Learning to Tango: an Anarchist View of Relationships

I remember taking a Tango class last year when one of the teachers instructed the males, the leads, to treat our partners like puppets, “puppets to maneuver in whatever way we pleased”. Besides being politically incorrect to the extreme, the advice seemed to go against the instructions I’d received in earlier classes—instructions that we “invite” our partners to move by opening up a space for them to step into. The latter instructions seemed, at the time, much more useful and agreeable to me, so I wrote off the puppeteering recommendation to sloppy word-choice and ignored it. But maybe I reacted a little impulsively. In practice, I have to admit, the latter instructions never really worked for me. What’s more, I seemed to dance best when I worried less about what I was doing and focused more on what I wanted from my partner—in other words, when I treated her a bit like a puppet.

If truth be known, although I never became a skilled Tangoer, being an assertive lead came quite naturally to me (as my partner Constance indicates HERE). For that matter, I rarely have trouble being assertive in any part of my life, especially when it comes to offering my opinion about something (just ask my housemates). But, despite the stereotypical misunderstandings about my political philosophy, being a sometimes-assertive person does not make me a bad anarchist. Anarchists are not composed chiefly of bandana-wearing, gun-toting, chaos-loving, mayhem revelers who oppose all forms of order and leadership. That’s a misconception. In my understanding, anarchy not only accepts natural law and order and reasonable leadership, it embraces them. It implies a state in which the freedom of self-determination is increased rather than decreased, even when the expansion of one’s freedom comes, as it often must, by way of imposed restraint.

True freedom, like true creativity (which is really a synonym for freedom), can’t exist without restraints. Our current capitalistic culture has convinced us otherwise, of course, by equating freedom with having a plethora of choices. But true freedom and honest self-expression can only arise under conditions that promote clarity and cohesion—not extravagance. If you’ve ever engaged over a long period of time in any creative endeavor then I don’t need to tell you this. There’s a reason that writing a haiku poem or a sonnet often releases much more in-depth thoughts than writing in less restrictive genres. Form matters. The imposed restrictions entailed in writing a haiku require the mind to go in directions it wouldn’t have gone otherwise. It forces you out of your box. Put another way, it forces your mind to explore—to seek different methods of expression and understanding. And it’s in that explorative process, I believe, that we find our freedom.

That isn’t to say, however, that the world would be a better place if society were more regulated. I am, like any good anarchist, opposed to all forms of obligatory hierarchy and governance. But unlike the laws that regulate human society, the rules in writing a sonnet or haiku were not put in place by force or coercion. No one ever said that writing in Iambic Pentameter is the only way to write a poem. The rules were put in place and adopted because they proved useful. And when the rules deterred self-determination rather than deepened it, they were abandoned—brilliantly abandoned in the cases of Shakespeare or John Donne, for example. The imposed restraints of writing a sonnet are meant to enhance individual expression—to allow one to break out of the constraints imposed by social engineering—and as such they are followed voluntarily—so long as they’re needed and out of complicity rather than obedience. Voluntary restraints serve more as guides—guides in constant flux as situations change—than as eternal laws or commands. They don’t determine our behavior, they challenge us. And without challenge, the mind—the whole person, really—is dulled by habit and turns to stone; it becomes fixed and confined, a stereotype. Challenging restraints are put in place to stretch the imagination and to goad us into a clearer and less rigid vision of who we are—to push us past ourselves—not to limit our potential.

There’s an old Buddhist koan which says that if you meet the Buddha on the street, kill him. The idea is that you shouldn’t cling to anything, not even Buddhism, in your quest for self-realization and enlightenment. A Buddhist may subject herself to the most rigorous and confining disciplines imaginable, but when the disciplines no longer serve her interests—when they no longer expand her awareness but instead hold her back—she abandons them. Both her submission and her renunciation are voluntary. In Buddhist philosophy, you’re taught never to cling to anything, because clinging implies ownership, and ownership, in an ego-free/self-free world, is a delusion. At the same time, the disciplines of Buddhism aren’t meant to be discarded or devalued (not too soon, anyway); they are, in fact, essential tools of the practice. The same is true of the rules of Tango.

And though I didn’t stay with the Tango long enough to come to any dependable conclusions about what learning methodology works best, I imagine successful long term practitioners see their art as something akin to writing a haiku poem or practicing calligraphy or jazz or any of the other improvisational arts. All improvisation requires boundaries and limitations. So whether you’re leading or following in the Tango, you have to limit your freedom—limit your freedom to find your freedom, that is, through improvisation. For me, leading never felt like bullying or controlling. It felt like a constraint, sure, but a constraint that forced me to focus, to be more in the moment and thereby more myself and more in tune with my partner—more free—and more free of myself. And I imagine following requires a similar intensity of concentration and self-abandonment—an opening for reinvention—and feels equally as liberating. In both cases, the constraints allow for more not less freedom of expression. When you watch the Tango experts, you don’t get a sense of one person leading another. Expert couples seem to move together without any conscious will to be regulated by and with each partner giving to the other as much as he or she receives. Neither does there seem to be any loss of individual expression. Both followers and leaders have distinctive personalities and styles no matter whom they’re dancing with. The constraints, once mastered, I suspect, hardly feel like constraints at all. Instead, they suppress the ego so that what really matters—the dance—becomes more prominent. Like carrying weights while jogging, the dance strengthens the body through impediment; it gives one the strength to move as the imagination desires: both back home to our essential selves and far away and beyond.

It takes years of training to dance like an anarchist.


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When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost – and will produce its richest ideas."
— T.S. Eliot