Staying Somewhere Uncomfortable

Dr. Dana Segev

Publication date: 22 September 2026

(Drawn from a longer article on the topic)

The power of ceremonies within communities

At a tango party — a milonga — the music is organised into sets of four songs by the same orchestra. Couples dance together these full set of four songs, before changing partners in the next set of four songs. Between the sets comes a 30 second interval called a cortina. It is a thirty-second interval of music that is not tango and offers a deliberate interruption that ‘resets the room.’ Couples thank each other and leave the floor. The dance floor empties, and fills once more when the tango music returns. Dancers seek new dance partners by looking at each other and nodding their heads to invite and accept an invitation from afar. This ceremony is an elegant example of a custom within the tango community and offers a unique lens into group dynamics. Group dynamics and ceremonies, in turn, play a role in shaping individual’s social identity and the tango community is a fascinating space to explore how social identity is made, and unmade, within a community.

A small world that shows something large

For over a year, I have been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the London tango community — attending milongas as a dancer, a competitor and a teacher, and writing field notes about what I see and what I feel. Tango might sound like (‘just’) another community among many for researching group dynamics. Yet, there are four factors that intertwine in the tango community, which make it an unusually rich and complex case study:

• Social feedback arrives in enormous volume, because dancers circulate and change partners all night.

• The activity itself is intimate and embodied. Hence, what is offered and what is experienced can be deeply personal.

• The community has a strong culture of performance and assessment — dancers are constantly being watched, judged, admired or overlooked, by partners, by the people seated around the floor, by visiting teachers, and by audiences on social media.

• Individual experience and group dynamics unfold within a bounded group that knows itself over time: seeing the same faces, week after week, year after year. Though, new people join and some leave.

Other communities might, for example, have continuity and assessment but will not have intimacy, or an intense volume of social feedback. work environments, for example, carry a high volume of feedback and a culture of assessment and performance, but lack physically intimate experience with another person. Tango has all four at once, which brings forth a very interesting aspect: individual processes which usually unfold slowly, and largely out of sight, here happen quickly and in plain view, and, at times, in front of the whole community. These four combination of factors makes it a valuable and fascinating case study. Indeed, tango makes visible something about social life that is ordinarily less visible.

Group dynamics and individual behaviour: Hirschman's three responses

In 1970 the economist Albert Hirschman published a short book that has been widely referenced across many disciplines. It asked a simple question: what do people do when something they belong to — a community, a workplace, a country — starts to disappoint them?

His answer was that: people have three options available. They can exit: leave the company, the country, the relationship. They can use voice: speak up, complain, try to change the cause of the problem. Or, alternatively, they can stay loyal: remain, and absorb the strain. The idea of exit, voice and loyalty has since been applied to employers and employees, schools, political parties, marriages, trade unions, and more. My fieldwork looked at moments of disappointment, or more specifically, at moments of social dissonance and individual experience. Moments of dissonance refers to an experience that conflicts with the perception a person has of themselves. That is, I refer to dissonance as an experience in which other people's responses — or a misaligned situation, or the absence of an expected response — conflicts with an individual's sense of identity and with the impression one seeks to convey onto others. In accordance with the findings of the fieldwork, I suggest two further responses to Hirschman's framework. Below I briefly discuss them, in order to explain the way individuals respond when faced with a sense of dissonance and disappointment.

Responding to an uncomfortable situation

Personally speaking, entering the world of tango, I found the relationships between tango community members to be complex (and that is an understatement). These multi-layered complex relationships could be between friends, acquaintances, lovers, couples, dance partners, organisers, as well as between teachers and students. All of members in the community occupy different roles within the tango scene, and some occupy several roles at once. In the analysis of data, I found that when friction arises, tango dancers can either: 1) renew energy in the same direction (loyalty); 2) renew energy in a different direction (which is a type of both loyalty and exit; see below); 3) use their voice in the hope of changing things (perhaps less common in the tango community); or 4) exit. Lastly, and this is arguably a type of response in its own right, the individual dancer can 5) act with ambivalence. Ambivalence, as I am using here, means still investing resources and energy, but simultaneously withholding them, or investing in an opposing direction. I argue that this is not always an indecision, nor necessarily a delayed loyalty or exit, and not merely a feeling that accompanies the other responses. Rather, I argue that it is a way of behaving that manages tricky situations and complex relationships within a community that is multi-layered in its relational dynamics. At times it is perhaps a helpful approach when living within a very close community, where everyone is connected to everyone else.

In the fieldwork, ambivalence might show in cases where, for example, students might experience complexity or dissonance with their teachers. Here, the worry of, for example, disappointing a teacher, creating rumours within the community, or hindering the teachers reputation, might encourage an ambivalent response, where the individual invest resources in both maintaining a connection with the teacher, while seeking to learn from other teachers, for example.

Two kinds of staying

The fieldwork also uncovered a distinction between two different types of loyalty. Some people meet uncomfortableness by investing harder in the very aspect of themselves that was unsettled. For example, a dancer who views himself as dancing well might feel unsettled by the rejection of another dancer, and invest in undertaking more classes and attending more milongas. In the second type of loyalty, other dancers stay but redirect their social identity and energy to a different place. For example, a competing dancer might still wish to compete, but will seek out a different dance partner following an experience of dissonance with the previous one. Hence, a sense of dissonance was not resolved by leaving the community or developing a different social identity within the same community; rather, it was resolved by finding a different avenue for the same goal with in the community. In both cases the individual chooses to stay through different types of action.

What keeps people engaging in the tango community?

Not being seen, wanted, and recognised in the way one sees oneself and wishes to be seen, can be unsettling. A simple example is when a dancer who considers himself accomplished sits through an evening without being invited, and without having his own invitations accepted. This can be a powerfully personal and painful experience in the tango community. Additionally, difficult relationships can be draining, especially in a community where people continue to see each other in tango event, even after separations (from dance partnerships, romantic relationships, and/or friendships). And yet, members openly describe tango as addictive — a world that draws people in, and in which people find themselves investing a great deal of time and resources in order to belong. In the full article, I propose that the reason why people stay and continue to invest heavily, despite the difficulties can be encapsulated in those 30 seconds between tango sets in a milonga. When the floor clears and prepare for a new ceremony of invitation to begin. In that moment, there is possibility and hope. In the same vein, the tango community offers a sweet possibility: the prospect of being wanted, of being invited, of being met, of falling briefly into sync with another person who is delighted to be dancing with you. That promise is why people come back, and why they find a way to remain part of the community without leaving. You are never more than the time span of a tango-set from possibly being seen again. Furthermore, the deep and intimate nature of the engagement with others is not only powerful and unique; it offers something that other communities would struggle to provide.

This piece is drawn from a larger article

This short piece is drawn from a first article in a series on tango communities, and is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork. The full paper looks at three intertwined processes: recognition, dissonance and emotional labour. It examines how people construct identities within a community and what that reveals about group dynamics. Furthermore, the article explores how belonging to a group can shape an individual's sense of identity, behaviour, and wellbeing. The paper is a work in progress and its findings may be recalibrated as the research continues. It will be published in the near future, with companion articles to follow. These companion articles explore themes, such as: the emotional economy of the tango community; how social capital moves through its hierarchies; and more.

Social identity is something all people perform. Some people happen to perform it to music.

Dr Dana Segev is a sociologist and criminologist, and Executive Director of Scopium.

References

Festinger, L. (1957) A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hirschman, A. O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.