Dangerous Dance: Denver Post Article
Denverites turn passionate for the dangerous dance
Impassioned fans of tango insist: 'The dance chose me'
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 - Tango is a dance of complexity and passion. Unlike ballroom dancing, tango has no choreographed steps. Dancers improvise. It takes months to feel comfortable with basic steps and years to become proficient.
Those who get hooked are driven by a single-minded fervor to tango. "Tango is an arena for intensity, and there is nothing else like it in this culture," says Brian Patrick Dunn, who with wife, Deborah Sclar, founded Tango of the Heart and teach in Boulder. "Tango is a safe place to be dangerous. I say it's like dancing in a pheromone furnace, but it's intimacy without sexuality." On any Tuesday evening, the Denver Turnverein, an historic meeting hall on Clarkson and 16th Street, is taken over by the tango. Local instructors and aficionados converge at a practica, just one of the weekly events sponsored by Tango Colorado. These nights are for schmoozing with fellow club members, taking lessons and dancing. "Part of tango's addictive quality is that it is an opportunity to be close to another person. I danced all my life, but tango is fascinating because it calls for such a deep intense connection with a partner," says Tom Stermitz, a tango teacher and organizer of Denver's two Tangofests, held on Memorial and Labor Day weekends. The dance practiced in the United States is social tango, and is done milonguerostyle, that is, in close embrace. "We dance tummy to tummy, at most just inches apart," he says. Tuesday nights at the Turnverein begin with instruction. Advanced private and group lessons are given on the basement dance floor, while the main ballroom upstairs is divided in half by a table where a deejay spins Argentine tango music. 
On one side of the room, instructors lead a group of beginners through a free lesson. On the other a few experienced dancers work on their form, either solo or with a partner. 
Post / Hyoung Chang Many tango dancers at Tangofest say they are obsessed with the dance.
Later, the practica begins in egalitarian fashion, with men and women lined up facing each other. They are randomly matched as partners. After the lines dissolve, the "mercy dance" is over and the tango begins in earnest.
This group, members of Tango Colorado, is serious. When any of them speak of tango they describe it as an obsession that consumes them, something they practice three times a week, maybe more.
Other weekly tango gatherings include another practica conducted Thursday evenings in Boulder and a milonga or dance party, on Friday nights at The Mercury Cafe, in Denver. At the milonga, dancing is done in full dress, approximating the scene of Buenos Aires, the hallowed capital of the tango, where many devotees make repeated pilgrimages for instruction and experience. While the practicas are casual, The Mercury was about glamour, with many women attired in dresses featuring the tango colors of red or black, along with distinctly alluring high heels.
Besides the basics - the walk, balance, body stance - tango is improvised, without specific choreography. The male and female roles are clearly defined.
"It's a retreat from the modern world, in that dancers take on traditional masculine and feminine roles," says Stermitz. The man leads, and movement originates from his chest, not the arms as with other dances. The woman follows, leaning in to her partner, matching her movements to his.
Small talk is limited, and dedicated dancers don't drink because they want to tune into a partner. In the dance, the man keeps his eyes open to navigate his partner safely around the floor, but a women often closes her eyes, in a kind of tango trance.
With tango, you have to know what you're doing, and then not think about it as you do it. "It's all about being present. Tango is meditative, a very Buddhist practice," says Pat Patton of Westminster, who is president of Tango Colorado. "You have to stay focused, listening to the music, and connected to your partner. You have to communicate with each other nonverbally, energetically."
Patton's story of falling in love with tango is typical in its ardency. "I have been doing the tango for eight years," she says, at first with trepidation after freezing on her first venture on the dance floor.
Fear quickly shifted to obsession. She signed up for a full docket of lessons with local instructors and whoever was visiting from other tango outposts. Patton soon began collecting Argentine tango music and then constructed a dance studio in her basement with red walls and ceiling.
"Once I did that I couldn't stop," says Patton, who also is a psychotherapist. "There was no way out."
The stories of these tango devotees are similar in intensity and passion. They see the tango, and they are goners. Often quoted is a line from the 1997 movie, "The Tango Lesson," a story of monomaniacal devotion to the dance: "I didn't choose the tango. The tango chose me."
