Argentine Tango School

Argentine Tango dancing by Marcelo Solis and Mimi at Milonga Parakultural, Salón Canning, Buenos Aires, October 2022.

Argentine Tango waltz dancing with Mimi at Milonga Parakultural Salón Canning

Argentine Tango waltz dancing with Mimi at Milonga Parakultural Salón Canning

Being a good dancer implies a search for greater balance, control, and ease in your movements, both physically and spiritually.

Dancing leads to a greater awareness of your own body.

This has repercussions on a concern to develop increasingly healthy habits and thus develop a more balanced relationship with the people around you and yourself.

Dancing means getting to know yourself and people in general better.

Dancing Argentine Tango is continually learning to see life from the perspective of a person who dances.

Dancing Argentine Tango is dancing your life.

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Argentine Tango dancing by Marcelo Solis and Mimi at Milonga Parakultural, Salón Canning, Buenos Aires, October 2022.

Argentine Tango dancing with Mimi at Milonga Parakultural Salón Canning 1

Argentine Tango dancing with Mimi at Milonga Parakultural Salón Canning 1

Interview by Andrea Barron, a college student in Edinburg, TX, at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

  • First and Foremost, Where are you from? Why do you teach Argentinian Tango?

I was born in Argentina. Tango has been part of my life since my childhood. I became an excellent Argentine Tango dancer, and since teaching is a natural skill, I became an Argentine Tango teacher.

  • How did you come across this dance style? How long have you been practicing this style of dance?

As I mentioned, I grew up in an environment where Argentine Tango is always present. Therefore, I started formal learning of the Argentine Tango in 1984.

  • What does Argentinian Tango mean to you? Does it play an essential role in your culture?

Argentine Tango means to me, the highest wisdom you can achieve. I understand Argentine Tango as a practice that helps me improve in all aspects of being human.

  • Do you know the origins of the Argentinian Tango?

The origins of Argentine Tango are highly debated. However, we are confident that it developed in the marginalized sectors of the populations inhabiting Buenos Aires and other urban conglomerates in the Rio de la Plata area during the second half of the 1800s.

  • I understand that you teach Argentinian Tango in the United States; how do you preserve the authenticity of this dance style while introducing it in a different country?

I travel back to my country very often, visit and take classes with my teachers and friends, and dance at the milongas (Tango dance parties) in Buenos Aires to maintain a solid connection to the roots of Argentine Tango.

  • There are eight known styles of Tango, such as Ballroom Tango and Tango Nuevo, to name a few. So how does the Argentinian Tango differ from other types of Tango? This could refer to culture, movement, maybe both, or any other differences that you may think of.

Argentine Tango differs from other dances in the fact that Argentine Tango is a way of life, an approach to existence. In that sense, Argentine Tango is the purest form of dancing. It makes you see life from the point of view of being a dancer.

  • In Argentinian Tango, do performers create any contact or communication with their audience? This could pertain to touch; it can be done vocally or through eye contact.

When you perform Argentine Tango, you dance in the same way that you dance in the milongas (social Tango dance parties): you connect with your partner to form a kind of subjectivity that is of the body of both partners becoming one. From there, you become aware of the surrounding world and adapt your dance to either performance or social dancing situations.

  • What dress wear do dancers wear while performing this style of dance?

I like to dress up, like going to a formal party to teach, dance, socialize, and perform.

  • I am entirely unfamiliar with the Argentinian Tango. To be trained in this dance style, what advice can you provide for beginners before jumping into practices?

My advice to beginners is this: enjoy the pleasure of dancing. Your curiosity will take you to deepen your knowledge of Argentine Tango step by step.

  • Is it challenging to develop the lines of an Argentinian Dancer? How long does it take for a dancer to adapt to the Argentinian Tango’s movement style physically? In ballet, dancers must maintain a straight, strong back and execute graceful motions. In addition, modern dancers are taught to utilize the curvature of the spine and to remain grounded with their movements. Regarding the physical display of the Argentinian Tango, are there any essential tips you can provide for us?

