What Teaching Tango to Engineers and Physicists Has Taught Me

Fig. 1. Internal state of an engineer after being told "it depends."

Field Notes from a Woman Who Spent Years Watching Highly Educated People Discover That Walking Is Difficult

Dedicated to Bruce, Tetiana, and Kevin. 

Many years ago, when I was teaching at a salsa studio, I noticed a pattern. Every few months, without fail, a scientist would wander into my class.

Sometimes it was a postdoc from Columbia. Sometimes it was an engineer. Sometimes it was a physicist who looked deeply suspicious of the entire enterprise. Once, memorably, a bunch of nuclear physicists. Thus would our tango adventures begin. 

The next tidbits are from my actual notes when I’d be on the uptown A after teaching, wondering how to make it make sense, and would hound Bruce for, “okay, yes, but that thing I said? WHY did it land and why did the OTHER thing not land.”

I process things very non-linearly. My students were….very much the opposite of that. Teaching scientists forced me to reverse-engineer my own intuition.

More than one engineer has told me my brain moves too fast. They're probably right. My thoughts don’t arrive as straight lines. I often know the answer before I can explain how I got there.

Bruce, Kevin, and eventually Tanya would patiently endure my post-class analysis sessions as I attempted to figure out why one explanation worked beautifully while another crashed and burned.

At first glance, tango seems like the perfect dance for scientists. There are systems. Patterns. Structure. There are rules!

And then comes the tango walk. In close embrace.

Suddenly, people who routinely solve problems I barely comprehend are staring at their own feet and at me in existential despair.

The engineers were usually first.

"Okay, but where exactly does my foot go?"

"Well... it depends."

Visible pain.

Engineers want (need, desperately desire) a flowchart. They want: IF partner does X → execute Y.

Tango’s response: eh, maybe.

The AI engineers have recently become my personal favorites. They arrive convinced that tango is a pattern recognition problem.

To be fair, they're not entirely wrong. Tango is full of patterns. The trouble begins when they attempt to identify all of them simultaneously.

Somewhere around week three I can practically see the internal process:

"If leader steps left, probability of cross increases by 62%..."

"If weight transfer incomplete, expected outcomes become unstable..."

"Insufficient training data." "Error: follower response not deterministic."

Meanwhile I'm standing right there going, "or you could just feel where your partner is."

Physicists especially get destroyed by tango initially. They're accustomed to deterministic systems and tango is adaptive/emergent. They try to “solve” it intellectually. Meanwhile the body is standing in the corner screaming: Girl, we are FALLING!

Halfway through the series, one of the physicists looked at me and announced: “who can walk like this?” with genuine indignation. 

It really is a fair question.

Argentine tango asks human beings to walk in ways that are simultaneously natural and deeply...not.

We spend our entire lives learning how not to fall. Tango then arrives and says: "Excellent. Now I'd like you to fall very elegantly." Repeatedly.

Scientists love proof. Tango teachers love demonstrations. These are not the same thing, but they are close cousins.

Over the years, I've learned that when a student insists something can't be done, it's usually faster to produce a video than an explanation.

"Javier Rodríguez."

“WHO?”

Magically, a phone appeared in my hand.

Pro Teaching Tip #1: Always have a relevant video ready. The unfortunate side effect is that my phone now contains an alarming number of tango videos organized by category: walking/musicality/embrace/pivots/milonga/vals/examples of what NOT to do/examples of what I aspire to do/examples I keep solely to emotionally damage my students. 

A few moments later, Javier was gliding? Walking on water? Doing what he does effortlessly across the screen. My student looked at the video. Then at me. Then back at the video. It really did not improve his mood. 

A few months later, another one of my students, this time a nuclear physicist, looked at me with the thousand-yard stare of a man who had seen things.

"Tango is the hardest thing I've ever done."

A pause.

"What the f*** is this thing?"

Reader, I cannot adequately describe how insanely intelligent this person was. Nor can I adequately describe the level of satisfaction I felt in that moment. (I am not sorry!) Somewhere deep inside, every tango teacher has a tiny goblin. Mine perked up and whispered, "tell me more."

I truly believe he meant it too. Tango teaches you motor learning, social coordination, emotional tolerance, rhythm processing, biomechanics, improvisation, and trust calibration. All at once.

The funny thing is that physicists aren't bad at tango, quite the opposite. Many become excellent dancers. The challenge is that tango demands a different relationship with knowledge.

In physics, uncertainty is often something to be reduced.

In tango, uncertainty is part of the medium.

Every embrace is slightly different. Every partner moves differently. Every orchestra creates a different landscape. Every crowded dance floor changes the available possibilities.

The system is never static, and the answer is never the same twice. 

The Hardest Lesson Is Trusting Incomplete Information

A dance lead is never a complete sentence. It's a suggestion. The follow responds. A dialogue, not a monologue, is born in real time. And that humbles you. You cannot analyze your way into axis or the embrace or musical interpretation or trust. At some point, you either do and lean into the uncertainty or….you don’t. The tango learning curve eventually becomes: "I must surrender to uncertainty while maintaining structure." Which, I’ve been told, is basically embodied systems theory with eyeliner.

The funny thing is that physicists, engineers, software developers, researchers, et al., are often excellent tango students.

Not because they learn quickly, but because they're curious and because they're willing to wrestle with difficult problems.

The challenge is that tango presents a problem unlike most of the ones they're used to solving.

Over the years, teaching scientists has taught me that tango and science have far more in common than most people realize. Both demand curiosity. Both require patience. Both involve repeated failure in pursuit of something beautiful.

The difference is that in science, the answer usually exists somewhere outside of you. In tango, the answer is often hiding inside your own body. And tango has a cruel little secret: the more you try to control it, the harder it becomes.

And that can be a much more uncomfortable place to look.

Which, now that I think about it, sounds suspiciously like science.

Just with better music.

And more eyeliner.