The day you realize it doesn’t take two to tango

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Due to my sub-par introduction post (before I realized how INTO I’d get writing long posts about my life. i.e. I’m officially Steemit-obsessed) many of you may not know that I am avid dancer. I started dancing 2 and a half years ago, starting predominately with Argentine Tango. Now I dabble in an assortment of dances, tango (my favorite, especially when its contemporary styled Tango Nuevo), salsa, merengue, bachata, a dabbled in a bit of kizomba, zuok, west coast swing, blues, and recently was exposed to the Vienna Waltz which is SUCH a delight. Outside of awkward middle school dances, my first real exposure to dance was seeing informal salsa when I moved to Miami in high school. I was a 17 year old prudish gringa, with no ability to speak Spanish or move hips or feet correspondingly in any way. I was convinced dance was something you were born with, and I was far to stiff and awkward to ever groove alongside the amazing Cubans and Colombians I was surrounded by at the time. But I was completely infatuated by it.

Fast forward 8 years to 2014 - I had graduated high school, college, and grad school, and was still a timid wallflower in many ways. After graduating I had a plan to teach at a university in South America and live there until I could finally get a grasp on being conversational in Spanish. While I was there (first Chile and then Peru over the course of a year), I was improving - slowly but surely - and achieving my goal of being able to speak Spanish. I returned to the US for a friends wedding and to celebrate the holidays and Christmas with my family. On my return I paid a visit to one of my dearest (and by far my oldest) friend, Barbie, who is an Opera singer and dance instructor in NYC. We celebrated my 25th birthday with a few glasses of red wine, and she convinced me to try tango for the first time. Til this day I still don’t know if it was the wine, the music (Sam Smith, my favorite), or the fact that a stiff little gringa ended up working FOR me in tango as opposed to against me in more loose dances like salsa - but I danced the basic moves of tango right then and there and it felt like magic. As if that's what my feet were meant to do all along.

Barbie teaching me tango for the first time

Barbie singing and playing at one of our regular tango milongas in NYC

And so, slowly but surely, and in cities and countries all over the world - I started going to tango classes, practicas (where you go to practice) and milongas (an event where you go to just dance, not practice). Starting in Lima, on my visit to Buenos Aires, back in NYC, when I moved to Boston - I was hooked. And of course every time I visited Barbie in NYC she would drag me to all night milongas where I’d learn by throwing myself into the deep end and dancing with great leads.

I’ve learned so much about tango over the almost three inconsistent years I’ve been dancing it: it takes a lot of persistence and determination to progress, its a great way to have a gateway into many of other styles of dance (once you meet dancers - they do ALL the types of dances), and nothing compares to the feeling of dancing spur of the moment with someone totally spontaneously when the right song comes along.

I look back at that scared little teenage me, afraid to speak a word of any foreign language and too embarrassed about dancing I’d shyly decline when asked - and here I am more than a decade later at 29: I speak Spanish like a South American, dance tango better than most Argentinians I know, and will actively jump into any dance I’ve never tried before because once you know a few, you know them all (at least in the basic sense). And one day you wake up and realize it doesn’t really take two to tango at all - - it takes just one very determined heart and many dedicated hours.

1- The video shows an early morning 6am sunrise tango session with a tango partner and professional colleague of mine, along the sand dunes of Liwa in the United Arab Emirates.

2- This post is for the STEEMIT STARS - All Talent Style Competition hosted by @dobartim

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