After intending to go to Friday night salsa classes for a month, I finally made it there this weekend. 50 pesos gets you into the venue – in a cultural centre in Palermo Soho – and access to all the lessons of the night, the dance floor, bar and restaurant (well tables around the dance floor that you can order some food from). A friend and I went to learn salsa, and randomly ended up running into someone who we had met earlier in the week at a closed door restaurant (who incidentally is also South African. Well technically Zimbabwean but lives in SA. Close enough), and another British girl. This meant we had a nice fun crowd, which was good since we had no idea how the evening was supposed to work.
The music started pumping, and people flocked to the floor and formed lines behind a row of very enthusiastic instructors. Our clue that the class was starting. It started with what basically resembled a zumba class at the gym, with everyone copying the instructors through some basic fun moves, and some loosening up – turns out, I’m good at learning steps but not so comfortable shaking what my momma gave me on request!
Breaking up into groups – complete beginners and those with more experience – the class started. It was taught in a really fun way, with the guys lining up on one side and girls on the other to learn the steps, and then pairing up to practice. We had to change partners every song, which makes it an excellent way to meet people. The lessons attract all sorts of interesting people, both locals and many foreigners, and I ended up dancing with people from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Ireland, France and more. The instructors frequently stopped us to teach us more complicated moves or to correct what we were doing and reinforce the timing. It was so much fun and a surprisingly good workout, as we left the dance floor an hour later, a lot more tired and sweaty and ready for a beer at the bar.
Feeling very social, we hung around having a chat and a beer, watching people practice their moves on the dancefloor. Then, after a tango demonstration, I was excited to find out that a tango class was starting. Of course everyone was keen to join in and learn Argentina’s most iconic dance.
Tango is much more difficult than salsa. Not least because the steps and timing are more complicated, but partner work here is very important. With the same concept as salsa, having to continuously swap partners, I figured out that the ease of the dance is definitely dependent on who you dance with. The class ended with most of us having achieved a competent grasp of the basic step (I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was mastered). This is definitely a style that is going to take many lessons to get the hang of.
Hanging out at a table afterwards, watching everyone take to the dance floor, I was approached by a very insistent (and very short) Argentinian man. Despite my protests that I couldn’t dance tango beyond the basic step I had just learnt, he dragged me onto the dance floor to begin two excruciatingly awkward rounds of the dance floor. Tango is an extremely intimate dance, making it very difficult to dance with a stranger if you have any issues being super close to someone you don’t know from a bar of soap. Even more so when that someone is a little bit too into the dance and the intimacy and gets a little bit more close than the dance requires. When after the second dance he put his head on my chest, I reached my limit and ran off, before he could grab my hand for a third dance.
Later, sitting and enjoying the dancers, I was approached by an old man we had been watching all evening. He must have been well into his 70s or even 80s and looked a little bit too close to death to be dancing, but that wasn’t stopping him dancing with all the old girls. When he came to stand over me wanting a dance, my brain started whirring to find excuses (I can’t dance! I’m too tired! I have a disease!). Luckily I was saved by a (much younger) guy who cut in and asked me dance.
This gentleman (who is nameless because I can’t recall if we even exchanged names) was very good at tango. He gave me the greatest lesson of the night. He told me that the steps aren’t important. The woman, in tango, doesn’t have to do anything but let go and be guided, to feel the music and the weight and let your body tell you where you need to go. I cannot even explain the accuracy of this advice, when lo and behold, after letting go, and letting him simply guide me, I was actually dancing tango. Perhaps not with the flair and fancy footwork of someone with experience, but tango none-the-less.
I feel like there is probably a valuable life lesson in that, particularly for someone like me who doesn’t not easily just ‘let go’. Or perhaps the lesson is simply that the only person who makes mistakes in tango is the man. Pick which one works for you…
This is definitely going to become a Friday night regular spot until I master both salsa and tango. Should you be in Buenos Aires and want to join, check out La Viruta. In addition to salsa and tango, they also teach rock (basically swing), folklore and bachata. It’s an incredibly fun way to spend a Friday evening, and 50 pesos for two dance lessons is a bargain.
Nix Travels 