Hi all, Thanks for the public and private feedback so far!
> Why doesn't the woman just tell the man after the tanda? > If a man asks me to dance before the music starts, I just say "let's see what > the music is", and then we'll decide together. I've never had a man repeat > the same mistake when asking me to dance at another time. If you are a dancer and teacher with 15+ years of tango experience, resolute to refuse dances, and willing to sit through milongas without dancing more than a few tandas, you don't need solutions like this. What I'm curious to figure out is how one could effectively change the social dynamics in a previously cabeceo-free enviroment so to help advanced followers avoiding unwanted dances while *minimizing* the amount of stress and awkwardness which comes with refusing leaders who walk to them. Yes, of course they *could* simply explain the new rules after each tanda, but to do that is awkward and time-consuming, and does not make it clear to the leaders that they shouldn't take the little speech personally. The thought was that if five-six advanced followers decide to hand out such cards starting at a certain milonga, by the end of the evening all leaders in the community will very clearly understand that the rules of the game changed (at least w.r.t. some followers) and the transition time from no-cabeceo to cabeceo-with-some can thus be significantly decreased. In the US people are inclined to accept arguments of the form "it is our policy that..."; having something like a cabeceo card at your disposal may help creating the ambiance that you are indeed refusing those to walk to you because it is your policy to do so. And this may significantly reduce your stress, which in turn makes it more likely that you can succeed to keep your policy and that the custom sticks. > Chances are the good leaders and followers in a community already know about > the cabeceo and use it in addition to asking. I don't "In addition to asking": again, for good followers the whole point is that avoiding being directly asked by adopting a cabeceo-only policy allows them to avoid dances which would be more stressful to refuse otherwise. I'm not that worried about good leaders; especially with the usual gender- and proficiency-imbalance they can get their dances either way, and many of them have plenty of incentives to adopt cabeceo anyway. (By the way the usual slogen "with cabeceo leaders can avoid public embarassment of refusal", even if it's historically accurate, is really bad publicity for cabeceo, for there are much better reasons why a leader, good or bad, may want to rely on it. For instance those leaders who prefer to dance in close embrace and who would actually prefer non-dancing to open-embrace-dancing have every reason to make it sure that followers make an informed free-will choice by agreeing to dance a tanda and have a stressless way to avoid being asked out (that moment, that night, or ever). A leader may offer the close embrace, but no leader in his right mind would force anyone who indicates preference for open to dance in close, and so when that happens he is stuck in an unpreferred dance. Also, writings shedding light on the psychological aspect of the whole dancing experience, like Sallycat's blogpost "The Gift" ( goo.gl/HwmY ) should be a mandatory reading, in my view, for leaders of every kind..) Yours, Gy.B. [Note: this is a resent email from two days ago; apparently the original filesize was too big due to formatting reasons.] -- Balazs Gyenis Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA http://www.pitt.edu/~gyepi _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list Tango-L@mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l