Tango Blossoms in Viroqua

               There was no tango in Madison this weekend, so I decided to go to Minnesota to buy a canoe. On the way, I recalled a tanguera mentioning that there was a tango workshop and a milonga being held somewhere in the Wisconsin Hill Country, which is where I just happened to be.

               I went to http://www.madisontango.org/ and found the workshop was being held in a town called Viroqua. I made a detour and attended a terrific class on the fundamentals of tango taught by a pair of excellent teachers: Craig Rypstat and Catherine Young of http://tangohouseofmadison.com/.

               My arrival provided a perfect gender-balance to this group of twenty students. 

               Viroqua is a small town of seven thousand people located in southwestern Wisconsin. It is separated from the Mississippi River by a small mountain range twenty miles wide. It’s an incredibly beautiful area that is full of Native American landmarks and Norwegian-heritage gift shops.

               Going to different tango events is always a learning experience inside and outside of the classroom. I learned that here the hills aren’t called mountains, they are called bluffs; and the valleys in between are called coulees but they all looked like mountains and valleys to me.

               The class was conducted in a Masonic Lodge meeting room. After the lesson, there was a milonga at a nearby winery that provided vino, crackers and samples of Wisconsin cheeses that would make a Frenchman jealous.

               In the interaction between qualified tango instructors there is often a dynamic that provides a very important lesson. So it was here in every demonstration of the seemingly simple movements that we studied. 

                With each of Catherine’s rudimentary exhibitions, she sent a powerful message about the follower’s role in this endeavor. With her demeanor, she conveyed the intense concentration necessary to read Craig’s body language. 

                This is almost always lost on the beginners because they are so focused on learning patterns. I too was oblivious to it during my entire first year, yet it was the biggest hurdle I had to overcome before I could truly dance tango.

               The couple’s ability to listen to each other with total absorption is what gives this dance its legendary mystique. To the untrained eye, the exchange between two competent tango dancers can appear to be one of intense passion, often mistaken for anger or lust.

               Within their embrace, however, there is only the music and the next step; there is no room for anything else. The spontaneous choreography of a song by two persons while each maintains a separate balance is a demanding task.

               To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to find such an authentic tango experience this weekend but I did. I danced with women I had never met and connected with them through the music in a way that I found satisfying, recuperative and edifying. 

               I left there with the same feeling I have after a night of good tango dancing. I felt refreshed and my mind raced with memories of all the wonderful encounters I had on the dance floor.

               The seasons changed that day. Winter finally conceded to Spring amidst the bluffs and coulees of southwestern Wisconsin. The music played and the people danced as tango blossomed once more in a place where before there had been none.

              

For more of the Kayak Hombre, read my book Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure or River Tango. Available on Amazon.com in paperback or Kindle.