When I was an Itty Bitty Tango Miles, I was not a fan of close embrace! Truth be told, I hated it. Let me explain:
I started out learning open embrace and thought that that was how people were supposed to dance. I hadn’t actually been to a milonga yet, so what did I know ? My teacher was all-knowing, and I trusted him to teach me what I needed to know in order to dance Tango.
Fast forward 6 weeks later after learning about the music (a bit) and a piece of vocabulary that didn’t have a name yet. Because as my then tango teacher, Daniel Trenner, called it the ‘Irregular Piece of Tango Vocabulary’. He wanted to build me differently than what he saw constantly. That piece of vocabulary became known as The Golden Nugget of Tango. If you’re curious, you can see a version of it here >
I would later rename the vocabulary because of its multiple properties that I had discovered while trying to teach it to a room full of people. That story, or a piece of it, is in my book > ‘Confessions of a Retired Tango Teacher’ (https://library.tangotopics.com/shop/confessions/).
Moving on, when I went to the Milonga and saw that everyone was dancing very differently than what I had been taught, I was embarrassed to dance what I knew. Honestly, I was furious with Daniel. So I sat and watched people dancing, what I later learned was called > ‘Close Embrace’.
I felt like I had been misinformed by Daniel. Further, what he had been teaching me, the steps, weren’t useful at all. They weren’t, because of a misunderstanding I had, again the full story is in my book.
After I cleared up the misunderstanding, I begged Daniel to teach me Close Embrace dancing because I didn’t want to look like an idiot. He steadfastly refused for a variety of reasons. That was until I had signed up for Tango De Los Muertos and was scheduled to leave in 2 hours for the weekend. At which point he relented and ‘taught me’ Close Embrace.
HA!
Just as a sidebar, you can’t learn the nuances of close embrace dancing in under 2 hours. It’s not possible. You can learn the basic structures of it in that time. True. But you must be properly trained to unlearn what you have learned about tango, about your walk, and about hyperawareness. Your instinct is to clamp onto someone because that’s what you see. That instinct comes from a variety of factors, not the least of which is because you are not stable. As well as the desire to control someone’s uncontrollable motions to keep them close so that things don’t get out of control. Over time, those reasonings fade away, and you learn to manage things, just to keep doing what keeps you close and safe. What no one tells you is that there is a different way. One that requires you to generate stability on your own, without hanging, pulling, pushing, or squeezing. Further, what no one tells you is that the words to describe this experience are insanely difficult for you to even comprehend. Even this description is hard for you to imagine what you’re currently doing from the perspective of what I now teach > The lightest of touch and NO PHYSICAL PRESSURE AT ALL is required. I didn’t know that at the time. I had to learn it the hard way through a myriad of hard tango life lessons and multiple personally gutting embarrassments that left me unable to function. I digress.
I went to Tango De Los Muertos and, now armed with this knowledge, I went to the opening night of the Festival. I confidently cabeceo’d my first partner. Stepped onto the dance floor with her and went into close embrace the way that I had been taught. I immediately regretted it. Why ? The Follower hung on me with all her weight. I literally had to hold her up. Every step was ‘thud, thud, thud’. Every motion was wild and uncontrolled. I led a turn and she went away from me. I almost toppled over. I tensed up and tried to control the madness; otherwise, I was going to hit people. She just kept on. I tried to do what Daniel had taught me, but I failed. The tanda ended and I walked her back to her table. Thanked her kindly. And then went to sob for a few minutes until I regrouped. About a half hour had passed before I cabeceo’d again. Another woman. And it was the same story. Not as bad, but pretty damned close.
Once I recovered from that one, I called Daniel and asked him what was up ? Why was this happening ? He told me to keep trying and hung up; he had company. I tried again, and again, and again. All varying levels of hanging, pulling, pushing, squeezing, and compressing. Some with all of their weight on me, some with using their arms and me to stabilize themselves, some with a vice grip of an embrace that could best be described as being manhandled. And this was supposed to be ‘fun’ ?
The rest of that weekend while dancing close embrace, I tried to avoid it as much as possible because I just couldn’t function with someone hanging, or pushing, or using their arms to stabilize themselves. It seemed that everyone else was having fun, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t stand it. I went back to Northampton, and lessons with Daniel and explained what had happened. And Daniel told me that not everyone has the same idea of what ‘Close Embrace’ means. We spent weeks exploring different ideas, but in the end, I was not happy. I wouldn’t be happy with Close Embrace dancing for another 9 months at that point in my tango development.
Several things had to happen to me (the aforementioned embarrassing things) in order for me to change my perceptions and understanding of what I was doing and who I was dancing with. Most notably, I had to unlearn that what Daniel had taught me about close embrace, which was slightly out of date. Further, I had to learn that what I was doing as a Follower was exactly the same as what Followers were doing to me! Further still, I had to have a Follower literally leave me on the dance floor because my embrace was so compressive that it gutted me. That singular embarrassment changed me in an instant. It was a painful but necessary lesson.
All of those things forced me to redirect my education with my 7 different tango teachers in San Francisco (at the time) towards a better embrace format. A format that wasn’t so compressive and painful for me or my dance partners. I learned over time that there was a better way to engage an embrace, which I later termed Intention-Based Dancing’. Oddly enough, over time, that idea took hold and became a standard of how some people danced at certain events that I went to.
I mention all of this because of 3 things that happened recently:
1.) Sitting in on a teacher’s class here in Berlin, in English, and listening to the language of how someone else describes close embrace dancing to a room full of newbies.
2.) One of my students, who just graduated from the intensive, wanted to go study with a resistance-based teacher, and I told her what would happen to her. I encouraged her to go do it. It would be a good experience for her to learn the ‘dark side’. Hahahahaha.
3.) I had a conversation with a teacher from the UK recently about where Apilado style of dancing came from and why it’s fallen out of favor. If you have this image of me being an arrogant ASS about this stuff, while at the same time trying to bite my tongue the entire time, and not have my head explode. That image is just about right.
The end result here is that more than likely, you have your story of close embrace dancing, and I’m somewhat curious to hear or read your commentary of that experience in the comments below.