A woman's opinion: "The best leaders and followers are those who are so relaxed, confident and flexible, in their own center that they can subtly feel where their partner is at, physically, at that moment AND adjust to whatever conditions are presented in and outside of themselves, with the infinite variables."
I ask: Is a leader born with these traits or is there a fair amount of experience and learning involved. In which case I suspect a decent amount of analysis is also involved in the outcomes. So not wanting to "squeeze all the juice out of it" where does over analysis start? Probably this question is also the answer. But it still leaves me in the dark. We all know that there are poor, good, very good and excellent leaders, but it seems to me that the following comment could suggest that any leader could be any of the forgoing depending upon: " the truth is, everything depends on the couple, the moment, the night, the place, the music, the space, the onda, what I had for dinner and did earlier in the day, as well as him/her." Does this mean that as far as the dance is concerned, technically correct steps and technique have comparably little influence on the quality of the dance for the follower? That a beautiful consumation of the dance is more dependent on external and unpredictable influences? A further quote: "A good follower is a simple creature." (And I don't believe pigs fly either.) "All we ask is that you, simply....whatever your particular style of dance may be...be sensitive to our "signs"; don't bump us into other people/furniture, constantly or grope us; stay on the beat and try not to bore us with infinitely repetetive/inappropriate, steps/patterns. Everything after that is "Gold"." At the risk of being over analytical, what does "sensitive to our "signs"" mean? And "infinitely inappropriate steps"? Whilst I totally understand and share the concept of dnb's comments, I simply can't empathise with them, as they're too ethereal to be truly meaningful. At least to men like myself. Leaders are somewhat like pilots, who need to know precisely how to operate the controls and their effect, interpret the instruments and be aware of how subtely they remain aloft. This is what's required, for them to confidently launch themselves into the skies. I can confidently assume that acquiring and understanding these skills is not "squeezing the juice out of" flying. I believe women are blessed with Andromeda dust, but men not only have to bring the tango dance onto the floor, but need also to be in a state of Tango if it is going to be "Gold". Bringing the dance onto the floor involves lots of analysis and technique. Bringing a state of Tango is even harder. Putting the two together is a magical miracle. Luckily for me who is low on dance skills, I'm quite often in a state of Tango so I have a lot of sublime moments. But unless I have both, I'll never experience a true tango moment. I'm done analysing! Anton _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
