“Are you trying to make me extra nervous?” She is standing in line to sign up for her very first Tango lesson. My sudden appearance seems to add to her agitation. We had been talking about this for months — and now Yvette was going to learn Tango!
On this Friday, Waverly is taking his first ‘real’ Tango class. We’re at the Senior Center in Emeryville, CA, where Ivan Shvarts is teaching a class with basic steps and exercises. Most of his students are in their sixties and seventies, some in their eighties and even nineties. Some of them have danced for a long time and now want to learn Argentine Tango, others have no dance experience at all. Some of them come as couples, others come by themselves. Ivan makes sure everybody teams up in his class and that nobody is left without a partner. However, somehow he can’t convince Waverly to take a partner. Waverly wants to learn on his own throughout the class. “I’d be fearful for my partner,” he explains to me. “I might lose my balance and cause her to fall.” From a distance, he watches Ivan and practices by himself what he sees. He appears to be amazingly light on his feet and at the same time centered from the core, his earlier dance training clearly showing through. His teacher is thrilled. “You have to come over and talk to this guy!” Ivan exclaims to me. “You wouldn’t believe it – he is just recovering from a major stroke!”
Okay, so the winners have been announced: congratulations to Ivan Troshhi and Yamila Viana from New York — you make the rest of us now look and feel really clumsy on the dance floor, but for the next year we will work hard on that leg extension! Everyone else has to face up to the fact that they didn’t win. Although they had spent countless hours practicing and a fortune on private lessons, shoes, chiropractors, pilates, and dance studios, and had suffered through emotional rollercoasters and self-doubts, fights with their partners, pain in their feet and in their legs and backs, traveled across the country and spent all the money they had initially saved for that trip to the Caribbean, and basically had put the whole rest of their lives on hold it just wasn’t good enough. Or so it seems.
The moon shines in a dark blue sky over the San Francisco Bay. From the top of the hill I can see a million lights shimmering and reflecting in the water. As I stroll down the steep and windy road, past lush gardens hiding comfortable homes, I can hear tango music softly drifting through the air. On this balmy night, the doors from the dance floor to the terrace are open. There is the faint sound of subdued talk and laughter. As I approach the tall, multi-level house and begin to climb the steep staircase, the sounds become more distinct. I’m climbing up two, then three flights, catching my breath before approaching the last one, until at last there I am. I’m gazing at a several dozen dancers swirling around the floor and, on one side of the large room an enormous buffet bearing an overwhelming amount of delicacies. It is Friday night and a wonderful event has just begun.
It is Thursday evening and Andrea Monti walks in to a popular Milonga in San Francisco. She just returned from a trip to New York where she was promoting the “Argentine Tango USA Official Festival & Championship 2015” which starts on April 2 in San Francisco. Prior to her New York trip she traveled to Los Angeles, also promoting the Festival, giving interviews about the four-day event on local and national radio and television stations, the biggest and most important of them being CBS. As a matter of fact, she says, ever since CBS discovered that an official branch of the Argentine Tango Championship takes place in San Francisco, they have been eager to report about it.