Hooray! We’re dancing tango again! After attending several milongas, it is becoming obvious to me that the ladies are anxious to dance and I am getting a lot of verbal dance requests. This brings me to the topic I'd like to discuss today: tango dance invitation etiquette. If you’ve been dancing tango a long time the answer may be obvious: cabeceo, of course, but we all know that this is not necessarily practiced here in America, land of the free, the place where men and women are almost equal and home to the world’s largest population of contrarians who defy all rules right up to their very last covid-filled breath.
Here is how I feel about women asking me to dance: I am extremely against it…...unless she’s extremely attractive or she's a friend or she is simply irresistible; other than those things, I really prefer to initiate the dance invite with a cabeceo, delivered with the utmost discretion. The use of cabeceo is an art, and, if applied correctly, does not affect the mood of a crowd because dance request rejections go mostly unnoticed.
I must admit that when I was a beginner, I found cabeceo extremely daunting. After I’d been dancing tango for five years, I took a workshop on close embrace. It was a weekend event with milongas after class on both Friday and Saturday nights. Cabeceo was strictly enforced and I struggled with it but grew to like it, then to love it, albeit seven years later. I now find the spoken approach to a dance invite to be kind of rude. However, as noted before, there are exceptions.
One of the nicest things about a good milonga is how I feel afterwards, it is a feeling that can last for days, even weeks. I had a tango dance with a tanguera just before covid hit and the memory of our dance together stayed with me for a year. Now that we are dancing again, I’ve come to know those feelings once more, but there is a glitch: I'm older and not necessarily wiser or maybe less forgiving than I used to be before covid. My memory of the night before is the same euphoria I’ve come to know and love, but a poorly executed verbal dance invite from a tanguera to me invades that pre-dawn sleepy stage of a night’s rest where visions of women dressed in high-heels and nice dresses drift magically across the screen of my dream theater….and it makes me angry. I know it shouldn’t matter but it does. I guess I've become a cranky old man.
I know women are of different minds when it comes to asking a man for a dance at a milonga. Let me try to present their arguments to the best of my recollection:
The most common defense I hear is that she won't wait for cabeceos all night and will resort to asking men outright if she feels her butt becoming too familiar with her chair. She's put a lot of work into looking great and drove a long way to get here and she'll be damned if she doesn't get some dances.
This next one is a brute. She never waits and is most annoying. I will dance with her the first few times she asks but I will put a stop to it before it spirals out of control and she is treating me like her bitch. She is the woman who interrupts my euphoric tango dreams and the reason why I write. One of these girls once approached me before the song was even over, while I was still holding my partner in my arms! I found this incredibly insulting and resolved not to dance with her the rest of the night or forever, whichever is longest.
Then there are the newbies who must be forgiven all transgressions because they know not what they do.
It is not unusual for a woman to ask a man to dance at other venues: there is little risk to it, three minutes and it will be over, barely enough time to smell her perfume. A tango engagement is entirely different: it is at least ten minutes, you will not only catch a whiff of her perfume, you'll have a pretty good idea of how long it's been since she showered last and what she had for supper. Not all girls are made of sugar and spice; tango teaches a man why the blind man knows he's passing by a brothel.
It is said that, in tango, the man is the man and the woman is the woman: what does that mean? I can't say for sure but I think it has something to do with the roles we are expected to play. For my part, I think I am obligated to be pleasing and respectful. It is also said that tango is all about the woman, so it seems that she can do whatever the hell she wants and us guys will just have to deal with it.
As always, I write to expose the mind of a man dancing tango. I'm not asking anyone to agree with what I have to say, I am only saying that this is how I feel and I'll bet there's other men out there who feel the same way, too.
Peace, Love, Tango,
sincerely,
The Kayak Hombre
