One moment I’m sitting down listening to a classical, melodic, Cayetano Di Sarli piece and the next, I’m being yanked from my chair. “Haven’t you ever seen Scent of a Woman?” says Julius “Julio” Mayer, as he pulls me upright, tightening his grip around my sweaty palm. I hadn’t.
His right hand rests on the middle of my back, rough skin catching on the red modal fabric of my dress with each unanticipated movement. My body staggers along after my feet as I’m lead across the floor.
Mayer’s bright blue eyes are wide; wrinkles between his brow bone and upper lashes form an epidermal accordion. His lips curl upwards at their sides. “Step, step…step, step…step, step…” he says, leading me backwards. “Ah! But step, step, step!” Mayer says, changing course. “Sometimes,” he says as my body snaps forward with the pressure of his hand on my back, “I’ll switch it up on you.”
Argentine tango is a dance that Mayer has practiced for 17 years as both a teacher and a student. It is unpredictable in nature as there are no set steps, and communication between leader and follower is carried out exclusively through body contact. One partner is able to follow another’s lead by keeping a good amount of resistance against the other’s body within the embrace. This way, the gentlest beginnings of movement can be detected before a leader’s feet begin to carry the duo. Skillful Argentine tango dancers are able to move counterclockwise around the dance floor with their partner in a way that illustrates the rhythm and tone of the music. They keep their knees and feet close together, bringing one foot to meet the other with each step.
Tango dancing developed in the mid-1800’s in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and became widespread throughout the 1900s. The first public Argentine tango dance in Western New York was arranged in May of 2005. These days, the highly improvisational, social dance is attracting newcomers constantly as the tango scene in Buffalo, New York, and surrounding areas flourishes.
30-year-old Travis Widrick, an Argentine tango dancer and teacher, is at the heart of Buffalo’s tango scene. As creator and maintainer of buffalotangox.com, he organizes and advertises milongas, or social dances, where people can gather to practice and learn to tango. Widrick plans at least two dances each month at the Amherst Community Church in Snyder, New York, on the respective second and fourth Fridays. Admission is ten dollars per person or 15 per couple, and a free pre-milonga lesson outlining the basics of tango is typically offered.
Widrick has been teaching group and private lessons on his own time for about a year and he previously taught a class at the University at Buffalo during the spring semester of 2008. His group lessons are held on Sundays from 6:00-9:00 pm at the Shakti Yoga Studio on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo and at 6:00 pm on Thursday nights at his apartment. About a year ago, Widrick converted his living room into a Tango studio for mere convenience. “It’s easier, and it provides me with a reliable space to dance,” he says. Group lessons include an hour of beginner’s class, an hour of “Level II,” a slightly more advanced practice session, and an hour of “Guided Practica,” during which students are encouraged to cultivate their tango skills with the help of classmates as partners. Widrick charges $60 for a five week series of group lessons and is available for private lessons, charging $30 per hour of private instruction. Dan Hawryczak, a UB alumni from the class of ’92 had taken ballroom dancing lessons for a couple years before beginning lessons with Widrick last February after seeing something about them in the paper. “Travis is great. It’s a lot of fun to learn,” says Hawryczak.
Widrick is planning his next milonga, which will be free and open to the public, at Chow Chocolate on Main Street in downtown Buffalo. He recently hosted a dance outside of Elmwood Avenue’s Globe Market on September 23, which was also a free event. For Widrick, these events aren’t about the money. The public’s growing interest in what he is most passionate about is incentive enough to continue his integral, yet time-consuming, role in the tango scene. “Getting people to see it, that’s the big thing,” says Widrick.
Flipping open his large black sketchbook to a clean page, Widrick draws an “X,” labeling the center “Buffalo” and the diagonal extensions, “Toronto,” “Rochester,” “Geneva,” and “Ithaca.” He explains that Buffalo is central to these areas, each with their own, thriving tango community. This visual representation that Widrick draws up generated the name of his website, “Buffalo Tango X.” While each tango community is a separate entity, dancers in New York often travel between these areas and to other major tango communities in Syracuse, Binghamton, New York City, and Montreal, Quebec.
As Widrick explains, Argentine tango dancing is like a language in itself. If he traveled to Paris, for example, and didn’t know how to speak French, he would still be able to communicate with other tango dancers. The common language that Argentine tango dancers share lends ease to the interchangeability of dancers from community to community.
Argentine tango communities, quite literally, embrace outside dancers with open arms. “El Congreso,” The Argentine Tango Congress festival in Toronto, Canada was held from October 8 through the 12, and consisted of dance and music workshops with professionals, dance shows, and milongas. Another festival to be held in Boston, Massachusetts will take place from November 6 through the 9. The 2008 event will be the fourth annual “Tango de los Muertos” festival. Attendees are encouraged to dress up and get creative, as the festival has different costume themes each day and music varying from several DJs to a live orchestra. Inspired by festivals in surrounding areas, Widrick himself has ideas about a three-day Argentine tango festival in the works for next year to be held in the Niagara Falls area. He wants to bring people together to dance. “I know that there are so many people that would be interested in tango,” he says confidently, sweeping his left hand toward his scrawled-across sketchpad. “They just don’t know about it yet.”
