Twenty Tango Lessons :: Andrea Shepard's "Life Is A Tango Blog"

Oscar Grillo Artist

From Andrea Shepard's blog "Life is a Tango"...she's in Montreal...

I took my very first tango class in 1997. It is now 2017, so that means I have been officially dancing tango for 20 years! And what a journey it has been.

So, has it all been worth it? Absolutely.

Has it been easy? Of course not.

Over the years I have learned many things. I have learned confidence and humility, I have learned to let go and to stand up for myself, to be both tougher and more understanding, to lead and to follow, to express myself and to listen, to be engaged and relaxed, to think ahead while living in the moment, to follow the rules while thinking outside the box.

In no particular order, I have come up with 20 things I have learned in 20 years of tango. In an effort to keep my posts both shorter and more regular (it has been months since my last post!), my plan is to publish one "lesson" a week for the next 20 weeks.

Lesson No. 1: Tango evolves and so must we. Tango has changed in the 20 years since I was a beginner. The dance has changed, the trends and customs have changed, my city has changed and of course I have changed. Back then, tango learning was all about the steps. By the time I had finished Tango 2 I think I had learned ganchos and boleos, barridas and sacadas. Teachers were not really talking about following the line of dance, or the ronda -- beyond mentioning the fact that things moved in a generally counter-clockwise direction on the dance floor -- most local DJs did not play cortinas to separate the tandas and nobody used the cabeceo. The Broadway show Forever Tango was touring the world while Sally Potter's movie The Tango Lesson and Carlos Saura's Tango were just being released. All around us were showy moves and dramatic music. Pugliese instrumentals and show soundtracks were played everywhere. In a couple of years, this new group called Gotan Project would bring an entirely new, equally dramatic and thoroughly modern sound that would be a big sign of things to come. Meanwhile, tango shoes from Argentina were not yet readily available so we all danced in whatever kind of dance shoes we could find. Montreal was already a major player on the North American tango scene, and you could dance seven nights a week even then, but each night there was one milonga on offer, so the whole community knew where to go, came together and most events were a guaranteed success."

Click here to read the complete "Part One" post...and then click on each successive of the Parts 2-20 at the bottom of each post...