Tango

About Tango

I dance Tango because I love the music - specially the golden age music- and I love the people I dance with. Sometimes I hear the bandoneon in the music and it raises every immigrant neck hair I have (on my most of the times bold-shaved head:)

Fueled by the traveling I've done in the US to festivals, which opended up the possibilities of intimate dancing experiences and a honest physio-emotional communication, the quest for refining the possibilities of the human body is ongoing.

Tango is a challenging dance form and I love being challenged. The amount of coordination and fine-motoric muscle movement needed to be essentially a quadruped is staggering and seems to be a never-ending learning process.

The psychological dynamics encountered in this dance would intrigue a C.G.Jung and a Sigmund Freud to new lifelong studies. It can be a mess on every level and equally blissful and mind quieting too.

Tango dancers I feel inspired by are Jaimes Friedgen, Cecilia Gonzales, Sebastian Arce, Rebecca Shulman, Brigitta Winkler.

About Teaching

Having a solid base right from start I found to be essential in order to have a steady learning curve;

therefore I teach with Mitra Martin - who is also my dance partner - a very detailed introductory 6 month curriculum with the goal to have the basics needed to go out social dancing - that's when the rewarding part starts; We found that the best approach is the one suggested by Jaimes Friedgen from Seattle:

• from teaching basic walks - chest to chest (Apilado Style)
• to simple ways of combining basic steps and start improvising
• to basic musicality all the way to the first outskirts of the so called "open embrace"

After that a student is officially "intermediate" means that by now she/ he has shown a great ability to suffer and still keep going - that's definitely promising

Now the real thing gets started; transitions, turns, changes of directions in another neat and well thought out six months curriculum. Teaching is not only fun; it is rewarding to see friends and fellow strugglers make progress, fight for something they are passionate about, be of assistance in this process and laugh or cry with our friends. It's life.