Argentine addition: tango students submit to the passion - Summer Study Guide 2004

Argentine tango is a dance of the night--and passions that breed in the dark. It's infused with desire and loss, impossible tenderness, insatiable hunger.

So what am I doing at 9:30 in the morning dancing tango on the top floor of the Holiday Inn in Emeryville, California, with sun streaming in windows that overlook San Francisco Bay? And what are all these other people doing-little whirls of couples moving counterclockwise around the room to the time-warp sounds of Osvaldo Pugliese's orchestra?

Welcome to tango camp.

Every July, Nora Dinzelbacher, the diva of tango in the Bay Area, assembles a group of instructors from Argentina for an intense week of tango lessons. At Nora's Tango Week (there's also a three-day Tango Weekend), students learn the steps of this endlessly complex dance, and can immerse themselves in all things tango: the history of the dance, the physics of tango, the different styles, the music, the different orchestras. And tango shoes.

We are an ordinary-looking bunch. Many are from California, but students also come from New Orleans, Chicago, Minnesota, and there are a number of younger women from Japan. Since we're constantly in each other's embrace, it's a warm and collegial atmosphere.

I HAD MY FIRST tango lesson about three years ago, and was instantly in its thrall. Ever since that first off-balance step, I've tried to understand what makes this dance so powerful. "Addictive" is a word

one hears often in this odd little subculture--and there are no twelve-step programs for tango junkies. The eight-step basic pattern beginners learn leads to stronger stuff: the jackknife glint of a follower's kick (gancho) between her partner's legs; the step that displaces a partner's leg (sacada), sending it on an unexpected trajectory.

Still, all those flashy figures are mere verduras, a lot of things with no importance, without the walk and the embrace. Tango teachers talk a lot about the embrace, the connection. The heart of tango is the heart.

I have absolutely no dance background. Fellow student Richard Cammack, however, has been a professional dancer for thirty-five years. He danced with American Ballet Theatre and San Francisco Ballet, and was director of the latter's ballet school. Now owner/director with his former wife of the Contra Costa Ballet, he admits, "Tango is addictive. I think it's the complexity of the dance--and the intimacy with your partner. When I'm dancing, I'm choreographing all the time. To do it well, you're 100 percent involved. Other [social] dances are fun, but they're not as interesting as tango. It's multifaceted. It's not for exhibition; it's a much more personal experience. It's personal joy."

At tango camp, students choose between three classes in each of four periods each day. Classes are designed for beginner or advanced; tango neophytes tend to stay in the beginner room.

It can be difficult to decide among classes. In nay search to understand the power of tango, I often followed instructors Rodolfo and Gloria Dinzel for their tango philosophy.

"Tango chooses you," says Gloria. "It does not discriminate. I was a ballet dancer and tango embraced me."

I implore them, "Why is tango so powerful?"

"Tango is a mystery," Gloria says.

"Depth is found in simplicity. Through simplicity, you can understand tango," Rodolfo says.

"It's their Zen thing," Nora, who is translating for me, says with a delighted little laugh.

When they teach their classes, the Dinzels become tree tango deconstructionists. "Dance one tango on your own, doing steps that you've always wanted to do but couldn't because you had a partner," Rodolfo instructs. And we dance our own private tangos. "Now dance a tango where each is free to do what he or she wants, but everything is done to preserve the embrace," Rodolfo says.

"In the beginning of tango, steps were improvised by the most creative dancers," says Rodolfo. "The least adept were the ones who needed patterns." I realize the Dinzels want to take us back to the birth of tango--so that we can experience what the poor and disenfranchised who created the dancc must have felt for the three minutes it lasted.

TANGO BEGAN among the (mostly male) nineteenth-century immigrants to Argentina, who worked out steps among themselves and took them to the brothels. The "rich as an Argentine" sons of fine families introduced tango to Paris on their grand tours of Europe. It became the rage there early in the century, and eventually returned to its home country (where it had been scorned as low-class), a star--the latest craze from Paris.

Tango's heyday was in the 1930s and 1940s when thousands would gather to dance to tango orchestras, but it practically disappeared in the 1960s when rock music inundated the world. The milongueros who frequented the dance halls (milongas), the men whose life was all about tango, went home. And stayed home until the international hit show Tango Argentine toured the world in the 1980s. Tango was hack. It captured Paris. It took Broadway.