Cabeceo and its flip side, the power of the peripheral vision

Focusing our vision all the way across the dance halls, seeking an eye contact with the one and the only one we want to spend the proverbial quarter of an hour of a tanda ... I'm sure all of us remember the thrill of a successful cabeceo. The meeting of the eyes, the soft spark. We also remember the occasional misfires, those embarrassing moments when your supposedly laser-precise line of sight hits an unintended "target". Ouch!

But in this post I am going to concentrate on a different side of cabeceo: on our ability to see without focusing our vision. When I look around a milonga floor, checking who is around and who is up for what, it feels as if my vision stays purposefully slightly unfocused. Have you ever noticed that? Have you noticed that whenever your eyes meet, by chance, with the eyes of someone you don't intend to dance with, you end up slightly unfocusing and shifting your gaze with a very peculiar haste? The task there is not to see anything other than by using your peripheral vision. The direct look is strictly reserved for just one (but extremely important) target. Must not focus on anything else.

The whole world becomes a blur as the magic of the dance unfolds
"Mia en la Milonga" by Mauro Moreno

The feeling gets even stronger once I actually get on the dance floor, once we start moving in a ronda. There are so many people moving around, maybe approaching you too fast from behind, maybe taking a far too risky back step when they are in front of you, maybe shifting out of their lane to the side, or possibly spinning in a wild windmill of a spirited giro and who knows how tightly controlled it is. Dangerous feels, dangerous feet, dangerous speed, dangerous moments of the music, you gotta be watching it all (at least if you are a leader :). But wait, that's not all. A friend is sitting at a front row of tables, and your eyes meet, is it time for a smile and a silent promise of a conversation or a tanda soon? And who just walked through the door and stopped there momentarily, appraising the dance floor or looking for a place to sit? Oh, and look at this couple in the middle of the pista, fooling around as if nobody's watching? Wait, and what about this Mr. Celebrity dancing over there, with an unbelievably sour expression on his bored face - who is there with him, who's making him suffer? The point is, you can do a lot of people-watching at a milonga, and it may be really tempting to keep doing it as you dance.

Dave Donatiu with  Talyaa Liera
at their wedding reception/
cancer fundraising last month 

But is it even a good idea to focus on all the other people as you dance? I can't get one "attention / focus" tango class experience out of my head. It was many years ago, but I remember it as if it was yesterday. The instructor has been Dave Donatiu, then an itinerant tango psychologist, and his workshop topics were all crazy and enlightening at the same time. For the attention & focus class, one exercise was for the leaders or the followers to watch, intently, a dancer from another pair, as we tangoed around the room. Another one was to keep a conversation about something important you've done recently. You couldn't believe how much it ruined the quality of dance! It really helped me understand that intention and listening aren't some abstract tango metaphors. Fully focusing on your partner and yourself is so critically important!

Ideally, it means that one should be able to appraise the dangers, to navigate, and to keep my partner safe, with the peripheral vision alone, almost without shifting the focus. And if our eyes meet someone else's gaze, then we can let it slip out of focus right away... Indeed, I find it hard to observe who is doing what when I dissolve in the music and in the moment of dance. Take a look at Mauro Moreno's painting again. Do you see what I see? The world around blurs out of focus as the couple is overcome by togetherness and being in the moment.

On top of the fortress walls of Kumbalgarh, India

This complete, undivided attention thing, which is so intense that it makes the outside distractions disappear, always reminds me of a fable I read in a popular psychology book as a kid. It was about a Maharajah in India trying to fill a Grand Vizier vacancy at his court. The candidate's test was to circle the city, walking on top of its fortress walls, carrying a brimming full bowl of milk without spilling. All of them fail soon, except for one hopeful who keeps on walking. The Maharajah sends his soldiers to the walls to yell and to shoot in the air, but still the guy with the bowl of milk doesn't spill a drop. Afterwards, the ruler asks his new chief minister: "Have you seen the soldiers trying to scare you? Have you heard their shots?" - "No, my lord, I haven't seen anything, I was watching the milk".

More recently, I discovered that the fable originally came from a grownup book ... a book which can actually teach us a lot more about tango. "An Actor Prepares"is Konstantin Stanislavski's original intro into his "System" of acting, and it includes an amazing chapter on creative attention. There, Stanislavski's alter ego teacher introduces the concept of 3 circles of attention to his acting students. The smallest circle of focus / of attention is roughly equivalent to being alone in public, not seeing anything beyond the footprint of one's body. The medium circle, perhaps the size of a small room, allows us to pay attention to people and objects surrounding us, without losing the complete focus on what we are doing; but when the circle of attention increases even further, our attention escapes and drifts away, and only refocusing on something very small and very close by will restore your attentiveness. If my tango focus escapes into the Stanislavski's largest circle of attention, I often try to refocus my complete attention on a single flashpoint - on the tip of the heel of my partner's free leg. (And to me, tango has a lot in common with improvisational acting, where the music, the verse, and the emotion provide a loose blueprint to what will unravel through the expressive interaction of our physical bodies, and where we experience becoming other, imaginary people in the same way as the actor lives a role).

Keeping our focus on ourselves and our dance, and devoting just enough peripheral vision to the surroundings without spreading our creative attention thin, is about more than just navigating the floor and being aware of the physical objects around us. I also try hard to keep all the social disappointments and slights, all the unfriendly gossip and caustic remarks, outside of my circle of attention, where they barely register in my peripheral vision. The cabeceo power of laser-sharp focusing on a point can make all the bad stuff fade from out of focus!

Tango addiction - a metaphor or a Dx?

