[Tango-L] When lead-and-follow seems to disappear

[TangoDC.com]

Chris, UK wrote:
> Jake wrote:
>   
>> That is what my (now infamous) "Prologue to an Aesthetics" was about. Anyone with a semester's worth of experience in actual aesthetics (whether from the artistic or the philosophical angle) will recognize...
>>     
> Damn, that must have the semester I skipped off to dance...
>   
Evidently.

[Chris, UK] >> When the guy keeps his upper body static relative to 
hers, and she to his, thence the union. Within that union, the lead is 
just kinesthetic gesture, only the suggestion to move... as one.

Look, the dance in close embrace, with a vocabulary limited to walking, 
ochos, and giros, is more or less an affair of such symmetry, or union. 
But this is a limit set deliberately, in order to dance in a certain 
style, and to achieve a certain end. This one style also sets a hard 
limit on what walking, ochos, and giros will be. Different embraces and 
different styles use a greater variety of moves, and add a greater 
complexity to the lead-follow relationship.

Ultimately, if you only dance one style, and believe that style to be 
the only one you're interested in, it's obvious that elements beyond its 
purview won't concern you. Those elements, however, are not therefore 
"wrong."

Moreover, we aren't (to my knowledge) talking about kinds of leading 
that violate the connection you refer to as union. We're talking about 
other ways, in _addition_ to that connection, to make it happen. 
Foot-contact during a barrida, for example, does not replace the torso 
lead. It is, however, an additional part of the embrace, and can be 
used-- like the hands in the embrace-- to smooth and shape the motion, 
as secondary features, while the upper-body connection remains present 
and primary.

In any case, the torso connection itself is not completely static, or 
shouldn't be, if you seek to create comfort for yourself and your 
partner. If it were static, then counter-motion movements such as boleos 
would be painful. As it is, we relax and harden the embrace by different 
degrees, sometimes minute ones, in order to absorb shock, to pick up the 
slack, to smooth or sharpen our movements-- to maintain a kind of 
harmony, no matter which embrace we use. The _illusion_ is that we 
don't. But let us not succumb to blind-eyeing the very illusions we create.

Jake Spatz
Washington, DC