Growing up on a dairy farm in upstate New York, Widrick was never interested in dance. In high school he was more of a jock than anything else. He had taken one year of modern dance class at Hobart College in Geneva where he majored in English and minored in art. His girlfriend at the time sparked his interest in Argentine tango dancing, and the rest is history. In fact, at his ten year high school reunion, Widrick surprised his former classmates with a performance. “They were surprised,” he said, “but I was like, ‘This is what I love, and I’m good at it, and I’m doing it’,” he said with a chuckle.
Chris Beale, a history teacher at Kenmore West High School, attends Widrick’s group classes and milongas at the Amherst Community Church. He’s been tango dancing for about one year and had some previous experience tap-dancing. He typically wears dress pants and a button down shirt or t-shirt to classes and milongas with ordinary, rubber-soled dress-shoes. Beale is able to dance with anyone at the milonga and is an exceptional leader. He dances because he likes the social aspect and the activity level, he says. “It’s a great outlet.”
Semant Jain, another dancer who frequently attends milongas in Buffalo has a solid background in ballroom and Latin dancing. During graduate school, Jain attended ballroom dancing championships such as the Ohio Star Ball with the University of Michigan’s various dance teams and clubs. In search of something new, he began looking into Argentine tango and attending milongas. He admits that his previous training has been an advantage to him in the world of tango, but also sees tango dancing as something very different. Jain enjoys the improvisational aspect of the dance.
Tali Wagner, a 23-year-old dancer from the Buffalo area, describes her passion for tango dancing as “an addiction.” In an article appearing in The Boston Globe, correspondent, Grace Talusan seems to have found the same sentiment among other Argentine tango dancers. “If Argentine tango is like falling in love, it’s also, according to its devotees, like catching an illness or developing an addiction. Dancers describe being ‘infected by tango’ or ‘bitten by the tango bug’” the article reads. Wagner has a background in salsa dancing, but her love for Argentine tango began just ten months ago, in December of 2007, after she was introduced to the dance by some friends. Now, she dances tango every day. In an excerpt from her journal from December, she writes: “Tango has hooked me in with its intense betrayal of passion. Nothing else (for me) has seemed a better physical expression of raw emotion; I can’t stop thinking about it…”
Wagner loves to travel to different Argentine tango communities to dance. Montreal and Toronto are her favorite dancing destinations thus far, but she hopes to see more of the world through her passion for the dance. She typically brings several pairs of shoes to a milonga or practica, wearing sky high heels until she needs to switch them for flats, or a lower pair. With the amount of dancing this girl does, it’s necessary to have more than one pair. Some of her favorites are her electric blue, strappy sandals from tangowear.com. They’re a custom order, costing her $130, and adding 4 ½ inches to her stature. Another pair that she has is leopard printed, and lower in heel-height. These shoes cost about $200 purchased from Comme Il Faut, the company that Wagner describes as the “crème de la crème” of tango footwear. Company founders Alicia Muniz and Raquel Coltrinari boast “sensuality, elegance, and comfort” in the production of their unique heels.
Shoes like Wagner’s are ornate and purport high quality construction, but they are not an essential. Women wear anything from tattered ballet flats to their favorite everyday heels. Wagner explains that the importance lies in the dancer’s ability to move around while wearing the shoes that they choose to wear. Pairs that allow the dancer mobility by sliding smoothly across the dance floor work best.
Argentine tango has no set dress code. Traditionally, however, men wear formal outfits and fedora-style hats, while women wear dresses that are typically red or black. Ideas about tango garb have changed over time and with different styles of dancing. Widrick has worn anything from a suit and tie to oversized jeans and a casual shirt. “You see a lot of creative dressing, especially associated with the Tango Nuevo style,” he says. Tango Nuevo, or “new tango” is a more modern take on traditional forms of Argentine tango dancing. It incorporates instruments such as electric guitar and saxophone and has a jazzier musical quality. Widrick stresses the fact that tango is not limited to traditional tango dancing styles and music. “Once you know the basics, it’s easy to branch out,” he says. “I’ve tango danced to just about everything,” says Widrick, as he continues on, talking about tango dancing to the likes of Alicia Keys and “Roxanne,” as featured in the film Moulin Rouge. This openness to modernity makes the dance accessible to anyone within any age group.
Argentine tango can be danced in a close embrace, in which partners’ upper bodies are pressed against one another or in a more open style where partners are up to an arms length apart. It depends on the style of dancing, the music that is being danced to, and the effect that is trying to be achieved. While a style such as Tango Milonguero is characterized by a very close embrace, styles like Tango Nuevo offer dancers more space for complex individual movements. Most tango dancers are able to alternate between different embraces, dancing closely or less intimately with a partner.
Regardless of the style, tango revolves around the idea of powerful, intense emotion between dancers. Wagner describes an almost “trance-like” state that her partner seems to drift into while dancing. While his eyes are open, he’s looking past her—or maybe he simply isn’t looking at all. His body leads hers around the floor, without any spoken direction. “It’s amazing to me how tango is a lot like a language,” says Widrick. “The basics of tango make up movements like the abc’s make up words. Words form sentences, and movements form more complex motions. This language of movement is the communication in tango dancing.”
