Oscar awards and role names

A thank you before we start

After my last post, I had a fascinating discussion with the blog’s community members that was really enlightening. The question was simple. Do you prefer the names leader and follower or man and woman when it comes to roles in Tango? To be honest, most of the text was already written when I posted the question. But I wanted to see if I was missing something in my logic and arguments below. So I started the discussion trying to see what people think about it.

Usually, such discussions can get very heated and charged especially in the context of social media. I have to admit though, that the way that the discussion was conducted was pretty civilized. All sides had open minds. Thus, I need to thank everyone who participated in it. From the bottom of my heart, I appreciate making this one of the nicest discussions I had online. I also understand that the text might raise more discussions. These might also get heated and charged. But I urge you to refrain from this. Please, keep it civilized. Keep it human and respectful.

If you want to be part of the blog’s community… What are you waiting for? But enough with the advertisement… let’s get to it.

Oscars

When it comes to roles, one of the first associations one makes is roles in acting. Have you ever noticed the naming of awards in the Oscars? They have different awards for male and female roles awards. Have you ever thought that an actor winning the leading male role award is better in any way than the actress winning the leading female role award? I don’t think so. We live in a society, where although we still have some issues, we manage to acknowledge that males and females are two different groups of people but nevertheless equal. Different doesn’t mean better in any way.

Now how about the comparison between the leading role award and the supporting award? Do you see that one award is given to a more important role? The leading role plays a more important part in a movie. They are the main character, the main hero. The supporting role is most usually a secondary character. They also usually don’t have as many lines. They don’t have as much importance as a character in the plot.

So we consider the roles of actors and actresses who win the male and female awards equal. But we consider unequal the leading and supporting roles. This means that the gender part of the award doesn’t create any disparity between the roles. The leading and supporting part of the award does.

Leaders and followers.

As we know in Tango there are two roles. Initially, the roles were simply the role of the man and the woman and obviously, they were mostly played by a man and a woman. For some reason, Tango adopted later on the terminology of ballroom dances and the roles were then became the role of the leader and the follower.

The argument for this choice (based on many of the comments in our community discussion) is that the leader and follower are terms that communicate the role’s responsibilities and can be played by anyone regardless of their gender. That is a huge advantage in itself. But what is the cost of that? The new terms introduce a different dynamic between the roles that the gender doesn’t communicate in modern societies. Look at Oscar awards terminology above. In a society 100 years ago man and woman might also have conveyed a similar disparity. But now? If we live in societies that have left behind them notions about gender inequality then why are we afraid to use the terms man and woman for the roles? Moreover, why do we continue to use terms that will never change in terms of the disparity they communicate? A leader will always be considered higher in a hierarchy than a follower. A man could be considered more important than a woman in the past but NOT ANY MORE!

I know that some might be thinking about the restrictions that men and women can communicate as role names. People might think that the role of a man must be played by a man and the role of a woman by a woman. But hey! Are we talking about roles or identities here? A role is a a set of tasks you assume under some circumstances. It’s not necessarily who you are but mostly a representation of your actions… of what you do. There is no clearer example of this distinction than looking into acting in ancient Greek theater. In ancient Greece, all roles in a theater were played by men! If you want to have a look at the more recent past look at the movie Tootsie. Gender names for roles are just labels. They mean nothing about the person playing the role and they always mean much less than what we think. In my opinion, the labels of leader and follower had a purpose and a reason to be used to communicate a breaking of the restriction that the gender terms created. Yet, today, when we consider the disparity between genders anachronistic and the labels of male and female in roles convey nothing more than just gender, why should we still avoid them?

If you take this line of thought one step further, think about a person who enters a Tango class for the first time. They have in mind a couple of a man and a woman dancing to it. They are told, you are the leader and you are the follower. So instantly the image of the man is attached in their mind with the notion of the leader and the woman with the follower. Do we seriously believe that this communicates a message of gender equality? Do we really expect that to go well?

Role names are incomplete

Now I know what you are thinking. The leader as role is also a follower and the roles are just names and they don’t convey really any hierarchy. So here is a question. If you listen to the two words out of Tango context wouldn’t you immediately consider a hierarchy structure between them? How many times does a teacher clarify that there is no such hierarchy right from the beginning? Very few. Why? Is it too much for a beginner to understand? Do we want to simplify things in the beginning? Well, I can tell you that I have listened to this cliche hundreds of times until in a class I actually asked a question and took a practical answer of how the leader becomes a follower and the other way around. Many teachers will use such phrases just as a nice way to make this hierarchy connotation lighter. Very rarely will you find someone to explain this idea practically from your early steps. Hence, when you grow as a dancer in the leader role you may think you are not higher than the follower but you can’t really act as a follower from your role.

Now I am not saying that the role names of men and women are much better. They are also incomplete. What kind of a man is your role? A broken-hearted one? A macho? A sensitive boy? And the same for women. You can be a loving wife, a traitor who left her love, a betrayed lover, and so many more. So any kind of single worded label for roles is incomplete. It communicates only a part of what your role is and leaves so much outside of it. So, as much as I understand the technical practicality of the leading and following terms, is it possible that in the end, these terms take away the essence of our roles? Our roles are human beings. Humans who are of either gender, have emotions and want to express them. A man and a woman are humans and can be easily linked to emotions. A leader? A follower? For all I know, a leader and a follower are not even defining that we are talking about humans!

I am not here to change the terminology used worldwide and I am very small and insignificant to say that this is the correct way to name roles. But if you read this blog for a while, you will see that I also use the follower-leader terminology. I also try to keep the texts gender agnostic because in many cases the gender of a person indeed is insignificant. But when it comes to dancing roles in Tango… I start to realize that denying that we are men and women dancing may in the end take away the human aspect of this dance.

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango is a song that tells the story of a clown who plays a role. A role that demands from him to laugh and appear happy although inside he feels alone and sad. Talking about acting, roles and names, I thought it was the most fitting I could find. It is just another example of how insignificant a role name is. It tells us very little about the role or even more about the personality of the person playing the role.

So what do you think? Which role names do you prefer to use and why? Do you think that some role names can be misleading? Do you think that the follower-leader names might be causing today more harm than the benefits they offer? Let me know your thoughts on it.

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