why/how did you start dancing tango?
I'd been a full-time telecommuter – working in the apartment where I ate, slept, etc. – from 1995 to 2013. All my hobbies and pastimes were at home, too. Aside from errands and appointments, I got out maybe once a week.
I was aware that being parked at home, usually in front of a computer, was bad for my physical, mental, and social health. In 2013, a friendly reminder from my doctor on this subject drove me to seek out an activity that involved at least light exercise, outside my apartment. I picked dance because it had always fascinated me – a best friend had not one but
four sisters who were dancers, one of them a pro (ballet).
My wife at the time, now my ex, was into all kinds of dance, including tango – although tango wasn't her favorite or even third-favorite dance. However, there was a studio 10 minutes from where we lived with a big decal of two stylized dancers with the word "TANGO" on the window, so we went there. I confess that I knew little about tango before then, and wasn't drawn to it due to its appearance in media or an interest in Argentine culture . . . if culture was going to bring me to dance, it would have been Brazilian culture bringing me to samba de gafieira!
I immediately fell in love with two things:
1. The fact that tango was
improvised, without some strict set of steps or interpretation of the music. This appealed to my approach to other things: cooking without recipes, inventing cocktails from the bottles at hand, writing without an outline, and generally creating on the spur of the moment. I'd tried salsa and just hated the constant insistence on "on 1" or "on 2," the repetitiveness of the basic mambo step, etc. . . . not for me.
2. The fact that tango could be danced in a more cerebral, calculated sense that's all about geometry, if one liked. The need to navigate with a walking dance, fit bodies around each other in the embrace, vary angles and speeds to deal with other couples, etc. seemed mathematical to me. That appealed to my background as a theoretical physicist.
The music wasn't my first interest. Initially it was "just there"; in fact, I disliked the
bandoneón because it reminded me of an old-timey accordion with a squeedly-deedly, discordant sound. I spent my youth around punk rock (more DIY, spur-of-the-moment stuff), so tango music was far from what I grew up on. Once I understood how it was a perfect fit to improvised dance, though, it became another thing I loved about tango.
By a stroke of luck, the studio where I was learning needed leaders to accompany followers; I was always in demand for the classes at the levels below mine. They also needed a bartender, so I ended up doing that at the milonga. This gave me a massive social "in," and also meant I was the go-to guy whenever a class needed a spare body. As a result, I got immersed in tango, which meant that I was always giving everything when I danced. As an accompanier, I
had to – that was the job description – and as I was doing that when I was creating my mental image of myself as a tanguero, it became a big part of my dance personality.
Today my "tango identity" is about the things I love: improvising and even inventing steps, appreciating the music, thinking through the theory behind the dance and the music, and throwing myself into each tanda with 100% of what I've got, whatever my partner's level. It was never and still isn't about meeting people, beyond "get out from behind a computer and see other humans." It was never and still isn't about Argentine culture, beyond "this music comes from Argentina."
