Tango Is a Relationship

Tango is an intimate dance. It invites your partner to touch your body, share your snug embrace, and experience your gentle obedience, attentive leading, loving protection, and accommodating following. It also grants your partner access to the innermost parts of you, enabling them to listen to your inner voice. Indeed, much can be learned about a person by dancing with them. How you connect, move, communicate, respond, and adapt reveals your somatic, psychological, ethical, artistic, and aesthetic qualities. The way you dance unreservedly reflects who you truly are: whether you are friendly or aloof, shy or open, emotional or impassive, spontaneous or rigid, musical or unmusical, sensitive or sluggish, calm or irascible, agreeable or disagreeable, coordinated or clumsy, yielding or demanding. In tango, everything is laid bare.

Tango is a relationship. Like any relationship where the well-being of both individuals is intertwined, you must strive to be your best self in order to bring out the best in your partner. In tango, as in relationships, the ego is the greatest obstacle. It is the ego that makes one self-centered, arrogant, controlling, inflexible, irritable, rude, or uncooperative. Tango can only be fully enjoyed when two partners act as one, moving in complete harmony and agreement. This requires letting go of your ego, surrendering yourself to your partner, listening to their inner voice, and following their intentions. You must accommodate yourself to them, subtly complementing their strengths and compensating for their weaknesses, ensuring they feel entirely comfortable and able to enjoy the dance with you. If you focus solely on yourself and neglect your partner, the dance will fail, no matter how many fancy steps you can execute.

Ultimately, tango as a social act demands good manners. Learning tango is far more than mastering steps; it is, alongside other things such as acquiring a taste, a new set of values, and a different culture, learning to be one with another person. Unfortunately, this crucial perspective is often overlooked.