocabulary and in connection to your partner’s movement. Every creative act, from cooking to telling a story, needs ideas, energy and ways of expression. In dance the way of expression is your body. Therefore dance is not something you DO, it is something you must BECOME.

So, why is there often so little dance in people dancing tango?

The specifics of tango is that it has two equally important components: the need to move yourself and the need to communicate with your partner (impulse exchange, or leading/following). You can work on your own movement, but for tango this is only half of the story. You need to spend almost as much time learning to communicate with your partner by very subtle, practically invisible movements and intentions. You dance embracing each other and even the slightest movement of your body is felt clearly by your partner. The embrace in tango is an extremely sensitive environment and can be a source of huge discomfort or profound joy.

Tango is a conversation and in order to have a conversation you need silence. To communicate by impulses with another person you need to create a quiet space so that the tiniest of intentions is transmitted. This is what makes tango such an introvert and a fulfilling dance emotionally, for we do not remember the steps, we remember the quality of the connection. We remember sensations.

People who start learning tango are confronted with the fact that they cannot “just dance to the music”. If they do, they disconnect from the partner. Tango classes are built on two levels, teaching people to communicate by subtle movements and to move expressively themselves, so that they can match the energy of the music. This is what you see in highly skilled dancers: they look calm, natural, often unmoving in the upper bodies, locked in the embrace, yet as a whole they can create most extreme dynamics and become infused with the music. The teachers have the complex task of showing both the dynamic side and the stillness of tango.

What does a beginner imitate? That which is most visible to the eye. When the teachers show very dynamic dancing, the students naturally copy the big movements, to the detriment of the connection in the couple. When the teachers do the “small stuff” the students copy that, with the effect that they stifle their desire to move in order to be “quiet”. They cannot yet move freely AND lead/follow subtly at the same time. By stifling the desire to move they block their energy from flowing, with tension as a result. The embrace becomes a rigidly fixed shape. Add to this the necessity to navigate a space full of other stressed-out couples and the picture is complete.

All over the dancefloors we see people stifling their natural desire to move, trying to remain “fixed” in this extremely sensitive environment of their jointed embrace. The desire to move is often also blocked by personal difficulties. Shyness, fear of exposure, fear of failure, fear of contact, inability to connect to the music and therefore to get the ideas and feelings to express. We also see the opposite: people letting their energy run free, moving a lot inside the embrace, which does create a sort of a dance, but the communication between partners amounts to two people shouting at each other while standing only a foot apart.

In order to learn tango you have to do it wrong before you can do it right, which means allowing your energy to move no matter what. It does not necessarily mean move A LOT, but sometimes this is what will inevitably happen. When children or puppies learn a new skill they start moving with a simple goal in mind and do it again and again, moving too much or too little, falling over and getting up, trying this way and that, until they get the right reflexes activated and the movement is stripped of everything it does not need to be effective. But to become like a child or a puppy is a very hard thing for adults. It is challenging for people to find themselves novices at something, especially when watched and judged by other people around them. Children do not mind doing it wrong, but adults want to do it right from the start. The quickest learners in tango are those who are not afraid to move, not afraid to loose themselves in movement and music, not afraid to look ridiculous. 

Besides, most of us come to tango after having had a largely intellectual education. We live in our heads and our computers, not our bodies. We try to process intellectually what is happening to us. This is not effective when learning movement. Your body works in ways you cannot fully fathom, let alone fully control by your mind. Do you control your digestion? Do you activate your heartbeat? Do you consciously push the blood through your veins? In your brain there are more neural connections than there are stars in our galaxy, and this is a fact, not a figure of speech. Are you controlling them? Or are they controlling you? Stiffness in a dancer is often the result of his or her conscious mind trying to understand and control every movement BEFORE it happens, which is simply not possible. Your mind is not running the show, it only helps you to understand the intention and the mechanics of the movement. This is why leaders implore their followers: “Please stop thinking!”

To be able to “become dance” you have to allow your whole being to abandon itself to the energy that you are generating yet stay fully present and aware of what is happening. Mere abandonment will lead to automatic movement. Aware abandonment will create true dance and true bliss we are all looking for in tango. Dance is that special state of being called “flow”. It sounds difficult, but actually it is not. To flow is the most natural thing for a human being to do. It is what you do when you are not trying to control what happens, when you are not “efforting”. You need to become a dancer before you can become an advanced dancer, and to dance means to embody each movement fully. This way, no matter your skill, you can dance from your first tango day to the last. Isn’t it good news?

RUSSIAN, CHINESE, CZECH, GERMAN, POLISH

January 10, 2014

In my years as a dancer and teacher I heard a lot of critique on the English terms “lead” and “follow” and their derivatives in other languages. The dictionary defines “ to lead” as “to guide on a way especially by going in advance”, “to direct on a course or in a direction” and “to serve as a channel for something”. The verb “to follow” is defined as “to go or come after or behind (someone or something)”. As you can see, in their general sense those words describe quite precisely the roles in tango and are devoid of any emotional connotation. Yet, many people dislike them.

Social tango is a dance of IMPROVISING TOGETHER, is it, in a sense, a conversation between two people. As in any conversation, someone has to start and the other to join in. In other languages the word “leading” is sometimes replaced by “guiding” or “marking”. All terminology points, however, to the basic concept of “proposing a direction” for the leaders and “going in the proposed direction” for the followers.

Throughout the human history the words “leader” and “follower” have been used to denote concepts that have very little to do with the word’s’ original sense. The “lead and follow” model has been often confused with the “order and obey” model. In the “order and obey” model the dominant party forces the other one into compliance by threatening its survival, either literally or within a certain social context. These historical connotations are sometimes very strong. Those few times that I had to teach a class in German, I could never bring myself to pronounce the term “Führer”. In truth, the “order and obey” model has nothing to do with leading and following. If you want to have an interesting conversation or a genuinely connected dance, the “order and obey” model will never work.

