Feminine Power is Anything but Passive

Perhaps because of the paradigms of power in our society, feminine power is overlooked and underappreciated, and therefore underdeveloped. I’ve heard of men being yelled at for opening doors. I think these are confusing times. And in the tango world, women are often told to “let go”, “surrender”, “trust”, or my favorite, “just follow.” People – often times women – also say things like “anyone can dance with a good lead.” What about the feminine role? How does one dance the feminine role well? After all, there is a difference between how one follow dances and how another follow dances. And from having led some myself, I can attest to the fact that, it is much easier to dance with a skilled follow as a lead, as well.

So, I decided to investigate further. I went right to the source. I began seeking out the women who had been dancing since their teenage years when they had to be chaperoned by their mothers and aunts to attend milongas – the social tango dances. After observing the grace of their connection and decades of experience on the dance floor, I would approach and ask them, “How does one dance the woman’s/follow’s role well?”

One after another, I got the same response: “You never do anything the man doesn’t lead.” I tried changing the question a bit, adding the follow-up: “What do I need to do to dance the follow’s role well? What advice would you give women learning to dance?” Same answer: “Oh no, no, you never do anything the man doesn’t lead.”

Well, I’m persistent, and I kept asking in different ways all the older women whose dancing I admired. Until one day, after getting the same answer as usual, I struck gold! “What do you do when the leads squeeze you or hold you in a way that is uncomfortable?” She said, “No-one ever holds me in a way that I don’t like.” Oh! Now we were getting somewhere! I asked her to elaborate: “I position myself in a way that is comfortable for me.”

And then another evening at the milonga, I sat next to my friend who I asked the same question. Her answer, after a bit of coaxing, was:  “We use the same tools that they use on us (in the embrace)” (arms, healthy tension) So, we position ourselves to create the embrace we want with our partner; to create the dance we want with our partner. The dance doesn’t happen to us! Now this was more consistent with my experience of switching lead and follow at Dance Underground with the Tazmanian devil!

This new insight into feminine power revolutionized my dance! And it better equipped me for situations like the time I was getting ready to perform in front of a sold-out theater with a guy who besides dancing tango, was also a musician. We chatted with the other performers – mostly musicians, none were tango dancers – in the green room before our turn in the line-up. “In tango,” he explained to the other musicians, “I play my partner like I do my guitar.” What?! I mean, I wasn’t completely surprised considering the way he danced, but WOW! I’m not your guitar, my body is not here to be “played”, I dance in this dance, too! So my words, which were not nearly as significant as what followed on stage, were something along the lines of, “I think tango is more like a jazz jam session, where we are each instruments and we improvise, creating the music or the dance together.” On stage, we danced to an intense, emotional song, and I took all of it out on him – or better said, I matched his energy and then some.

The feminine role in tango is far from passive. It is patient, it is receiving, and it is absolutely responding. It’s even setting the parameters for how you would like to be spoken to and treated. And one thing it is not is powerless.