I think that's a simple, common, perception. Tending towards 'introvert' (that spectrum, and 'otravert'), you can learn to 'play the game'. You may not appreciate indulging in small talk for yourself, but you perceive its purpose and play a role to satisfy your requirements. If necessary you can create a strategy to 'work the room'.
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opendoor
Forum Master
Sorry, but this is completely outside my (many years of) experience. Perhaps it has something to do with your personal development in tango, or perhaps you happen to encounter a non-representative cluster of certain characters in your dance environment.
My observation is that at milongas, (leading) extroverts and introverts get the same number of dances. Even poor dancers get fed up. This is due to the etiquette of constantly changing dance partners, being open to newcomers and strangers, and, of course, to the imbalanced ratio of leaders and followers.
But it's quite different when extroverts have their first group lessons. Here you can understand the differences. After just one hour, they've made many contacts with dancers of the opposite sex. Soon they meet up with them before and after the lessons in a bar. They plan activities together and their first milonga visit. And all this despite being still very poor dancers !! Extroverts follow my advice ("learning tango is social learning in the first place"). This means they never operate alone, but in a peer group.
This trait, however, takes its toll years later at milongas. Extroverts have too fulfill and maintain too many obligations and commitments.
TTanguero
Forum Master
Yes, I generally respond by asking a question on a topic which does interest me.
pianistamediano
Forum Master
You're right about the mindset — I think the key is that most people just don't look back on their dances and think critically about how they can do better next time. If we ignore the factor of classes/privates, dancing a long time isn't enough to significantly improve one's dance unless one seeks to actively improve. Maybe at best you'll subconsciously optimise your body and movement for the kind of partners you dance with most frequently, but I think actual improvement is not complete without you being able to apply it to another dancer.
Pair that with the inevitable degeneration of body and mind over time, since plenty of tango dancers don't do the bare minimum to keep themselves in shape... well, it's definitely possible (and happens quite often) that you can actually get worse at dancing (for some definition of good/bad) over time despite being active.
It's no excuse for an active dancer not to keep themselves in shape — my grandmother is in her 80s and suffering from the early stages of dementia. She still goes on daily walks and does body maintenance exercises. Any dancer wishing to remain active in the milongas should be capable of and do much more than that.
TTanguero
Forum Master
A lot of leaders especially give up lessons once they can dance as much as they like. They could then spend ten or more years repeating the same technique errors and – worse – embedding them into muscle memory.
The only way we improve is to get feedback from knowledgeable people, which in most cases means good teachers. Speaking personally, I learn very little from group classes, so for me development primarily takes place through privates and then practicing the elements addressed in those.
For me it was the opposite. I never adopted a tango lifestyle. I have floated in and out of tango. I found most development by group classes and social dancing actively at milongas. Or may be social dancing mindfully. I was trying to avoid the word “mindfully” because it has taken different connotations. By mindfully or actively, I mean being analyzing what’s going on, being aware of what’s not working, experimenting with body positioning and movement kinetics, etc. I used milongas like a practice grounds to get good at one or two things. Then adding on after getting competent at those. For group classes or workshops, I took them from variety of different instructors but always careful of which instructors. How good I thought they were at teaching.
I remember one particular instructor who had a personality that was critical. She wouldn’t sugar coat. I didn’t mind her because she was mostly correct. I know many leaders and followers who stopped taking lessons from her because they felt insulated or didn’t like her direct talk. I discovered that followers were more sensitive to her direct critical feedback than the leaders. There were also leaders who got offended at her. I was very surprised that people couldn’t take direct unvarnished feedback. I remember once a visiting instructor was giving a workshop. Due to lack of followers, she entered the rotation. When it was my turn, she immediately gave feedback and what needs to be corrected. More useful than peer followers who wouldn’t have been to identify the issue in first place.
Privates can certainly help too. But you need to have same attitude as in group classes. I think it is about willingness to learn. That includes critical analysis of what is being taught. I known people who regularly go to BsAS take privates there and yet their dancing keeps showing same drawbacks. One follower I know who has been going for 8-10 years now maybe. Twice a year. While a friend, I found her improved only after 7-8 years. Another follower, also a friend who goes twice to BsAs in year. Takes a privates when there. Haven’t found any improvements in the last eight years.
Tango Distance
Well-Known Member
Opendoor and others, I was responding to JiT's comment below, not saying that was my experience.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
Sure, and that's a valid take on the terms. It isn't the one I use, though, which looks less at the aftereffects of the moment and more at the social strategies during the moment. I don't think that's any less valid, as we're talking about terms defined mostly empirically if not popularly, not clinically.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
And you would be right.
I pal around with other milongueros. The guys who avoid us aren't being excluded by us . . . they're keeping their distance for their own reasons. I also pal around with quite a few milongueras, and they inform me that these guys' "own reasons" are chasing women. At my usual haunts, female regulars usually avoid the weird loners. That isn't to say that there's no dating or other hanky-panky at the milonga – but it typically involves men who socialize, not lone-wolf skirt-chasers. A man lurking on his own may think he has an air of mystery, but mostly he has an air of creepy.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
I think it's mostly pseudoscientific hooey – I really distrust "personality inventories" and psychometrics in general – but yes, I've done such a test several times at the insistence of others. I'm a confirmed ENTP. I'm not sure what that really means, though, beyond "the 'E' stands for 'Extraversion'" . . .
I came at this from a different angle.
