Tension as Instrumental to Anti-Racism (and as it just so happens, Tango)
/We’ve all had (or will have) partners who are super nice, very sweet, possibly new, eager...and whose arms simply won’t hold an embrace. Or been in situations where all your signals go straight to a set of enthusiastic and well-meaning but overly loose hips that seem to only move in gratuitous swivels. Conversely, we’ve also had partners who clasp our hands in a deathgrip, or forget how to bend their knees once you start walking. Or maybe you remember being those partners--frustrated, unaware, embarrassed, nervous or some deflating cocktail of all four.
What’s off in these universal, quintessential, inevitable tango experiences is tension. Tension in the appropriate places, tension at the appropriate times, tension--not for tension’s sake--but as a foundational ingredient of connection.
In the summer of 2020, Oxygen Tango held a series of community conversations about race and white supremacy in the tango community following the public lynching of George Floyd.
After a particularly poignant discussion about what the future of tango could look like with intentional practices around anti-racism, I sent Magan this message:
There was a last thought I had about people's relationship to tension. And how there would be no tango without a healthy version of it, no connection. And if that helps people understand and shift their relationship with tension--both themselves and others--as a prerequisite for something creative rather than something to be shied away from, then it opens up space for meaningful connection, collaboration, and creation itself.
In anti-racist work, misusing tension--whether via not engaging at all or remaining too rigid to move--is as universal, quintessential, inevitable, and detrimental as floppy arms or locked knees are in novitiate tango journeys. The results of being tension-averse or overly stiff in either of these spaces parallel each other: difficulty moving together, interrupting or disrupting the line of movement in the space, lack of agility in moving together, bumping into others, stepping on toes, injury, violation of boundaries.
And it’s not to say that tension, as a tool, is a cure-all. Swing dancing requires different applications of tension than tango does, and assuming the relationship to tension is the same between these two very different dances is a great way to have a not-so-great time.
So, just like you can’t dance tango without certain, specific timbres of tension at different times, neither can you truly practice anti-racism without purposefully leaning into the tension you experience when looking at the ways your actions (or inaction) uphold white supremacy. You can try to avoid or put off those uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, situations, habits, and conversations, but that’s a different dance altogether that isn’t called anti-racism.
How do we learn the “appropriate” amount of tension to have in any given moment? Practice. Engagement. Like your yoga practice or your guitar practice. Like our tango practice. Books, instagram content, classes, workshops, YouTube videos can all inform our practice, but if you aren’t putting your body on the line, if you aren’t applying what you’ve learned through action, you’re not dancing. Practicing anti-racism has to be just that: a practice based in engagement and action.
There’s so much more to say on this; I don’t use these parallels to downplay or trivialize the very real, present, and ongoing harm that people of color experience every day. I draw these parallels to demonstrate that dismantling and divesting from white supremacy culture absolutely has a place in tango communities, and that if you can implement a tango practice, you can definitely implement anti-racist practices. And it can’t happen without addressing, honoring, and moving both through and with the tension that comes with it.
One of many places to start:
Things you can do today:
Donate to Movement for Black Lives
Subscribe to Anti-Racism Daily for daily, bite-sized bits of education and related actions you can take. Commit to taking a few of the suggested actions per week - start out with even just one if you want to ease into it
How you can practice anti-racism with Oxygen:
Join the Accountability team and help design rituals & policies to change the community's culture around addressing and interrupting harm. Email connect@oxygentango.com for more information
Read up on the African roots of tango and include this information in your telling of tango's history. Listen to the stories of contemporary Black tango dancers. We've compiled a list of books, articles and videos on this Google Doc
Share what you learn with friends and on social media and on our Oxygen Tango Facebook page
Learn about white supremacy culture and consider how it manifests in tango spaces. Read Oxygen's new Values doc, which will continually evolve as we learn more about how to disrupt supremacy culture in our community. What would you add to it?
Do NOT:
Betray your humanity by choosing to still remain neutral or inactive on divesting from white supremacy
Consider yourself “woke” or “an expert” after reading this--or any--singular article
Take my opinion as a monolithic representation of how Black people or people of color feel about this
Start apologizing to your POC friends for how terrible white supremacy is in general (if you have something specific and personal that you did and want to apologize for, get their consent first, and remember that you aren’t entitled to any specific outcome)
