About training by yourself Argentine Tango

About training by yourself

Marcelo Solis performing with Yanina 1994.

Challenging times

Although this never happened before in our lifetime, I have a personal story to share with you, in which you may find some similarities with the situation we are all dealing with, regarding the place that Tango has in our lives.

In the early 1990s, I decided to go full-time into my professional Tango dancer career. I had a busy job in the hotel industry, but I was not feeling it was what I wanted to do, although it was very convenient for me because I earned a good salary and the flexible schedule allowed me to study in college and to dedicate a lot of my time and energy to Tango.

I had been working for a year and a half with a great partner. She was a very skillful dancer, a great person, a very dependable friend who loved Tango as much as me. We were winning competitions, training hard, taking classes with the best Maestros, and performing at festivals, conventions, corporate parties, restaurants and schools. We got so busy that our schedule started to conflict even with my very convenient and flexible work hours.

Not only that. At that point, our gigs were providing me with more income than what I earned with my salary.

You guessed it… I decided to quit my job and dedicate all my time to Tango.

Within less than a week after that decision, I received a call: my partner had been in a car accident.

Long story short, she was fine, but she was not going to dance the way a performer should for at least three months.

Life often presents us these kinds of challenges.

I took it as a test of my commitment to my decisions and to Tango.

Marcelo Solis Argentine Tango with Sofia Pellicciaro

I did not have my partner to train with, although our partnership got stronger. I did not have money to go to milongas. However, I danced every day, by myself, training, studying, watching videos, remembering what I had learned.