October 10th, 2005
Few nights ago, I was talking to a tanguera about the tango embrace. We all know that there’re different ways to embrace your partner in tango: it can be chest-to-chest, which is known as milonguero style, that 2 persons’ chests are almost parallel to each other. Then there’s open embrace, that the 2 dancers won’t have any body contacts except their arms. And then there’re something in between chest-to-chest and open embrace, which is usually known as salon style, that 2 persons dancing close together but not necessarily having full chest contact, I used to call it a V-shape embrace. And needless to say each dancer has his/her own preferences. The puzzling thing for a dancer is that in which way I should embrace my partner?
First of all not talking about the technical issue about our capability, I think the embrace is totally a personal choice, though as a follower myself, I believe we better develop this technical aspect so that we will be able to dance with /handle different types of leaders. Having said that, I do believe no matter as a leader/follower, he/she should respect his/her partner’s preferences. It’s like having dinner with friend. Your friend may want to have chinese food while you want to have japanese food. The only possible options to solve this problem is (1) you follow your friend’s choice; (2) your friend follows your choice; and (3) try to find something that both of you like. For me, the embrace issue is exactly the same. Either you follow your partner’s preference or he/she follows your preference, or you two try to find out a way to embrace each other so that you two feel comfortable. That’s a compromise, something we need to know and learn to do. We are always ready to change our embrace if necessary, and we never impose our choice to others if other people don’t like it. As long as we decide to dance with others, we have to be ready for it, because it’s not only a matter of dance/technique, it’s also a matter of respect to another person.
Then another thing which is related to the embrace is the posture thing. The most obvious situation is a tall person dancing with a short person, but it also happens between 2 persons who have roughly the same height. No matter what, I think this is one of the things (if not the only thing) in tango that we shouldn’t make any compromises! What I mean is that we shouldn’t sacrifice our posture to accomodate our partner:
For me, posture is like our character or personality, we present to our partner who we are, and we dance who we are. When we make a friend, we show who we are and we won’t twist our personality or character to accomodate a friend, a friendship like that cannot last. Same for the dance. We make compromises in the way we embrace each other, but we won’t make any compromises in the way we hold our body. If we don’t hold our body well and we’re not comfortable with our own bodies, how can another person can expect a good dance with us? If we don’t take care of ourselves well and respect our own bodies, how can we expect others to do the same to us?
It’s cool that you are also using WordPress now! Looking forward to some more Tango thoughts from you.
Dear Royce,
This is Yuru from Taipei. I read those bloggers and find this land. All your tango “wisdom” and sharings are invisible power, like those adorable music, to excite me into dance pool without hesitate! Great articles, I’ll visit here often. As a women, your journey to explore “walking” and “embrace” are also inspiring. It reminds me another words from Julio y Corina while I was having private lession in BsAs: “Tango is progress, not a result”. Though it mentions how we use the energy, maybe it’s also a hint to declare tango is a long trip of discovery as well.