Rémi Targhetta. "Dans la Musique"

Discover magazine "craziest and funniest research" section has just reviewed a scholarly paper about the addictive potential of Argentine tango. And of course it's now cited and shared all over the tangoverse. 

We like, occasionally, to muse about our "tango addiction", just like some others may play with the badges of "political junkies" or "snowboarding addicts". When you enjoy your fav activity, and spend much time doing it, and it just happens to be an activity only appreciated by a minority of your relatives and neighbors, then the metaphor of "addiction" always comes handy. The weirder the better. (They wouldn't talk much about "hamburger addicts" or "laundry junkies" because eating burgers or house cleaning are supposed to be everybody's normal things to do).

At the very least, the tanguero was simply seen as "possessed", depicted as a vampire in TangoClay's / Arturo Newman's "movie plot" or as a hollow-eyed skull-calavera in the classic letras of Trasnochando (translated here by late Alberto Paz).

But here we have a study which claims that "tango addiction" isn't just a poetic metaphor - that it is an actual clinical diagnosis. You can see the paper (published a year and a half ago) here. The authors (one of whom, Rémi Targhetta, is an old tanguero from Nîmes, France, and a pulmonologist professionally interested in tobacco and other addictions) tried to look at tango the way the researchers look at videogame addictions, compulsive shopping, or exercise dependence (NOT drugs). Dr. Targhetta was inspired by meeting a guy who left his job and his country at 52 to dance tango every night, and who haven't missed a milonga during a 10-day tango event both of them attended, a case which is undoubtedly an extreme outlier. To conduct the study, they quizzed subscribers of a tango ezine, obviously drawing from a group of outliers. Despite this IMVHO extreme selection bias, the majority of the test-takers turned out to be NOT addicted. And what are we told to read in this? Yeah, right.

In any case, my statistician alter ego was starving for the actual data from the much-overinterpreted (and paywalled) paper, and I found some in Rémi Targhetta's other publication, written in French for the tango folk at www.toutango.com & illustrated with Rémi's breathtaking photographs. Here are a few tidbits translated from the French article for your enjoyment:

The first question of the Questionnaire was, "How often do you dance tango?"

0.4% = Never

22.0% = Occasionally

10.1% = Less than once a week

22.4% = Once a week

32.1% = Twice a week

23.5% = Three times a week

9.4% = 4 to 5 times per week

1.7% = 6 to 7 times per week

(Rémi interpreted the observation that his sample represented frequent and infrequent dancers and looks kinda Gaussian as a "proof of lack of bias of selection". Really. Not like we really know how the distribution should look for the randomly selected tangueros ... but obviously nearly 40% of the test-takers danced A LOT, and were counted towards the supposed addicts)

In reality the tangueros were drawn to the study because of their subscription to the online magazine, and their keen interest in the study of the addictive nature of tango. Fully 39% of the study subjects described themselves as "addicts" (surely in the metaphoric sense of the word), and they left hundreds of detailed comments to the questions as a further proof of their deep interest in the topic of the study.

Rémi Targhetta. "Balade dans l'imaginaire", with the survey-takers' comments

The average "tango age" was 5 years (female) and 6 years (male). 60% of the respondents were female. The subjects' average "actual" age was 49.5 years (SD, 13.1 years).

There are no universally accepted criteria for behavior dependence, notes Rémi. So they lifted the substance-dependence criteria from DSM IV and replaced "substance" by "behavior" throughout the text. (Except they dropped the criterion #4 from the questionnaire, that's where DSM asks about persistent / futile attempts to break the habit)

The "withdrawal" signs were measured using fairly silly questions such as "do you feel missing something important when you don't dance for several days" (when it's clear that most tangueros go to regularly scheduled calendar events at least weekly, so of course they miss, at the very least, adherence to their social groups' calendars?) or "do you want to dance when you feel you're missing something". Typically, high-scoring withdrawal is observed in 80% smokers (who are asked about a time scale of hours rather than days anyway); 16 to 35% tangueros scored high in these arguably confounded questions.

"Loss of control" / "unplanned binge dancing" wasn't typical for the tangueros (and in fact a separate question about hours spent at a typical milonga made it clear that the dancers didn't go, uncontrollably, for every available minute of tango time). But they often scored high in the amount of time spent on tango indirectly (travel, dressing, rest, sleep) and in displacement of other leisure and social activities (with three questions, "Will I dance even if I have other things to do?", "Did I have to reduce other social / family / recreational activities for tango?", and "Do I structure my vacations or holidays around tango?") (I would guess that all enthusiastic social hobbyists tend to score higher on indirectly expended time and on displacement of non-hobby activities? But in any case, no more than 1/3rd of the tangueros scored high on this section)

"Pursuit of the activity despite knowing its negative effects on one's body and soul"

In this section, Rémi asked about injuries and pain, as well as about negative consequences for psychological condition, family, or professional life, but less than 7% of the quiz-takers had any ill effects of any of these sorts. In hindsight, one could have also asked about one's sense of accomplishment vs. bitter regrets about discovering tango, or about eagerness to recommended tango to the friends and dear ones ... I'm confident that the answers would further underscore sharp differences between the attitudes of the addicts and the tangueros.

So, let's summarize: tango didn't score anywhere like a drug addition on withdrawals, binges, loss of control, or pursuit of a high regardless of its known destructive effects. Tango scored higher by the measures of time spent for it, both directly and indirectly, and by its extent of displacement of other social and recreational activities. Ergo, we end up with a proof that dancing tango may take up a lot of your time, and give you a lot of joy, but it has little in common with addictions such as substance abuse, alcoholism, or smoking.