I think almost everyone knows that we notice and process much more information than we really think. Our brain receives huge amounts of data from the outside world and only part of it gets to our consciousness. To be honest, a quite small part. The pure knowledge comes to our consciousness very seldom, in most cases we get some kind of image that our subconscious mind has formed and transferred to our consciousness.
Speaking of dance it means that we judge a set of various characteristics of the other person. For example while dancing folklore we can see partner's posture and gestures, how fast does he move, what rhythm does he follow. We judge his facial expressions and direction of his glance. This person's image that appears in our mind is also affected by an abstract information about him or her, for example, where is he from, do we like him or not, and so on. Do not forget about our current emotional state, it also affects the impression we get from the other person. As a result we understand, for example, that the other person wants us to turn around. That's how it works in tango too, the difference is that we get this information not only by seeing but also directly from our and partner's bodies.
Speaking of such signals, the most professional dancers show the best results because they can make them (the signals) not contradictory. They do not add any "noise" to their "messages", they do not give any irrelevant information to their partners. They understand intuitively or consciously what kind of signals should they chose to achieve their goal and to create desired effect in the partner's brain. The outcome, the effect of their actions is concentrated, so the majority of people understand them equally. The dance of ordinary people usually lacks such an unambiguity. This sad fact certainly complicates the understanding of the dance, so two people might have totally different and even opposite opinions about the same performance or show.
All this is mixed with our thinking flaws, so that our perception of dance is also affected by color of the dancer's clothes or by our previous dance with another partner. Actually this seem to have nothing to do with our perception.
Probably, this concept is very familiar to actors, at least, I assume they have heard about something similar since they have exactly the same challenge to create a certain clear character or image using a variety of micro-movements and so on.
So what should we do?