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toe portrait © Verena Fischer 2011

toe portrait © Verena Fischer 2011

Most people in Western cultures find there feet odd-looking without their shoes. It probably has to do with them being always out of sight, either in socks or in shoes. I also thought that I had particularly weird-looking feet, but only until I started to dance tango. Since then I have seen so many different feet of women that I had to change my mind about my own feet. Mine are not particularly weird-looking, especially not in comparison to some of the feet I’ve seen at tango.

The only bad thing I have to say about my feet is that they took quite a beating over the last few years. I hardly ever wear high heels in real life, so dancing on 10 cm heels is a bit of a crazy thing to do. It’s definitely not good for the feet either. Additionally my feet have been stepped on so many times that I even have scars from it – you can imagine what happens when a thin heel of another woman lands on your foot full force. If you’re lucky she doesn’t step right on it, but only scratches your skin a bit. Most of these encounters are close calls like that, but sometimes they hit you right on with all their weight and some more additional force. It hurts like hell! At the beginning of my journey into tango something like that would have stopped me from dancing for 2 weeks. Nowadays I know that she didn’t break any bones and that my foot will be just as new in a couple of weeks, why stop dancing? The same thing happens with blisters. You just put adhesive plaster (band-aid) on it and dance another couple of hours. The pain only hits you the next day when you wake up.

My dance partner from yesterday is even crazier than most. He had 3 hours of tango classes in a row with an inflamed tendon in his foot. How did he get it inflamed? Well, dancing too much tango! Being a bit crazy like that is an occupational hazard, I guess. It’s no different from sports where many people don’t stop with all sorts of injuries, they just push through the pain, because the flow of what you’re doing makes you forget about it.

Getting injuries from women treading on your feet in tango is one thing, as I said, occupational hazard, but a completely different one for is me is when men manage to step on my feet. With this I don’t mean my dance partner, that can happen too and it does all the time. No, I mean leaders from a different couple! This actually often makes me angry, because normally this isn’t even possible at all if you dance with consideration for other dancers. If people wouldn’t be changing lanes walking backwards this would probably be entirely impossible. And so far this has happened to me only in Berlin where the dancing often seems more than inconsiderate.

I wished that tango teachers here would be teaching milonga etiquette alongside the technique as they do in other places. Then they would tell beginners never to walk more than one step backwards if it’s too crowded to predict the space. They would tell them not to dance figures that pose a risk of injury to other couples in such situations. They would tell them that the best way to protect the woman you’re dancing with from injuries is to dance in a considerate fashion yourself. However, maybe that’s too much to ask in a city where all teachers are competing with each other and tango schools even have competitive rates at which you can come to all of their classes with a monthly subscription. Since there are 2 classes in every school every night of the week you can have your pick and maybe they have figured out that teaching etiquette will lose them students, who knows!