[Tango-L] Tango in the Spring - festival report

[Brick Robbins]

> Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2008 13:45:25 -0700 (PDT)
> From: "Trini y Sean (PATangoS)" <patangos at yahoo.com>
>>  But if a woman dresses well and looks like she could be a fun person on the dance floor, then she can still get asked.  If she's sitting there sulking, no one is going to want to ask her to dance.  If the newbie participants in the classes, he/she can find people who may be more willing dance partners.<<

A couple of thoughts on this..

More so that other dances I've done, I think Tango is about building a
few good relationships rather than many superficial ones. I think that
the closeness of the embrace, and the relatively small number of dance
partners in an evening due to the tanda fosters this. I think it helps
newbies to "build relationships" off the dance floor to get dances.

This is a "social dance" and I often think that too much emphasis is
placed on the "dance" part and not enough on the "social" part. I
sometimes doubt the value of group classes for improving dance skills,
especially for follows, but classes are great places to build social
relationships. Classes help may get dances, but so does simply
appearing friendly and approachable.

Which leads to my second point: sulking REALLY hurts. I was at a
festival earlier this year, and there were more women than men,
especially at one afternoon "alternative" milonga. There was the
customary wall of tables around the dance floor and I remember looking
out at this crowd of unhappy, no,  ANGRY women sitting on the other
side of the wall. I was uncomfortable just looking at them.

I was not about to venture out into that sea of hostility and ask a
random woman to dance, and incur the wrath of the women around her for
not asking them. Even the cabeceo was uncomfortable: selecting one
face in a field of stares all demanding "Pick Me!, Pick Me!"

So I mostly danced with my friends, where normally at a festival I try
to dance with people I don't know, or at least don't see often. I did
dance with a few ladies with "happy" faces that had positioned
themselves near the breaks in the wall so I didn't have to run the
gauntlet to get to them.

I once took a class in "milonga etiquette, tips and tricks to get
better dances" taught by Alex Krebs in Portland. Minute per minute and
dollar per dollar, it was one of the best workshops I've ever taken.
There are some "special" social things about Tango that I think are
just not obvious to people raised outside of BsAs.

All IMHO, YMMV.