Tropical Zen

I like focusing on leading moves that the follower can’t ignore, or has to work really hard to not follow. I think that most of my dancing time will be spent dancing with women who are not as good at following as I am (following or leading) and probably also with less musicality. This is a normal part of things, related to where I need to live and how friendly I want to be as a dancer.

What I want to be able to do, then, is to lead not-so-good followers in such a way that they have fun, look better, and I have fun too. I can probably already do the first two; it’s my fun that I’m not so sure about. I don’t want tango to feel like work all the time, you know?

My teachers think I should teach.

If I want to teach, I will (among other things) have to do the grunt work of dancing with all the old, not-so-pretty, bad dancers in every community I land in. Everywhere I go where my face is new, until I have a Name for myself and also land in a bigger community where they are accustomed to Names, I will have to dance with bad dancers and make them look good if I want clients. That is the work part of the business. Dancing with good dancers and cute people is the fun part, but it doesn’t pay very well.

Related to my orientation and the strongly gendered culture of tango, I’ve never once fooled myself into thinking that I will find love here. It does not matter to me if I dance with attractive women; I’m not interested in attractive women, nor am I interested in straight men, and the supermajority of tango dancers will be straight men and women (whatever their orientation). From the tiny little pool of tango dancers who are gay men, the likelihood of encountering one who’ll enjoy my freedom, annual migrations, and also my non-monogamy are even more slim. So much so that I have written it off as even a remote possibility.

There’s no need to feel bad for me. I don’t go looking for love in straight bars or government offices or hardware stores, either; when I find it, it is within my community, friends and friends of friends, people who share more with me than love of a certain music or dance style. Perhaps I have higher standards, or maybe I just have more specific needs; whichever the case may be, I’m not in any hurry to alter a reasonably functional system of low love expectations and polite but sexually neutral behaviour. I imagine that the straight men I dance with would be just as put off and weirded out if I flirted with them as I am when a woman gets too overtly sensual at me; that’ s usually the time to bring up a reasonable but blunt reference to my lover, the big hairy sailor in Victoria. (Who doesn’t dance tango, and doesn’t need to. It seems foolish to try to get all my needs met in one person and only one person; if there are needs he can’t meet, what do I do then?)

Several of the women I danced with last night assumed I was a teacher. I suppose, if the requirement for being a teacher is that I’m willing, then it’s in the process of becoming true. It still doesn’t quite fit comfortably, but it’s becoming more okay as I get used to the idea. Maybe by the time I return to Puerto Vallarta I will think of myself as a teacher, and be one.
And I will dance with all the older women, and make them smile.

One thing most people in the Puerto Vallarta tango community don’t realize is that no one is obligated to dance with them, and they are not obligated to dance with anyone either. If they actually practiced this, a bad leader would finally realize that he is a bad dancer and needs to become better, because he wouldn’t be getting all the dances he wants like he does now. The women who say yes and then bitch about him later are helping to keep him stuck. They give him no motive to change.

It’s a common thing, in tango especially but also in the world, for women to give up their power. They say, “I’m not doing anything, I’m just supposed to respond and let the man do all the work.” Well, why on earth would he, then? Is it because you’re so wonderful that he will spend years training at this frustrating dance just so you can feel good for 7 1/2 minutes? What are you offering your partner that he would be willing to spend years learning a difficult craft?

He does all the work; and if they do dance well together, she gets the reward: she looks good, feels good, and the passive dancer has put next to no effort into it. If they don’t dance well together, he gets the blame: “he’s not a good leader, he doesn’t do what I want.” But of course, this is never said to his face. What a set-up. The women who “just follow, it all depends on what he’s doing” are generally terrible dancers because they expect the guy to hold up her weight, keep her on her balance point, keep time with the music, and generally haul her as around the floor; all this just to make her feel good. Yeah, normally when a guy has to do a lot of work to make a woman feel good, she either pays him a good deal of money or she marries him, and prostitution is often illegal.

The best dancers don’t let themselves be pushed around. They move, absolutely; but they move according to their own needs, to their own sense of the music, and they don’t make the leader haul them anywhere. It’s not work to dance with a good follow.

I’ve been looking recently at why it is that someone would want to dance with me. I think it’s a good exercise, to really think about what it is that you have to offer a dance partner. It helps boost confidence, yes, but also knowing what you have to offer makes you more in control of what you’re going to give.

If you aren’t offering anything, why the hell are you dancing?

Last night, Tuesday, I went to the practica at Cheryl Burke studios, this huge chain of dance studios and met Marc, one of the gay tangueros here in SF. We had some wonderful dances, and he introduced me around to other people there, including Christy Cote (part of Tango Con*Fusion, the all-women’s tango performance group). Good times, and I didn’t sit out any dances I didn’t want to. Marc says he doesn’t really like close embrace, but I found it to be clear and sweet and a lot of fun and he seemed to enjoy it with me. Maybe he just hadn’t found the right person to dance it with yet.

