For many of my dancer friends, steps aren’t just random movements which happen to be part of the conventional vocabulary of our dance. They are culture embodied in movement, a rich and meaningful heritage expressed in the precise placement of a male foot in the walk, toes landing first, say, not just for reasons to do with technique, but in order to conform to a very specific aesthetic, in order to embody an elegance which has been passed down through the generations. To them, toe-first walking (just to give an example) is as much a part of being a gentleman as wearing a crisply-ironed shirt or dabbing on the same classic cologne your father used. It’s about respect for a genre, an honouring of a somatic history. To them, the lapiz and enrosque express a specific pleasing formality when done precisely this way and feel and look wrong in another style, like a T shirt worn back to front: it might be just as comfortable that way and keep you just as warm, but it somehow jars on the senses.
The way in which movements are arranged in time through the dance also has its conventions. As a friend put it: ‘You always begin by walking, then you open for a giro, then you close again and walk, then you do another figure, then you close again etc.’ It’s not mechanical, it’s just the form the dance takes for him, just as the structure of a Shakespearian sonnet, say, is not restrictive, but allows you to connect what you personally wish to express with a much longer and more meaningful tradition, lets you take your own banal thoughts and translate them into something of poetic value, allows you to channel the bard (which is why I always use that form for my own poetry). It doesn’t matter what you wish to say afterwards, first the form needs to be right, the lines just feel good when they are in perfect iambic pentameter. And the dance ends with the partners swirling through a giro back into close embrace, just as the sonnet ends with the delicious summary of the final couplet, just as music ends with the tonic chord.
I used to find that kind of focus on male aesthetics sterile and restrictive. And personally I am attracted to those dancers whose dancing is alive with creative musicality, even if their ocho cortado looks nothing like what Carlitos Perez teaches and their giro bears no resemblance to Portalea’s. (I’m using male examples on purpose, since, for historical reasons, step traditionalists, as I’ll call them, tend to focus a great deal on the aesthetics of the leader’s dance in particular — there are just so many more older role models in that role and they are concerned, primarily, with fulfilling their own part, with their own elegance as dancers). At first I took this for harmless masculine narcissism, and then I realised that this is about trying to embody and represent a tradition, that it has a quality of almost military discipline — perfect enrosques are like polished boots, a sign of respect for your office as a dancer. The step traditionalists are soldiers of the salon.
