Disclaimer

First of all, please do not expect to learn things about something so wrong in tango that I had to stop dancing. Actually don’t expect to learn much about tango at all. This text relates to my personal experience and only aims to explain my (non-)relation with dancing as an individual. I write it somewhat extensively here as I’m a bit tired of explaining it.

Why I stopped dancing

In brief - Long story short

I probably stopped for the same reason I started: because dancing is not something natural for me.

And please, don’t tell me that I need to dance because it’s "so much fun"... because that is how YOU feel.

Previous texts

This text may contain redundancies with some of my previous texts:

It is possible that some information in these previous texts is old or deprecated.

Before I started tango: no dance at all

Meme from mememaker.net showing Giorgio Tsoukalos from Ancient Aliens saying 'Because your friends don't dance and if they don't dance, well, they're ... aliens.'

I had my very first tango class in July 2013. Before that, I literally could not dance at all. When I hear music, I may enjoy or "feel" the music, I may want to hear more, I would like to play music 1 … but I DO NOT feel any impulse to move to music. I do not feel like my body has to move because I hear music.

We actually live in such a dance centric society that this is sometimes difficult to explain. Given social pressure for dancing, I have literally become scared of dancing places. (I have found one well written text about this topic: "Please respect my decision not to dance" ).

In general, I have a very quiet and "controlled" behaviour, so if somebody tells me stuff like "Just let it go because it’s fun!" I will first decline politely, possibly asking what exactly I have to let go. I know this may sound ironical, but at the same time it's a question I genuinely ask myself. Why should my body move in space because some wave is propagating in my surrounding? But if the person insists I may take it as some form of aggression and get really pissed off (yet depending on how they insist). Dancing is not some ideal state everybody has to tend towards. It is a bit like: some people are born black, some people are born ginger, some people don’t like tomatoes and some people are born without an impulse or pleasure to agitate their body to music. When someone tries to force me to dance, it just feels like they're asking some guy in a wheelchair to start running or some mute person to start talking, I just usually don't feel that connexion to music. (In these examples, I only mean that these are things that people did not choose and that they can rarely and hardly change. I am aware that counter-examples exist.)

2013: Starting tango

In 2013, my attention was brought to tango by seeing photographs and probably video on a friend's Facebook account, and that dance felt significantly different to me because it is not a dance where you have to "shake". Much later and after I started tango, I read this page, "TangoForge: Engineers are good at Argentine tango: it's a system, not steps" , which mentions that tango somehow relies on logic and geometry, which explains pretty well why I felt like it was different from other dances. In July 2013, I took my first tango trial class.

August to December 2013: Enthusiast beginner

When I started tango, I felt very enthusiastic about it. I enjoyed following multiple schools and combining different things I had learned through different approaches. At some point I was following three schools at the same time. But that did not last long because it was too much in my weekly agenda. In that time I danced a few times in milongas. I did not feel like I was dancing very well, but at least with tango I felt some (limited) connexion to music and I was able to do some dance movements, which was a revolution already.

I also really appreciated the tango atmospheres and population, this is explained in some of my previous texts but briefly: open-minded, educated and often interesting people, a relaxed atmosphere, no social pressure to drink alcohol or to have geeky conversations, music that does not require screaming to be heard, and even no social pressure to actually dance…

December 2013 then 2014: Starting photography

TC Photography logo, photo in April 2014

Since my teen age, I have been into different kinds of digital creations. Although I did not master any proper form of art, combining technique and some search for beauty and/or fun, I have always felt a strong impulse to create things, which to be honest made me lack time to consume too much of what others create (ex: I don’t read many books, there are a lost of "must see" movies that I have no plan to watch…).

I felt inspired by the works of other "tango photographers" such as Peter Forret, Jean-Pierre Bataille, Ivo Chauveau... And actually Tim who is not a photographer but who was once shooting video of a performance just in front of me with a smartphone. I started doing tango photography. I actually started photography in tango, not the other way around. This is explained in "How I started tango and photography".

