ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the book’s primary argument: comprehensive analysis of lead/follow partner dancing demands attention to four intersecting fields of awareness—self, partner, music, and surroundings—the interaction of which forms a compelling ideological system. The chapter begins with a case study exploring the gender, racial, and class politics of Argentine tango through the interaction of these four fields of awareness. After contextualizing the lead/follow dynamic as one of three methods by which dance partners can coordinate movement (the others being predetermined choreography and responsorial riffing), the remainder of the chapter outlines how the lead/follow system socializes its practitioners to its particular ideological frame. The four branches of awareness operate as a set of concentric strictures, constructing a socio-spatial microcosm of bourgeois gender politics. Surroundings constrain the partnership and the leader constrains the follower in turn, while the music coordinates movement at all levels. Each of the four fields of awareness is also associated with at least one primary sense distinct from the others. Practiced dancers will experience these four branches of awareness and their associated sensory inputs not as constraining or fragmented, however, but as a synesthetically pleasurable unity. This affective holism grants the system its subtly persuasive power.