Argentine Tango is infinite. You can continually improve. If you feel you have nothing to improve, you are dead as a dancer. You must train Argentine Tango as a fighter. It would be best if you were solid, versatile, adaptable, and secure. Whatever you achieve with your body implies a spiritual transformation.

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Argentine Tango dancing by Marcelo Solis & Mimi at milonga Gente Amiga Buenos Aires

Argentine Tango dancing with Mimi at Milonga Gente Amiga

Argentine Tango dancing with Mimi at Milonga Gente Amiga

Empower yourself, nurture your creativity, explore and achieve a greater awareness by dancing Argentine Tango.

Find your style and a way of life so you can express yourself with freedom and elegance and enjoy the beautiful art of dancing.

Live to the fullest.

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Marcelo Solis dancing Argentine Tango with Mimi at Escuela de Tango de Buenos Aires virtual classes.

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Marcelo dancing Argentine Tango with Mimi

To dance, to live like a dancer.

To dance, to live like a dancer.

Marcelo Solis dancing Argentine Tango with Mimi

To really dance, maybe what is needed is to live like a dancer.

I don’t mean to say that to dance, you need to dedicate yourself to dancing as a profession. What I want to say here is something that I will explain below with a comparison.
 
If I liked, for example, riding a bicycle, I would need a bicycle. This bike would be built in a bike factory. It would be ready, with its tires inflated and its chain perfectly oiled when I got on it and started pedaling.
 
The body and soul of the dancer are like that bicycle. Just as it would be really cumbersome to manufacture a bike to be able to mount it and pedal it, I could not dance with a body that has not been conditioned, trained, and prepared, that is, “manufactured” previously to be able to dance.
 
Since I could not dance with a body that is not that of a dancer, and since my body is the only one I have at my disposal from the moment I get up in the morning, I already take into account at that time that my body and my whole being have to be ready to dance when it comes to stepping on the dance floor of the milonga.
 
Of course, anyone can dance, at any time, without much preparation because, in my opinion, being a human being is already being a being that dances.

However, I think we will agree that dancing Tango requires more, much more in subtleties, skills, perception, and awareness than that minimum that is what makes us dancers just because we are human.
 
Dancing a dance like Tango is, I feel, like philosophizing about what is essential in life, in matters such as the value of life itself, that is: if it is worth living or not, and why, that is: whether or not there are reasons for that answer; if language is of any use to us here, if perhaps it is not a more appropriate response to shut up and dance.
 
Now, this silence is not a resignation, so to speak, but a celebration, since we discover that the absence of the common language, the one we use every day, does not represent any problem but could even help us in the deepest of these intimate questions in the solitude of the individual.
 
Tango, as music, as dance, as culture and philosophy of life, and as something different from all that, which includes all of it, but which generates something more significant and further, a way of existing, of living life, is something that excites us, makes us fall in love, gives us meaning, and leads us to a fullness that we always dreamed of living, that which we intuited as children that life was. Perhaps it should not be believed that with an exhaustive and methodical study of its technical aspects, training, and putting objective principles into practice, we will obtain Tango. With that, which is essential, we would only prepare a ground that might one day be fertile enough to make us dancers.

What do we dancers want?

Maybe stop being babies concerning our bodies.
 
Happiness might not be an end but a tool for a life that would find its meaning.
 
Happiness would be something akin to getting organized.
 
Why does a baby stop being a baby?
 
Possibly because she feels pressure from the environment and has to react and change, modify herself and develop responses and adaptations to those pressures. She fights, opposes, submits, adapts, or imposes herself.
 
Marketing would seem to be proposed as a philosophy of life according to which we must consume in the present and urgently everything we want now, what we have ever wanted, and what we may wish to in the future (because it may no longer be available in the market in the future.) There are no alternatives that make themselves heard clearly. The ones that exist are timid and weak, stubborn, blind and deaf, wasting vital energy in violent, undignified, ineffective explosions, or with worthless talk, calming or justifying. Such philosophy, called marketing, is presented as if it were the only one possible. So, living seems to become living within the market, something like selling your life to consume things. Even experiences seem to have been reified.
 
