Social Partner Dance

Body, Sound, and Space

David Kaminsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000056570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Social Partner Dance: Body, Sound, and Space is an ethnographic theory of social partner dancing built on participant observation and interviews with instructors of tango, lindy hop, salsa, blues, and various other forms. The work establishes a general analytical language for the study of these dances, based on the premise that a thorough understanding of any lead/follow form must consider in depth how it manages the four-part relationship between self, partner, music, and surroundings. Each chapter begins with a brief vignette on a distinct dance form and explores the focused worlds of partnered dancing done for the joy and entertainment of the dancers themselves. Grounded intellectually in embodiment studies and sensory ethnography, and empirically in ethnographic fieldwork, Social Partner Dance promotes scholarship that understands the social, cultural, and political functions of partner dance through its embodied practice.

1
Introduction

The Four Branches of Awareness

My partner and I have spent our Friday night dancing tango at the weekly summer milonga hosted by Stockholm’s amusement park, Gröna Lund. We are taking the boat from the amusement park back to the Old Town, standing out on the deck and admiring the city pass by as we engage in conversation with another man who is returning home from the same event. This man, Swedish, white, middle-aged, does not dance much these days, being generally disillusioned with the politics of partner selection. Too many women, he feels, sit and wait the whole night for their perfectly idealized partner, rather than deigning to dance with anyone else. He does like to come and observe the proceedings, however. In his years of watching he has seen many things. The man is relating to us a story of the time he saw a woman do a boleo on her own initiative, without being led to do so by her partner, and in kicking her leg up in the air accidentally impaling a neighboring man’s calf with her stiletto heel. Finishing his story, he says: “she must have felt so …”

At this point I must interrupt my anecdote in order to allow the reader to ponder what someone in this situation might say next. I would like to think that were I telling the story, had I witnessed the event, I might come up with any number of different adjectives to describe the hypothetical feelings of a woman who found herself in this unfortunate situation. She might feel guilty, or sheepish, or remorseful, or embarrassed, or ashamed, or perhaps mortified. This man said none of these things (or their Swedish equivalents). Instead, what he said was:

“… cheap.”

“Excuse me, what did you say?” is what I said then.

“She must have felt so cheap.”

“That is what I thought you said.”

Had he used any of the adjectives I might have anticipated, I would not be relating this anecdote. The word “cheap” is unexpected here, however, and bears interrogation. In Swedish as in English, the term when applied to a woman implies devaluation as a function of sexual availability. It takes too little effort to convince her to have sex, and this somehow lessens her worth as a human being. The relevant question in this context becomes: how does impaling a strange man’s calf with your heel at a milonga mark you in this way? I will begin answering this question by examining how tango shapes the female body. For the purposes of this example, I will lay bare the gender politics of the system by assuming a normative male leader and female follower.

Tango principles mandate that the woman strive to bring her knees together after every step, and by extension that her feet should default to hugging the floor. The sexual implications of these rules are not lost on some instructors, who may make winking comments about the need for women of propriety to keep their knees together, or their feet on the floor, or their legs closed. At the same time, a parallel principle of tango embodiment demands that she keep her chest oriented toward her leader. The significations of this rule, too, can reveal themselves when women fail to adhere to it in class and are chastised for losing contact with or losing interest in their partners. While the lower body performs chastity, in short, the upper body performs fidelity. Simultaneous adherence to these two distinct impulses is enabled by an extreme dissociation between the woman’s hips and torso, which allows her to pivot her chest separately from her legs. This freedom of movement at the hips itself reflects an embedded ambivalence in expressing the carnal threat of her body while, in enabling that dual performance of propriety, simultaneously mitigating its danger.

When impulses sent to the lower and upper body conflict so greatly as to demand a choice between the two rules, however, fidelity trumps chastity. This means that the man can exploit the woman’s need to constantly be facing him to manipulate her leg positioning and so control her sexuality. On the one hand, he can use this power to emphasize her chastity by leading any number of standard moves that actually compel her to cross her legs tightly into a position known as the “cross.”¹ On the other hand, he can move himself in such a way as to manipulate her into compensatory chest movements that render it difficult or impossible for her to keep her legs together at all, or even in some cases to keep them both on the floor. This may result in any of a number of tango’s more sexually suggestive moves. In a standard volcada, he leads her forward but then repositions himself so she cannot complete the forward step without violating fidelity; instead, her front leg hangs parted in the air until such time as he decides to bring her back into that chaste cross. He might also lead a variation of that step in which he surprises her by positioning himself such that her left leg snakes suggestively around his right in a gancho. Alternatively, he might engage a sudden and well-timed shift in directional energy that causes her free leg to whip up into the air—this is the boleo, mentioned previously.²

