by Melissa Kocmkoc@ucla.edu
For those of you who get sick of relationships that last more than say three minutes, I have the solution for you. Argentine tango: a partner dance born in the suburbs of Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth century.
It’s a dance of posture, balance, embrace, and direction, comprised of intertwined patterns of ochos, ganchos, sacadas, and boleos, to name a few. If you don’t have the slightest clue as to what any of that means, it’s quite alright.
In its essence, Argentine tango has little to do with the elements or patterns. The spirit of Argentine tango is about passion, using the elements as instruments to draw out all of the emotions hidden away in the heart.
The heart doctor of UCLA, Varo Boyajyan, teaches intermediate tango at the John Wooden Center from 9:15 to 10:30 every Thursday evening.
As a senior at the UCLA School of Dentistry, Varo can do a lot more with your teeth than just pop a rose in between them. He is an aspiring dentist and a future teacher of dentistry at UCLA. But more importantly, he plans to continue teaching tango.
As a veteran of many a dance class, I expected Varo’s class to be no different from those of other instructors with big heads filled with preconceived notions on how to move everything from your upper body down to the last muscle fiber in your pinky toe. That wasn’t the case with Varo.
Authentic Argentine tango is not about learning steps or memorizing patterns, it’s about connecting with your partner, sharing with them the emotions we often push into a deserted corner of our hearts and are too embarrassed or proud to share with anyone else. The best part is you don’t even have to build up the nerve to actually say anything; you express it with your body language.
Tango is emotion. It’s about that time your lazy coworker got the promotion you were waiting for, the time when that special someone you had been eyeing forever ended up going for someone else, even that time someone stole the parking spot you finally found after making endless rounds around the lot, and especially all those times you knowingly walk through hordes of judgments and bigotry veiled behind a million fake smiles just to sit with your two friends in between classes. It’s intimacy, anger, passion, desire, harmony, romanticism, and sorrow all in a single song. It’s returning to life, even if only for a mere three minutes, after getting carried away by daily hassles and losing ourselves so much in the past and future that we forget to live the present.
Tango is a challenge. Learning to dance tango demands you to grow not only as a dancer, but as a person. We often associate strength with insensitivity. We are reluctant to experience our lives with our hearts because, frankly, that would just be too difficult to deal with, right? Plus we have classes, exams, papers, jobs, gossip, and the like to deal with; there’s just no room for feeling. But in order to truly experience Argentine tango, you must face the real feelings and weaknesses you once buried somewhere within yourself. You must challenge yourself to be honest and open up your heart to yourself and the three-minute stranger in front of you.
Couples swayed across the dance floor in Varo’s class, each with their own emotions and life stories creating their own intimate moments. Finding a few minutes to talk, I asked Varo:
What inspired you to get into dance?
Just being Armenian, part of a culture where when I went to any party people would dance. So I’ve been dancing since I was very young, it’s been in my blood. I came to UCLA, took one class, and got hooked.
Is there anything specific about tango you enjoy more than other dances?
In tango there’s a connection with a partner so it’s more social, where basically people say you’re in love for three minutes. You get to connect. Tango is more than a dance, it’s a lifestyle.
Can those people who are more shy and afraid of intimacy be successful tango dancers? What advice can you give them?
This definitely helps with social skills because tango has some unwritten rules. You just don’t walk up to someone and invite them to dance, and a shy person would be too shy to do that. In tango, you look at the lady if you want to invite them and you nod with your head. If they say yes then you walk over and invite them. Tango teaches you a lot of social skills and life skills and definitely people who love to dance should just come out and try it.
For those who want to learn tango, where around LA can they go to take classes and/or just dance?
Basically UCLA has two classes: beginner and intermediate. We have practices and a UCLA tango club. They hold weekly practices from 7-9 on Wednesday nights. Other than that, in Los Angeles, there are a lot of tango clubs. Every night there is a tango dance in Los Angeles where you can go to a class and then dance/practice after. All the information about LA is on tangoafficionado.com.
Is there anything else you want to tell anyone who is interested in tango?
Tango is basically a lifestyle and it will teach you a lot in terms of dancing and interacting with people and it will help you to improve your relationships with everybody. If you want to just have a good time, dance with people, meet new people, enjoy your time, just come out and tango.
So, if you’re sick of being a traveling spectator, only looking at things without being involved in them, I’d recommend paying Varo a visit. When the song begins and the passion unfolds, you’ll find a million reasons to fall in love with tango.
We dance tango because we want to conquer our egos, because we need a resolution to the tension inside, because we have secrets.
We dance tango because we have a million more things flooding through our hearts than running through our minds. We dance tango because an intimate moment, a chance to be honest without having to say a single word, is just too good of a thing to pass up.
We dance tango because arousing the heart and falling in love is just too beautiful of a thing to waste.
And the best part is that we dance tango because when the song ends, we can just drop each other like hot potatoes and move on to the next three-minute love affair.
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