Put simply, the leader in tango is responsible for the couple’s movement in space. He proposes a pattern, a certain “design”, and gives enough information to the other person to be able to follow. Leading is about DIRECTION. The follower’s role in tango is to feel the proposed direction and to go there actively, without hesitation. Following is about TRUST. This is why many teachers, sick of the lead-and-follow confusion, use the words “proposing” and “responding”. However, to me the words “lead” and “follow” are more apt to express the roles. A good leader is not solely proposing something, he is responsible for the couple as a whole, he will decide where and how to go depending on the circumstances and, not unimportantly, on the follower’s abilities and characteristics. Following is not merely responding to a suggestion, it is about carrying out the movement, fully expressing yourself, your own musicality, your own energy within a given pattern. In the interplay between the two roles there is also a paradox: once the follower has understood the direction and speed, she “leads” the couple by the simple act of moving, while the leader “follows” her in order to keep the connection.

When a woman comes to tango, very often all this is not clear to her. The word “follow” in its “obey” connotation is revolting to any modern, independent, let alone feminist woman. When the teacher tells her to “stop thinking and start following”, the confusion is complete. The real message is to let go of rational interpretation and to trust the invitation to move. The woman understands, however: “I have to become a passive non-thinking object that the leader will move around” and therefore has two options. Either she becomes an object or she revolts, which is equal to saying “I can only have a conversation with you if I am the one talking”.

When a woman chooses the “obey” model, what happens is that she starts waiting for the leader to indicate the way from the beginning to the end of her movement. This makes her slow, so the only choice the leader has is to either stop dancing or to use force to move her around. This establishes a vicious circle: the less the woman moves, the more the man pushes, and the more he pushes, the less she is compelled to move. This way of following is like going on a walk with a friend, but expecting your friend to tell you where to put your foot at every step. When a woman chooses to become a passive object, she condemns her leader to a life of moving furniture. When a leader mistakes his follower for a piece of furniture, he condemns himself to being refused by the majority of available dancers.

In truth, following has nothing to do with passivity, just as leading has nothing to do with force. Following is a very active role, ever-ready, ever-flowing where there is available space, ever-listening and ever-reacting, always open to impulse and suggestion. It is like being a river: as long as there is space to flow the river will flow, it does not need anyone to push it. To follow means to suspend judgement, to trust where the other person is taking you and to GO THERE with your whole being, in your own way, expressing yourself in the movement. Following is a choice, it is about collaboration. If I choose not to follow, to move me a man would need to knock me over.

My favorite trick to play on a beginner student is to lead him to walk while touching only slightly or not at all. His utter amazement at me (tiny woman!) leading him (a big and clumsy man!) to move in the direction I want points to the “magic” of tango. Leading is not only about showing the way, it is also about using the other person’s willingness to move for your creative purposes. Many teachers like to compare leading to driving a car, and if I got money every time I was called a Ferrari, I could probably afford one by now. I often say that leading is like playing with a child. A child has his or her own energy, will and ideas on what s/he wants to do. The trick is to lead THIS child into playing WITH YOU.

 Another reason why we often confuse “lead and follow” with “order and obey” is because both are expressions of the same energies, which, for the sake of simplicity, I will call “masculine” and “feminine”.

 (This point and the following paragraph have raised quite some discussion and it was pointed out, and rightly so, that calling these energies “masculine” and “feminine” relates them too much to biological sexes or gender. This is not my intention, as I see these energies as separate from biology. It is also true, however, that it is too simplistic to explain things with just two main energies, and that we as humans are more complex. I agree. The following paragraph is what I myself have been thinking so far about the two roles in tango and the two energies, or qualities. I am aware that I might be completely wrong here.)

Masculine energy is the energy of DOING. It is about acting, going, exploring, creating, destroying. Leading is a healthy expression of this energy, it is about having goals, steering, channeling, responsibility and navigation. Feminine energy is the energy of BEING. It is about flowing where there is available space, filling it out, settling into it, it is about intuition, feeling, trust, giving birth to new things and transformation. One of the most beautiful aspects of tango is that it allows these two energies to express themselves while playing with each other. Yet, as a true leader, you will need of “drop” of feminine energy in you and as a true follower you will need a “drop” of masculine energy. Why is that so? Because, when taken into extremes, these two energies become about “order and obey”. Masculine energy at its extreme results in violence and feminine energy in total passivity. The first creates a macho and the second creates a princess. In dance it means that a man squeezes a woman in his arms and drags her around the dancefloor, while she pedals quickly with her feet to avoid being run over. It is how tango was often danced when I started learning it. In those days the popular saying was “every mistake is the leader’s fault”, which I found a curious statement, for if it were true, I thought, then the leaders would be happy to dance with just anybody. Yet it was obvious that the leaders preferred to invite followers who danced well. You will, alas, still see the “macho/princess” way of dancing in many places you go to, but it is important to understand that the problem is not in the words but in how people interpret them. The words are quite perfect. 

Each of us has both energies, masculine and feminine, and their balance is not only different in every being, but in every situation. When I lead, I express more of my “masculine” energy; when I follow, more of the “feminine”. A woman who likes to lead is not necessarily a militant feminist, she just likes leading. A man who likes to follow is not necessarily submissive or a homosexual, he just likes that particular state of being that following induces. If you prefer different words, then choose the ones you find more fitting. In the end it is about how you apply them in your dance that matters.

RUSSIAN, FRENCH, TURKISH, GERMAN, CHINESE, MACEDONIAN, POLISH

November 18, 2013