For example: traveling –the “experience” of the trip– has been reified. I heard someone very wise say (I don’t remember who now): “the only possible journey is the journey we make within ourselves.”
 
So perhaps we would do well to train and know our bodies and gauge the value of the spiritual consequences of that training and knowledge; we could take then that wisdom to the field of our social and intimate relationships, that is, recognize ourselves in others, get to know ourselves more in “making ourselves known.” That would make us dancers.
 
This is why I think marketing (as understood by professional marketers) cannot help me to find new students, or more dancers to come to the milongas for milonga organizers, or to promote Tango in general.
 
As I feel Tango, it is for me Friendship. How could friendship be marketed? And since it does not fit in the market, should we conclude it has no value?
My students and I are good friends because we all have a friend in common, a friend we love so much, a friend called Argentine Tango ❤️

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To dance well in Argentine Tango

To dance well in Argentine Tango

Marcelo Solis dancing Argentine Tango with Mimi in the San Francisco Bay Area

To dance well, that is to say: to DANCE, we will have to organize our lives in that direction; I will not be able to dance well if my life develops away from that goal.
Indeed, if what I long for is, for example, to make money, then my life will be oriented in that direction, in the direction of abstractions (money is an abstraction), very far from my actual body.
 

Put any project on this scale and consider how far the primary goal of that project will be from performing a good dance.

No one is forced to dance well. Truths, life projects, and desires cannot be the same for everyone.
 
I am inclined to think this way: when I reach the end of my life, what would I like to see in the wake left by that life?
 
Imagine all the possible lives we could lead. Let’s try to think and feel them, weigh them, smell them, look at their colors, and measure the scope of their luminous skyscrapers of triumphs and black abysses of awful flavors.

Perhaps we all live in different worlds, with the things and people we surround ourselves with. A life could thus develop in the direction of a choice of one’s own world in which to inhabit.
 
I think that perhaps a good way of living would develop in the direction of becoming more and more capable of directing and selecting what goes into the process of our existence.
 
In particular, as far as I am concerned, I prefer what increases the power of my physiology, makes my body more versatile, adaptable, and happy, my mind more lucid, and my spirit lighter and dancing.
 
Here is the foundational question that is answered with living itself: How to live?
That would be dancing!
Should I ask myself “what for” and/or “for whom”?
 
We could also perhaps answer ourselves: “there are immediate, urgent things to resolve; we live at a precise moment in history which conditions us, that is, it enslaves us and forces us to do things that we would not do otherwise. Let us, then, postpone our plan, our life, until we have resolved the present and responded to all the obligations implicit in its calls”.
 
In particular, my truth concerning this is that we will eternally be bound by the present. We were born like this: OBLIGATED.
 
My opinion on this is the following: it is a matter of perspective; It depends a lot on where we look at life from and where we place ourselves –physically and spiritually– to look at it.
 
Let’s listen to the tango “Me quedé mirandola” by Anibal Troilo with Alberto Marino on vocals. (I ask you… Is there another version of this song that we can dance to?)
 
Sometimes people leave the dance; that is, they abandon the dancing project because they run into a barrier they don’t dare to cross. Although they always give themselves other excuses.
 
I have abandoned many of my previous lives to lighten up enough to be able to continue dancing.
 
And do not think that you will not find doubts about yourselves and the value of dancing!
 
There are many possible worlds, many parallel realities that cannot be accessed in any “objective” way, such as the achievements of science and technology.
 
Don’t you think you should dare?
 
But this is a matter of taste.
 
When I see someone who dances, who DANCES, I see someone free. His body is no longer “ergastulum“, as the Catholic Church used to say in the Middle Ages, meaning “prison of the spirit”, a spirit that must wait until death to be released.

When I see someone DANCING, I see his soul already free in life, no longer waiting, postponing, procrastinating life to perhaps one day meet that fundamental question not only unanswered but never asked.

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