The Mathematicians of Tango

This is not a post about those who count steps or about those who divide their steps with a protractor. This is post is about the analogy between my experience of being lectured engineering maths and tango.

My greatest problem with engineering maths was that it was lectured by mathematicians to engineers. Mathematicians think like mathematicians and engineers take everything apart, put it back together and then wonder why they still have a spare screw. This was always evident when they were teaching us derivations. There would be lines and lines of equations and suddenly the whole thing would collapse. It into a neat expression. Us into a dumbfounded expression and asking “why?”. “Oh sine of the angle over the angle is pretty much one for small angles”, or something to that effect. As engineers we didn’t go around noticing or remembering that sine of the angle over the angle is pretty much one for small angles. We tended to think we had better things to be remembering.

So too with tango. On occasion when I’m dancing there are phrases that I can remember the shape of but for the life of me I can’t do because I can’t remember the particular little equality that collapses the thing into place. It’s frustrating, it’s irritating. Usually because the shape of that particular phrase suited what I wanted to express at the moment. It’s like having a word on the tip of your tongue but not being able to say it.

Those are the instances where I don’t see the link. Then there are times when I’m watching video clips of performances (I usually like to just enjoy live performances and not be too analytical, plus video has pause and rewind) and there is a phrase that I like the look of and yet again I’ll be dumbfounded. “What did he just do, that appeared to come from nowhere!” So I’ll pause and rewind a number of times, being able to play at half and quarter speeds is handy too, and eventually I’ll spot it. Most of the times it’s nothing more than a change of foot at a particular time. But at that particular time it unlocks a whole new set of possibilities.

These are the mathematicians of tango. Those who can freely see at any point the minor change required to unlock major variations.

For the time being I’ll stick with being an engineer, breaking things and wondering why I have a screw left over.

For the time being I’ll just put one foot after another.

For the time being I’ll just forget everything and remember…