I was always an intuitive dancer . . . I never struggled with what I've been told is a common issue, which is chaining movements together to music in real time to get a flowing dance. That was what I did from Day One, and it caused the biggest problem I had in classes, which was that I'd see an idea, get bored with it after a few reps, and start riffing on it, changing entrances, dynamics, sides, systems, directions, sizes, exits, etc. Essentially, my brain is locked in improvise/invent mode and dislikes routine and planning to the point where those things give me physical headaches. (It probably also explains why my politics are progressive in the "anti-conservative" sense.)
These days, confronting my dream of teaching, I'm learning that this is a terrible flaw. I can do far more than I can adequately explain. If I try to slow down and step through something, deconstruct it verbally, or otherwise make it accessible to someone who isn't me, I crash into an intellectual wall. So, since earlier this year, I've devoted my private lessons with two coaches to learning dance pedagogy – to learning to tell others how I do things. Let me tell you, it hasn't been easy and it often hasn't been fun.
This has made me a better dancer, because it has forced me to acknowledge places where I cut corners or just didn't do enough practice reps, and to go back and clean up. But that hasn't been easy or fun, either.
I'm getting the impression we get to choose our ease: ease of understanding/explaining or ease of doing. The other thing is hard work, breaking boulders with a chopstick. A few gifted souls get both, but I'm not one of them . . . I got ease of doing, hard work at explaining.
Based on the stuff I wrote above, this seems true.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
That isn't what I said, no.
I said that extraverts stumble upon "tango telepathy" more readily because they cast a wide social net, tongue-bite their way through countless bad tandas that often happen due to small-talk turning into invitations, and have the social energy to do this many times a week (e.g., I sometimes dance once in the afternoon and once in the evening, several days a week, on top of going out lots on other evenings). This gives them a vast sample they can sift through to find the 10%, 1%, 0.1%, or whatever of partners who are "natural matches" for them, with whom "tango telepathy" is naturally present without further effort.
I'm quite sure that introverts are more gifted for "tango telepathy" owing to how they carefully choose their companions and gravitate to likeminded, less outward-directed people. They can probably develop it with a larger percentage of potential partners, too, given how their minds seem to work. However, they still require a likely candidate . . . the field is much, much smaller than "everyone."
The question is what the numbers are. To totally make some up: If extraverts dance with 10 times as many people as introverts in a year, but only 1% of partners are suitably compatible, while introverts can make things work with more like 10% of partners, they're both in the same boat. But reality is probably closer to extraverts dancing slightly more and extraverts being slightly more likely to find a natural match, with "slightly" being hard to measure.
Speaking for myself as an extravert, I experience a positive feedback loop of energy with other extraverts, and that energy can offset a whole lot of incompatibility to give me the illusion of "tango telepathy." I'm sure onlookers just see two people who laugh and carry on too much at their "serious dance."
JournalInTime
Forum Master
I have, after a fashion. I don't do the "jet around to encuentros, festivals, and milongas" thing because I can't afford it. However, when I scrape up spare cash, it goes toward private lessons, door fees at milongas, tango shoes and trousers, etc. I plan my non-tango social week around when I won't be at the milonga or a lesson, and most of my close friends are tango dancers anyway. I formerly worked part-time at a tango studio and I have aspirations to teach tango in retirement. At the height of the pandemic, I supported a tango school financially, despite being poor, And then there are all the little things, like naming the computers on my home network after tango composers and having tango art in my salon.
There are two things to consider here:
1. Improvement often comes with style drift. A person can be a better dancer in absolute, technical terms while also becoming a worse partner for specific people. I used to get turned down by teachers. Now a few of them seek to dance with me. We dance well together. However, people who were formerly good partners for me like dancing with me less today – and me, with them – because my style has become too technically demanding or just too different.
2. Both people need to improve or the improver's improvements will be invisible. It's mostly a myth that with improvement comes the ability to dance well with a wider range of people ("dance with," yes, "dance well with," not so much). Improvement comes with an awareness of what's bad technique, and it's hard for the improver to overlook that, while the non-improver won't be able to see good technique beyond a certain point, and might even perceive it as bad technique. One follower said that I don't use my arms to give her the impulsion for a boleo, to which I responded that I use my entire body spiral and the natural dynamics of the direction of movement, at which she sniffed "that's too complicated for an ordinary follower."
So, when a friend goes and invests seriously in dance training, I don't necessarily expect to be able to perceive it. They could have moved away from me stylistically or past me technically, in which case I'd be blind to it.
I have observed several neurodivergent leaders who may not be that social and can give out weird vibe. That is only because they project awkwardness. They are definitely not creepy. Usually the “predators” that woman want to be cautious of are quite charming. That is why they succeed.
One milonguero in particular mostly only talks with women, will only dance with younger women (below 40), will on rare occasions talk with men. I seen him for last 12-13 years ever since he took first steps. He has never said hello to me. Most women I think like dancing with him. He is not creepy but I don’t know if he realized others notice. I was once visiting a milonga several continents away. Met someone who had visited our milonga and mentioned this dude. He made the same comments about him as I written above.
I know several dudes who are loners, won’t talk much to men, are good dancers and women want to dance with them. Some of them also became DJs.
So the question is what constitutes a “weird loner”
I remember a discussion long long time back with a salseras (there are more creepy dudes hitting on women in salsa). She and few others were complaining about creepy guys. She admitted if she likes a guy, he isn’t creepy though others might think he is. Where as if she didn’t like a guy, she would more likely label him as creepy though nothing in his actions was creepy.
Best not to mix weird and creepy. There isn’t a correlation except for wanna-be players who are still learning the ropes.
I am surprised. My impression of you was an introvert
No wonder you are ENTP, though I too think all these pyschometrics are pseudo science. But they do capture a language to describe behavior and traits in people.