And so I had two things I wanted to learn at the same time. I started doing tango videos shortly after. From that point, I really had additional reasons to be in tango. I was not there only to dance for myself but also for photography and video. Since then, I did nearly 300 tango photo albums ( https://thomasconte.net/photography/ ) and nearly 200 tango videos ( https://thomasconte.net/tango/videos/ ).

2014-2015: Growing multiple interests...

I started an evening class related to my profession, which, in addition to doing photography and video already reduced my time to practice tango. I wasn’t satisfied with my dance for multiple reasons so I didn’t feel ready for it. I felt more motivation from my progression in photography, maybe because it doesn’t require to rely on a partner which allowed me to go straight ahead into it. And last but not least, if dancing tango is sharing a moment with one person, photography was also a nice way to share moments and creation with "many persons" at same time. (I am really not talking about the technical act of sharing content here.)

2015-2016: ...and squeezing practice time

Vintage clock pattern by freepik.com

My work-related evening class became a very stressful point in my agenda, add some health problems in it 2, my motivation to dance started to come and go.

I still managed to follow one hour of tango class each week, because I wanted to "stay into it" and I had a good partner (Tamara). By good I don’t mean that she danced like a maestra but we had good connexion and mindset to follow classes, yet she wasn't doing the mistakes that many relative-beginners do. And following the classes with her was fun.

I started realizing that, probably because I was born a non-dancer, I need to follow multiple classes per week to actually feel some minor impulse to dance at the milongas, otherwise I feel like "I’m not into it, I’ll do it another time". I still felt that I would like to be a dancer when I will have time, but then was absolutely not the time.

Another disturbing element for me was that I had done so many maestro videos that I felt like social tango lacked of that energy… This feeling has gone now, and yet I know that tango is not only "maestros' tango", but for some time it had a huge impact on my expectations and motivation.

2016-2017: Multi-cam videos and need to slow things down

I started doing multi-camera tango videos plus some additional types of image corrections, which all in all take very long to edit. In the meantime, I did such progress in photography that my photographs also take longer to edit and I started to feel like I had to slow some things down. By the way I could not slow down work (I mean my daytime job) and I was really inspired by this new video style and my own dance was the point I cared the less about. Regarding photography I started shifting from "quantity with some quality" towards "less quantity and more quality".

Stop sign photo from pixabay.com

July 2016: Stop 1

I was following a tango summer class and, although the class content was inventive, I started feeling like I was just repeating dull movements. I felt like the previous year of "I’ll be a dancer when I’ll have time and less stress" grew me tired of repeating those movements. And I had completely lost that fragile connexion with the music I had found a few years earlier. I stopped following tango classes and I stopped even thinking about dancing, unsure if I would ever get back to it.

March 2017: Stop 2

In January 2017, I gave it another try. But, although I had much more time, in February and March I felt the same as in July. I stopped again, and so far I have no plan to re-start dancing tango a second time.

The present (July 2017)

I’m really back to my non-dancer non-connexion to music. I feel like I have done enough tango movements and they feel redundant to me, but I feel like this has much more to do with the fact that dancing has never been truly natural for me than with tango itself.

For five minutes every week or every month, I may feel like I would like to be dancing again or even like I would like to be dancing right away, but I don’t know if it will ever happen. One thing is like 99% sure: if I dance something, it will be tango. Don’t expect to see me shake on electro-pop-hip-hop-rock-etc., not even to music that I actually listen to at home, because this part of my (non-)relation with dancing has never changed.

Anyway, if dancing doesn't make me happy, some other things do, hence I prefer to put my efforts and time in these other things. And there are still many aspects of the tango world that I enjoy, finding a comparable experience in other domains does not look that obvious. Yet many people keep telling me that, when they see my photos and videos, they see it's obvious that I have some connexion to tango even if I'm not dancing, and it still is a good source of inspiration for both photography and video.

TC, June-July 2017
Last modification, January 2022