Tango originated in Argentina circa 1900, at a time when single men greatly outnumbered unmarried women, as a sort of stylized mating ritual among the lower class.
The dance hit another peak in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades when most of today's music was recorded. Tango's popularity in the United States soared with "Tango Argentino," a Broadway hit in the mid-1980s.
"You see it once and you become obsessed," says Tessa Crume of Denver, an epidemiologist who teaches tango. "It consumed my social life for two years straight. My friends couldn't understand it."
Heidi Wichern of Boulder has been tango dancing for six years, and has visited Buenos Aires twice, first for six, then nine weeks. She also has a studio in her home.
"I like the paradox of it," says Boulder resident Darrell Sanchez who used to dance professionally and is now a psychotherapist and Rolfer. "It's such a deceptively simple dance, but really so complex. It requires presence and depth of self-awareness and of your partner, but in a social setting."
"Tango just grows on you, and becomes an obsession," says Carol Morris of Evergreen, who dances at least three times a week. "It's the music, the ambience and the dance."
And there's camaraderie with anonymity. "We see each other a couple times a week and don't know what any of us do in our other lives, kind of like a fantasy world," she says.
Tango attracts those, it seems, who abandon themselves to their enthusiasms.
"You can be gripped by the raw sensuality of the dance, and have that experience with a stranger. You may never talk or have coffee with one another," says Sclar. The safety of the dance is the result of the behavior codes that govern tango.
"Emotions are amplified in tango," she says. The rules were created to keep passions from running too high.
The tango code mandates that a man discreetly ask for a dance. "It's the nod," explains Sclar. The man sees a woman across the floor, and seeks to make eye contact. If she returns his gaze, he will nod.
To accept a dance, she nods back; to refuse she averts her gaze. That interaction insures that rejection is experienced privately. Codes are an integral aspect of tango, but in local tango dancing circles, they are enacted sporadically.
"We encourage the sophisticated approach in our classes. We're dedicated to bringing tango to the community, to teach the dance and its history and to impart appropriate milonga behavior," says Sclar. But though many are committed, social tango here is less intense than in Buenos Aires. "In the United States we gather to dance, while in Argentina they gather to dance well."
That discrepancy is just as well because tango is challenging, and it takes years to be good. "Here we want them to get up and dance as soon as they can," says Stermitz. The more that is learned about tango, fanatics say, the more time you want to devote to study. That never-ending process, that unlimited potential to grow in the dance, is what keeps many addicted.
Tango works on many levels. It's about being in your body, and simultaneously dealing with what is in your mind. "If you have issues, they come out on the dance floor. You dance who you are," says Sclar.
"Tango is very therapeutic for dealing with issues of intimacy and trust," says Cindy Highfield, a seminary student in California who has written about how tango has influenced her faith. "You have to open your heart to be able to feel the dance. If you have intimacy issues, you've got to let them go."
On the superficial side, another draw for women is the shoes. Sclar carries several pairs of shoes of various heel heights, which she keeps rotating throughout the practica to preserve her feet. However on milonga nights, women strap on shoes that are functional but intended to dazzle.
Jorge Giraldo, a tango instructor in Miami, is also a shoemaker, a job that now takes more time and is more remunerative than dancing itself. The women's tango shoes he sells are available in six heel heights, with tightly fitting straps so feet won't fall out, and in such colors as red, black, purple and gold. What they all have in common is this: "They're sexy," says Giraldo. (Men's shoes are black.)
Moreover, the biggest draw of tango is the thrill of the dance when all works as it should, in a seamless, transcendental movement between partners. "Sometimes," says Sclar, "the impact of one three- to six-minute dance can stay with you forever."
It doesn't happen every time, but when it does it is unforgettable. "The power of that intense intimacy of the moment, that ecstasy you share conceivably with a total stranger, that's what keeps people going back for more," says Barbara Durr of Atlanta. She quit her job three years ago to work on a tango documentary she titled "Chasing the Ghost," a term from substance abuse therapy that refers to that elusive high sought by addicts.
Passion led her from her previous career into her current incarnation as tango teacher, historian and filmaker.
"For some people," Durr says, "tango is life."