Compare and contrast with this evening, at the Cellspace Alternative Milonga, which I had thought was a practica. Oops. I got directions to the wrong place, ended up at a different tango studio (La Pista) a mile away, and tried to figure out how to get to where I was going without having the correct address. The building owner heard me on the phone, and not knowing the story came to kick me out; I explained that I *had* come for the tango, just to the wrong place, and he was very kind. I met Nila who walked with me to Cellspace, but that was very crowded and the floor was just plywood, so it was sticky and harder to move on. I sat down where there was space to sit, and spent the next several tandas with that awful sinking feeling which happens when I realize I’m at a strange place where I don’t know anybody and I’m not going to find anyone to dance with. I hate dances like that, and I was already mildly annoyed at having gotten the wrong address. If I’d been able to make it on time, I would have attended the class before the milonga and met some people I could dance with later. I’ve found that generally, if I attend the classes I find people who really enjoy dancing with me, and it is much more comfortable asking for dances later in the evening. If I just show up somewhere, unknown and untested, nobody knows if I’m a fun dance partner or not.

It’s not that I have such a hard time asking people to dance because I’m afraid they’ll say no. A very important aspect of asking is that they get to say no; otherwise, it’s not asking, it’s a demand. Nope, it’s really just that I’m terrified to talk to strangers, to initiate a conversation without a good reason. I’m not confident enough that I can just go somewhere and pretend they’re all my friends; I’m not creepy enough to prey on beginners; and truthfully, I’d rather be following, and that’s a really hard thing to ask for in a community with such highly specific gender roles.

Teachers say again and again that it would be better for leaders if they spent their first 6 months or so as a follower, so that they could learn what the follower’s feet are doing before they have to figure out how to get them to do it. But I don’t see the community support for such an endeavor; men are easily embarrassed, that they are dancing at all is a Big Deal; starting them out dancing with other men will not have much appeal for straight men. Now, if you had a large pool of women who lead and would be willing to adopt a few beginners, *that* could be a motivating situation. But generally, the women who lead are very experienced followers. What could motivate them to work with beginning men, I don’t know.

Ultimately, Nila came to my rescue just as I had given up and was leaving. She introduced me to a few friends and we danced a few dances, which were difficult because of the crowd and the floor. But we had a pretty good time anyway. Another woman came up to me just after that and asked if she could lead, and we spent some time switching leads about every song, and that was nice. It doesn’t really seem like a good place to work on stuff, though, only a place to show off how good you are. That’s part of what I don’t like about milongas; I’m still working, still playing, and not nearly good enough as a leader to show off. Not really, unless you think simple moves and good musicality is showing off, but it seems like half the time I can’t get my partner to groove in the music with me; usually, she’s just following steps.

Tonight I went stag to the Orange Practica in Berkeley, met Homer and Cristina, and had a great time dancing. It works well for me to show up for the class right before the practica, then I get to meet people in class who like my dancing, and I get to find out who I’m interested in asking to dance. I think part of the problem before is that I’ve been showing up at milongas without knowing the community, and I have to work really hard to get any momentum to ask some stranger if they’ll dance with me.

At a milonga, if you’ve screwed up and they’re not happy, they’ll often put up with you until the end of the set, and then go tell all their friends that you’re a terrible lead. Even if it was not my fault. (Explain to me, again, how this is supposed to be fun? Where’s the motivation, if there is no reward?)

I very much liked the open atmosphere, the friendly vibe, even the few tandas of alternative music. (By alternative I don’t mean Pearl Jam, I mean tango-able songs that were written after about 1959.) Homer was very friendly to me, when I introduced myself and said I was a fan of their YouTube videos; he even helped me get a ride home, which is no mean feat since Berkeley is about 25 minutes away across a bridge, or 1:20 by transit. I feel really positive about him and Cristina, and I’m tempted to see if I can arrange a private lesson with him about when it’s appropriate to relax the hips and get that huge torsion, and when it’s best to keep everything together. I think I’ll ask Michael and Beatrix the same question, and probably get different answers.

I like that about tango, that there can be many different forms that are right. Well, some people don’t think so, but I’m not very interested in their opinions. I just want to have a good time, not be all snobby about someone else having a good time.

The new digs are nice. My sublet is an older duplex, tall and skinny, typical SF in the Mission. Nice neighborhood, too; still a little grimy around the edges, just enough that it doesn’t feel fake. San Anselmo sometimes feels a bit too planned out, too little-boutique-shop/suburbia for my complete comfort, so it’s a nice change of pace. We still don’t have dance space during the day, though we’re working on it; we’ve been having lessons in socks at their place, and that’s a lot harder than it might seem. I keep sliding, in part because Beatrix is bigger than me; and today there was an unfortunate kicking incident that left all our toes really sore, something shoes would have softened. Ouch!

Beatrix and I still struggle to dance well or even comfortably together socially. We just don’t seem to, almost ever. I like her, and I want to be able to dance with her, but it’s just so difficult. We go out on the floor and I feel like an idiot, like I’ve never done this before in my life; so of course I don’t have the courage to ask anyone after that, because they’ve just seen my worst. It can’t *just* be me, because it doesn’t happen that way with 99% of everybody else I’ve danced with; but she’s a professional, so it must be me. I dunno. The way Michael dances, anyone could follow, and feel they were doing well; of course there are things he does that I don’t. (A whole list of them in fact, most of which I forget 20 minutes after the lesson ends. Argh.)

