Benched Follower Syndrome: Causes and Solutions for Tango Dancers and Communities
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
It’s every tango follower’s nightmare.
You arrive at a milonga.
Your outfit and technique and musicality are on point.
And yet you sit and sit and sit.
If this nightmare has become a reality for you, the problem isn’t your fault. You might just be a victim of Benched Follower Syndrome.
What is Benched Follower Syndrome?
Benched Follower Syndrome is a borrowed term (oh, how I wish I had coined it first), from VZTango. It’s the name for a common, albeit frustrating and dispiriting, social phenomenon Argentine Tango followers experience in tango communities the world over, where followers sit out for tanda after tanda. Even the Argentines have a name for this experience.
Causes of Benched Follower Syndrome
Don’t let a tango community (or Tango Vulture) gaslight you into thinking Benched Follower Syndrome isn’t real. It’s very real, with multifaceted and interconnected causes.
Let’s explore some of them:
Role Imbalance
Let’s start with the most obvious culprit, role imbalance. It’s no secret that tango communities have a dearth of leads. Said dearth is only exacerbated when you live in a location with skewed gender demographics and traditional cultural beliefs around gender performativity.
The math is simple when it comes to role imbalance. If your tango community has a surplus of followers, you will dance less, full stop. Reduce the likelihood of dancing at milongas even further if you’re a beginner or subject to one or more of the below causes.
Location
Some locations are havens for tango dancers, while others are dead as a doornail. For various reasons, tango might not be popular where you live. No tango means no tango dances.
Milonga Toxicity
Milongas take on a culture of their own. This is a double-edged sword, as some milongas can develop a toxic culture, complete with Tango Vultures and perfectionistic standards. If your tango community has systems in place that encourage and enable toxic social dynamics, followers who refuse to participate in said toxicity or play popularity game will be selected out of a respective community’s dancer pool. Once selected out, it’s nigh impossible to recover.
Desirability Politics
As much as we long to leave the real world at the door when we attend milongas, the real world often weasels its way into tango communities anyway.
Desirability politics, or (false) narratives surrounding beauty, intelligence, and ability, is one of many forms of societal ugliness that can plague a tango community. It thrives when left unchecked by dysfunctional leadership and weak social boundaries. Desirability politics is a particularly insidious cause of Benched Follower Syndrome, as it creates hostile and invalidating hierarchical social environments for dancers who fall outside of a community’s accepted beauty parameters.
Selection Bias
Something funny happens when you combine tango’s structured social codes with location; you might end up with a community that self-selects for conservative personalities. While there’s nothing wrong with favoring tradition, tradition becomes a problem when it results in excluding or judging others for qualities they can’t control, such as race, age, or sexual orientation.
Your Dance Level
The final cause of Benched Follower Syndrome is dance level. At first glance, this cause appears controllable, as level can be improved with time, practice, and opportunities to apply said practice. Dance level, and the mission to improve it, however, becomes a negative feedback loop when toxic social dynamics preempt a dancer’s access to the opportunities required to improve.
Why should tango communities address Benched Follower Syndrome?
Photo by Sebastian Dumitru on Unsplash
Why should I care about who dances and who doesn’t? I only want to dance with the people I want to dance with…
I’ve heard the above sentiment way too many times from tango dancers. I’ve felt no less disgusted each time I’ve heard it.
Argentine Tango is a social dance. Social dances should be accessible to all. Tango communities should care about and work to alleviate Benched Follower Syndrome because inclusive communities, where diversity is accepted and celebrated, are communities with happy, healthy, and fulfilled dancers.
Addressing Benched Follower Syndrome
Benched Follower Syndrome is a widespread tango problem. It also has several solutions that can be applied to widespread communities.
More Structure
Sure, it’s more romantic to embrace the spontaneity and mystery of the cabeceo, but romance is meaningless if dancers are going home in tears. Tango communities can fight Benched Follower Syndrome by incorporating more structure around tandas.
Structure can look like:
Community-builder tandas, where dancers switch partners multiple times throughout a tanda’s duration.
Three-song tandas, to increase dancer turnover at milongas.
Egalitarian cabeceo, where both leaders and followers can initiate invitations to dance.
Clear social codes, which can include requirements that all milonga attendees must dance with any who wish to dance. Note that social codes must be demonstrated and enforced in order to be effective
More Practicas
Followers benched due to skill level may benefit from forgoing milongas and attending practicas instead. As informal tango socials for practicing techniques, practicas provide several benefits for the dance-hungry follower. One is that you will be able to hone your skills in a forgiving environment. The other is that practica attendees more often than not arrive with an exploration mindset, where they will be open to dancing with new people.
After you’ve established new connections during practicas, give milongas another shot and see if your situation changes.
Travel
Sometimes all you need to cure Benched Follower Syndrome is a change of scenery. Save your tango coins and shake things up by attending milongas away from home. Besides attracting new leads and new opportunities to develop as a dancer, becoming a fresh face will build and restore your confidence in both yourself and your abilities.
Stronger Community Leadership
I’ll say it louder for the people in the back - Benched Follower Syndrome rarely occurs because of a follower’s inadequacies.
As someone who has witnessed the havoc dysfunctional leadership can create in the tango world, I believe strong community leadership plays a key role in preventing Benched Follower Syndrome from taking hold. Strong community leadership in tango is no different from strong leadership in other communities; some great places to start include intentionally reserving tandas for followers who have involuntarily been sitting out for a while and establishing firm expectations around how to include all dancers around milongas. Said protocols should be clear and consistently demonstrated through action by tango community leaders.
Adjust Your Expectations and Perspective
When I first started dancing tango, I arrived at my first milongas with idealistic dreams of dancing with everyone. Reality, however, has tempered my expectations.
Instead of quantity, quality has become my metric for having an enjoyable milonga, and this means I won’t dance with everyone. Favoring dance quality over quantity also meant making peace with rejection and adjusting my perspective; instead of waiting passively to be chosen, I exercise agency as a dancer, where I have the power to choose who gets to enjoy my embrace.
Have you ever experienced Benched Follower Syndrome? What did you do to recover from it?