By and large, the more sexually suggestive the move here, the more physically dangerous it can be to perform on a crowded dance floor. The cross, chaste, is also quite safe and stable. The woman’s legs join together directly under her body, supporting her weight. The leg-wrapping gancho can limit the couple’s mobility, however, and thus the man’s ability to react quickly to movements of surrounding dancers. If the woman is brought forward in a volcada, this shifts her off balance and potentially exposes her back leg to being stepped on by other couples. If her leg is launched upward in a backwards boleo, her stiletto heel can do real damage to dancers in her immediate surroundings, as exemplified in the man’s story. The key structural factor that makes it dangerous for the woman to initiate her own back boleos and leg extensions is that they extend behind her. She cannot see to determine whether these movements might put her in danger or endanger others. As a result, she has to trust the man’s judgment and vision (literally) to keep everyone safe. In sum, the geography of the dance constructs female sexuality so as to be materially dangerous to the woman herself and to society—her surroundings—and demands that it be placed under responsible male control.

Even the music works to enforce this constriction of her sexuality. Most other partner dance musics compel motion with internally contrasting iterative rhythmic patterns, such as the waltz oom-pah-pah or the percussive polyrhythms of salsa. The regular accompaniment patterns found in classic tango music, meanwhile, are usually too minimalistic to compel motion, leaving dancers to rely primarily on interwoven melodies and countermelodies to inspire their movements.³ The man is thus granted quite a bit of freedom to choose which melodic or rhythmic line to engage with at any given time. This in turn solidifies his control by obliging the woman to defer to his interpretations. The music, in inspiring rather than compelling movement, even permits him to suspend motion in the middle of the dance. Where she interprets the music, it is primarily to fill in these sorts of gaps he leaves her in his lead, though even here tango convention prohibits her from initiating her own shifts of weight. At the same time, the music’s facilitation of danced pauses—combined with its typically moderate tempo—slows the pace of the dance around the floor to an extent that the space accepts considerable crowding, like the bumper-to-bumper of rush hour traffic. The resulting close proximity of surrounding dancers, in turn, reinforces the need for tight male control of the woman’s legs.

Hence, when a woman initiates her own boleo and impales a neighboring man’s calf, his injury becomes the result of her violation of all the dance’s careful constrictions on her sexuality, laid down through her individual tango training and responsibilities to her partner and surroundings, and enforced even by the texture of the music. In kicking up her leg without being compelled to—in giving it away for free, effectively—she renders herself a danger to society. Of critical import here is that these inhibitions on her body are enforced not by individual dancers or teachers or malcontented wallflowers but by the very structure of tango itself as a combined music-and-dance form. Instructors Homer and Christina Ladas, for instance, do their best to mitigate the gender hierarchies of tango by encouraging students at their classes and practicas to dance in socks and learn to both lead and follow. Yet they famously claim that the paywall of their pedagogical website is protected by “The Curse of the Unled Boleo.”⁴ They will not put admonitions against this type of infraction in the same explicitly sexual terms as the man on the boat, but they will remain fully as insistent on its inappropriateness.

When I say the lead/follow system is ideological in nature, that is what I mean. Its complex web of interpersonal and intersensory relationships enforces its heteronorms independently of the social views of its specific participants. The unled boleo does not need to be explicitly named as a sexual violation for its implicit signification to remain in force. Nor could that move reasonably be reclaimed, for instance, by sex-positive dancers as a way to assert female sexual independence, given the actual physical dangers it represents on a crowded dance floor.