But all in all, it’s good. I’m learning so much, sometimes my brain is full. Soon we’re going to start filming the review part of the lesson, so I can look back later (after I’ve forgotten it all) and hopefully remember. It sure would be useful to be able to do that in shoes!

I just moved in to SF proper. We’d been up in the north bay area, miles from anywhere useful in a suburb that seemed built by Crate & Barrel. I thought I’d be happy to live in a town where there were no chain stores, but these are all upscale boutiques: fashion clothes for dogs, woo-woo-yoga for a prettier soul, Art galleries, that kind of thing. It’s damn annoying and really expensive.

Anyway, now I’m in a sublet in the Mission at 22nd and Guerrero for the next 3 weeks, and it seems like a neat place. I’m very much enjoying my lessons, and also my teachers as people. I like them a lot. Michael is sort of a cross between my daddy Charlie and me: he’s a curmudgeonly computer-gadget-loving dedicated meat/beer consumer who gets nervous around health food, and also a showoff and great physical comedian who enjoys smaller groups rather than larger parties. He’s got this thing he’ll sometimes do he calls “oranguatango” where he does a very good job mimicking an orangutan, and leads an entire song dancing tango while doing it. It’s super funny, and I’ve been encouraging them to get some clips up on YouTube. Oh, he’s also a quintessential Canadian, which interacts strangely with being a curmudgeon, because that means he’s a very polite curmudgeon. I’m not quite sure how one does that, but he pulls it off wonderfully. Beatrix is extremely sweet, sometimes a little too much but then she’ll make a joke out of language or do something weird and funny. German is her first language and she has a heavy accent; she has a hard time with “th” not coming out as “ss,” and she knows it, and she plays with that sometimes. She used to be a therapist on Salt Spring Island, not too far from my lover Derek. I bought her some glove warmers recently because her hands get so cold its painful for me when she touches me. She doesn’t seem to mind her hands being cold, but *I* mind, so I’ve provided a solution.

So there.

Their teaching style is wonderful. Really. Think Jaimes Freidgen’s level of teaching skill, coupled with a deep kindness and the ability to make it all so very clear you wonder why you hadn’t gotten it before. They will tell you that whatever it is you’re doing, it’s right for something; maybe not this lead, maybe not even tango, but it’s right for something. So the students are never wrong, and the sometimes crushing weight of the steep learning curve is suddenly not so crushing. Ahh, it’s nice.

Michael is a professional dance teacher first, and then also someone who likes tango. Many of the teachers are so wrapped up with tango that they can’t see it from the outside, and they can’t see that the different styles are created because someone did it wrong, and other people thought that was cool. He has a great sense of physical humor and has been known to treat his more advanced students to the “oranguatango” display, where he leads a dance from the orangutan pose. It’s really funny, and it makes fun of a weird pose, which some people do in less extreme ways.

The basic premise seems to be that a) you’re dancing with a person, not just doing steps and b) the leader is pretty much just changing the direction of the follower, but the follower is always trying to move in the direction they were sent, until they’re stopped or changed. This is very different from the “lead every move” style, but when I try to lead every move, I’m so busy trying to control my partner and negotiate the floor that I can’t have any fun or do anything interesting; it’s just work, and it’s only the leader that has to do it. Pththtbpt, I say; there’s no fun in it. Also, by waiting for the leader to lead every move, as a follower I prevent them from having any kind of flow; things get jerky, stopping and starting and waiting instead of dancing.

I’m starting to see it this way: the follower is like a solid, weighty ball that moves at a regular speed and direction, and the leader rolls it on the floor until he decides to change direction, speed, or rotation, which he does and the follower responds as best as they can; the leader then responds to that new direction, even if it was imperfectly followed. So if she misunderstands and steps back instead of to the side, he follows her as though that’s what he meant to do and they keep dancing. The leader anchors when he’s the center of a turn, and otherwise when they travel he offers a lead, waits a split second to make sure he knows where she’s going, then he follows her and they collect their balance.

I’m overwhelmed with tango. One lesson every day, sometimes milongas and practicas, we’ve just moved from San Anselmo in to San Francisco. I haven’t met any gay tango dancers yet but I hope to soon, and there’s a gay tango festival the first weekend of July that I want to attend.

I’m really enjoying Beatrix and Michael, as teachers, as dancers, and as people. They’re wonderful! They complement each other in so many ways, it’s like they were really meant for each other. I’ll try to write more down soon, but I have to get to sleep now, there’s another practica in the afternoon and a milonga at night, and somewhere in there we have to have another lesson. I’ve learned so much!

I’m going to start taking videos of the reviews, and post them up on Youtube. They’re trying to get a body of work up there, so we may as well start with something I can edit, instead of more work for them. I wonder how to check around Seattle to see if there’s anyone to host them when they come through toward the beginning of May next year; they’re going through too fast this year to really teach any classes.