Argentina BLOG

A proper invitation to tango isn’t made with words.

When two people poised to sweep across a dance floor lock eyes, one must ask the other through a quick little tilt of the head, says three-time world tango champ Monica Llobet.

“It would be rude for a man to go up to a woman and then ask,” said Llobet, who teaches the dance Tuesday evenings during Alma de Tango at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.

“She would be put on the spot,” Llobet told her students.

Llobet’s class is one of several going strong, thanks to the large number of Argentines in South Florida who’ve imported the passionate dance and its traditions — including the silent communication known as el cabeceo — from the clubs of Buenos Aires.

When the lesson is over at the Biltmore’s Danielson Gallery, the class becomes a milonga, as Buenos Aires’ tango parties are known. Experienced dancers join the rookies to show them how it’s done without counting your steps.

Cheek to cheek under dim lights, the dancers surrender to the classic romantic fantasy embodied by the tango.

Just one month after moving from Argentina to South Florida in 2000, Caballero, an instructor at North Miami Beach’s Tango Times Dance Co., met his wife and dance partner, Roxana Garber, at the Fontainebleau’s now-defunct Tropigala Club.

“We find something essential in the human being, which is the need for affection, and tango provides that through the embrace,” Caballero added.

His classes attract students from 8 to 70.

The latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show the number of Argentines living in Miami-Dade County has grown 24 percent between 2000 and 2008, from 6,596 to 20,510.

According to demographics website city-data.com, Miami Beach and Sunny Isles Beach are the cities with most Argentines in the United States. Bay Harbor Islands, North Bay Village, Key Biscayne, Aventura and Doral also made the top 20.

That population has promoted its culture here in a big way.

Enthusiast John Quinn, who regularly attends Llobet’s class, says the Biltmore’s plush ambience makes him feel as if he’s been transported to Buenos Aires of the tango’s Golden Age.

“I like the slower tangos,” said the Coconut Grove resident, who has danced at milongas all over the county. “It’s very intimate and beautiful. When you see the better dancers doing it, it makes you want to do it, too.”

In her 2007 book The Meaning of Tango, British physicist and tango expert Christine Denniston recounts how the Argentine style of the dance was born amid a wave of European immigrants — most of them single young men — to Argentina in the late 1800s.

The tango evolved from an earlier, faster dance form, known as milonga, done to music known by the same name.

“A true street dance, it was not created by dancers and taught to people,” she wrote. “It was thrown together by people who might not have shared a common verbal language but who wanted to move together to the pretty new music being made around them.”

In those early years, men vastly outnumbered women in Buenos Aires, Denniston writes. To acquire the needed tango skills for impressing a lady in a milonga, the guys had to practice by dancing with each other.

Around the same time, another tango style, influenced by drum-based candombe music, was emerging across the La Plata river in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Miami native Llobet, who got hooked on ballroom dancing and tango 15 years ago, said the proliferation of classes and milongas proves the subculture is thriving.

“That’s the whole idea, to develop a stronger community,” she said. “And we’re doing it; we’re growing.”

Indeed, folks looking to do the tango can find a class/milonga somewhere in South Florida almost every day of the week.

Thursday is tango night at Aventura Dance Studio, where soft lights, mirrors reflecting the purple walls and ceiling, wooden floors and couches make it seem more intimate, like a home.

Beginner and intermediate classes give way to a “practilonga” later in the evening.

“Something about it is very relaxing,” said Christine López, tango instructor at the studio.

“When you enter a milonga, you leave your problems behind and put everything aside. This is almost like an unspoken agreement,” she said. “You can be close to people and not feel so isolated. It’s a beautiful thing.”

On Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, husband-and-wife team Angel Howsky and Maria Perez put students through their paces in the Graham Center at Florida International University’s main campus.

They also participate in cultural programs at schools such as Rubén Dario Middle and West Miami Middle, Perez said.

Howsky, a native of Argentina who took up the dance in fourth grade, said he’s gratified to see its fan base flourish.

“People are coming together, not just in milongas but in events like asados in someone’s backyard,” Howsky said, referring to the traditional Argentine cookout featuring grilled sausages and steaks, bread and salads.

For New Yorker Laura Marks, an FIU Spanish major, a recent semester in Buenos Aires piqued her interest in the South American country’s most famous contribution to world culture.

“I was going to some really classic-type milongas and some where they had things like tango electrónico,” she said. “I can practice steps with my eyes closed.”

As an out-of-town student, Marks says she’s been able to find a kind of makeshift “family” with her dance instructors and fellow students.

To Perez, watching young people get involved in the local tango scene is a joy.

“We want to keep the flame burning,” she said.
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SOURCE:
“Tango takes off across South Florida”
BY LAURA MORALES AND DAIANA KUCAWCA
llmorales@MiamiHerald.com
The Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/gables-smiami/v-fullstory/story/1337278.html