The embedded ideologies of any given dance need not be limited specifically to power dynamics of gender, either. Intersecting tensions between class, racial, religious, and national identities also inform the inner workings of tango, transecting the more obvious politics of gender and sexuality. Tango is marked by traces of the cultural worlds of African slaves and their descendants, as well as those of working-class immigrants from the turn of the twentieth century. It also bears considerable evidence of work done to whitewash that past in the project of elevating it to the position of national dance of Argentina, where it may represent all that country’s ambitions toward refined European cosmopolitanism. The drums associated with the African-derived dances from which the tango developed are conspicuously absent from the music of its golden age, their polyrhythms replaced with the poly-melody of instruments associated primarily with the European orchestra. The woman’s extreme twisting at the waist is enabled by an interplay of African-rooted hip dissociation and an exaggerated upward expansion of the chest, a performance of aspirational whiteness that literally compels her to stretch as far as she can from the marked blackness of her lower body. The sudden incorporation of stiletto heels displaces the gaucho’s phallic belt knife onto her feet and instrumentalizes her as the sexual danger in need of control, exaggerates her upward stretch to whiteness, and simultaneously yields to him her balance. The same elements that assign power and control to the man thus work to render the dance white, Catholic, chaste, bourgeois, and refined. They manufacture the woman’s need to close her legs, to keep her feet on the floor, and whatever else happens, never to come off as cheap.

Toward a General Theory of Lead/Follow Partner Dance

The purpose of this book is to lay out a general framework for analyzing social partner dance that marries technical and social considerations. My reasoning is that the lead/follow system is coherent enough across dance forms, and different enough in its operation from other dance systems, to warrant its own theoretical apparatus. I argue in Chapter 7 as to the historical roots of this internal coherence, that this gendered division of dance roles has developed and spread superculturally in a dialectical relationship between a European bourgeoisie and its economic, racial, and colonial Others. In this book, therefore, I distinguish between a broader category of “paired dance,” which necessitates two participants but demands no more than that, and its narrower subset “partner dance,” a type of paired dance rooted in that gendered lead/follow system. Paired dance has developed independently in distinct cultural settings around the world. Partner dance, meanwhile, is of a specific—if centuries-long and global—historical and cultural moment.

For practical reasons, my own research has been narrower still, focusing on partner dances that have been formalized, standardized, and cosmopolitanized by an international community of instructors. Part of the rationale for this choice is that the standardization that happens as a result of this process enables me to make global claims based on local experience. If I observe the same practices among dancers of a particular form in San Francisco, Boston, and Stockholm, I can infer the influence of that international teaching circuit and assume its extension to other places I have not visited. My primary motivation, however, is that these instructors have already done much of the groundwork necessary for establishing a general theory of partner dance. Much of the project of this book has involved adapting specific pedagogical ideas into a more general scholarly theory.

Although this book is conceived as a work of theory, therefore, my primary research methodology has been ethnographic. I have interviewed dance instructors—and participated in workshops, classes, and social dances—across as broad a range of cosmopolitanized forms as I could find. I have supplemented this primary source material with the work of other scholars of partner dance, who are cited throughout the book.

The tradition among those other scholars—which I have also adhered to in my previous work—has been to focus on one specific form or a range of related forms. This book’s generalizing orientation is unique in this context and will undoubtedly be controversial to some. I return in greater detail to the ethics and uses of my generalist approach in the book’s concluding chapter. For the moment, however, I will simply lay out my argument and let it speak for itself.

The Three Methods of Coordination

There are, by my count, three distinct methods by which partnered social dancers typically coordinate their movements. The most complex method is leading and following, in which one person guides the movements of the other primarily through haptic cues.⁵ A more egalitarian approach is that of responsorial riffing, in which the two dancers use mainly visual cues to engage in a back-and-forth interplay. The third method is choreography, in which the dancers move according to predetermined patterns. Distinct dance forms may privilege one of these methods over the other two, and sometimes two or three of these systems will operate in tension within the same form. Minuet is primarily choreographed, for instance, while lindy hop is characterized by a tension between lead/follow and responsorial riffing.

All formalized social partner dances will involve at least some choreography, at the very least as something for dance teachers to impart as material. Some forms will have an associated vocabulary of standardized moves, which may grow and change over time. Most will have one or more basic steps—regular weight-shift and/or movement patterns that form a foundation for the dance’s other mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The Four Branches of Awareness
• 2 Choreohexis: Preparing for Partnership
• 3 The Two-Body System: Positioning, Axis, and Elasticity
• 4 Choreography: Base Elements, Vocabulary, and Basic Steps
• 5 Moving to Music: Social Bodies Entraining
• 6 Floorcraft: Sharing Space
• 7 The Dance Partnership: Leading and Following
• 8 Power Dynamics: Mechanisms of Patriarchy and Resistance
• 9 Conclusion: Social Bodies in Training
• Works Cited
• Index