When the leader becomes a follower

Against myself

A vals Tanda with Albert Casillo starts. Although I don’t really enjoy valses lately our eyes cross and I see her wanting to dance to it. She is an excellent dancer and we have danced many Tandas before, so I think… “What can go wrong there?… Let’s do it.”

Now, this kind of valses usually put me in a very energetic mood… one that makes me want to hit all notes… syncopations, and so on. However, from the first moment, we start dancing… till the end of the second song… I rarely hit second gear. I am going steady and slow… really slow for such a tanda. It’s not that my partner can’t go fast… or that the rhonda is full… or that I have some physical problem. Something in her embrace tells me… calm down… relax… I don’t want to rush this. It’s only in the last song that I feel her letting me go faster and get a bit more energetic but again in a very controlled manner.

The whole tanda felt like I was again a small child that is given a present and is told to wait for Christmas night to open it. I had to behave, control, and calm down my excitement until some parts of the last song when I finally got to open the present!

Listening to the heart of the woman

A long time ago, I read a blog post from Tangomentor where he was explaining among other things that the woman in the dancing couple is actually leading the emotion. He also used a famous quote from Cacho Dante “Guys to dance tango you need to listen to the heart of the woman.” To be honest I thought it was just a nice way to say be respectful to your partner… or something similar. I never really manage to fully grasp it… in a tangible way… with a real-life experience.

Well… in this Castillo vals tanda… I think it’s the first time I experienced it in such a profound way. Maybe it’s because I had a different mood entering the tanda… maybe in most cases my mood matches with my partners so there is no real effort needed to listen to them… I don’t know… somehow… from the first moment we embraced… I felt my mood calming down.

Last week a very interesting discussion followed my post about the DJs and if they should be leaders or followers. It actually triggered me to write and post this text earlier than I was thinking. When I wrote in the comments that really good followers in dancing manage to set the mood for the couple leading the emotion of the dance, I had exactly this experience in mind. So in essence, good followers are also leaders. They are just disguised behind the follower role. But all this happens in such a discrete and subtle way that sometimes it is not noticeable even by the couple itself. I am just so glad that I noticed and experienced it in such a profound way this time and I can imagine there were so many times in the past where I failed to listen better and just went on with my pointless monologue.

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango

Obviously, tonight’s Goodnight Tango is a vals from Casillo just to see if you can calm down with it or not.