by Valeria Solomonff
Published October 2025

Argentine tango can provide a model to update how we learn, choreograph, practice, and appreciate dance. For centuries, we have been told that you need to first become skillful as an individual dancer, and then, maybe, once you master your body, you can partner. However, the opposite is also true: the more skillful you are as a partner, the better individual technique you will acquire. There is no reason to believe there is a preferred order in which all of us should learn and practice. 

Culturally, we have fewer references for the latter, but that’s just because historically that approach wasn’t given a chance, and as relational ontology posits, there are no entities, only relations. The fact is that the two approaches reinforce one another. The added benefit of partnering is its way of informing organization of axis and communication without excessive tension, responsiveness, calibration of energy, trust, curiosity about the particularities of every individual, attentiveness and patience, to name a few. In a time of uncertainty about our place in the world, it is not a small thing to focus on what makes life worth living. So why not letting dance remind the world about embody connection? 

Connection can be taught and acquired, and Argentine tango is the perfect model for it. The aesthetics of tango is so strong and so imbued in a theatricality of man-woman relation, that it has been easy to dismiss how incredibly innovative its radical way to submit to lead and follow is. The most important legacy is tango’s social form of improvisation, not its gendered presentation. 

What do I mean by “radical” lead-follow generation of movement? In tango, there are no basic steps, no set counts, and no set patterns; there is weight, direction, intensity, and timing to be communicated. The dance is guided by a few constraints: the embrace, the verticality, and the simplicity of walking together through each other’s axis. These constraints limit freedom, but they warrant clear feedback. 

Deeply understood lead-follow connection means revising the old model of active-passive. Is it passive to be responsible for HOW we move? Is WHAT we do defined in a void? In tango to walk together as one, requires a commitment to the center line: the line underneath the center  of mass. For the beginner leader, the first feeling when having to direct the walk to and through the center line of the follower, is most likely fear of being abrupt, but unless you commit to the center line, walking forward will be ineffective. So, you need to develop “effective action”: intentional, clear and precise; never brutal. 

For the follower, walking back is not backing off. You are walking back with full presence forward. You are only making space underneath yourself, lending your legs, so to speak, so that the final moment of the process, the shift of weight, is timed exactly with the leader. You develop a walk that is gradual, that does not start by your volition to move but rather, by your determination to remain. In other words, you aren’t taking an order: “go back”; you are transforming your movement so that you become one with the leader,  making more “granular” the process of shifting weight. Is that passive? This is pure artifice, it’s “doing”, it’s intentional. Without this attention on the how, the leader would find a wall. The HOW will determine the next WHAT, and together they will come out with WHEN and WHERE.  

If we could let go of the need to entertain, to impress, and to assert hierarchy, the dance world could shift its attention from a visual/shape-based approach to a visceral/intentional one. From the search to respond to the perfect line, to the sensed feedback that arises from interconnection.

I’m in no way claiming that anyone who dances tango is connecting to their partner. Abuse is present in society, and so is in tango. What I claim is that tango, understood as a model of lead follow improvisation, is a good model of education that centers dancers on interconnection, not only to become better partners but to be better dancers (and happier citizens) overall.