Some people learn to dance to keep fit. Others go to classes in order to meet people or to get out of the house once a week, or maybe they love music and want a way to express themselves physically when listening to their favourite tracks. But I did things a little differently, because I went to my first ever dance class in order to prove to myself that I could not dance.

When I was growing up as a kid I kept hearing about how my father used to be a champion ballroom dancer in his younger years. He had been to competitions all around the country and won medals against local and regional dancers in all the main ballroom dances. I found this a little strange as I had never seen him dance at all, and my mother never talked about it anywhere near as much as he did, but I had seen the medals so I knew it to be true. From his time in the army just after WWII until the late fifties or early sixties he had regularly danced in places like Stanley Halls in South Norwood, the Rivoli Ballroom in Lewisham, The Regent Dance Hall in Brighton and in many venues along the south coast. He had even danced competitively in the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool, the so-called “home of ballroom” in the UK. Dancing had been a big part of his life until shortly before I arrived in 1966.

It was not until many years later that I found out a little more about this period in Dad’s life, and learned that the main reason I had never seen him dance was due to my mother giving him an ultimatum regarding someone called “Sheila”. I have no idea what happened with Sheila or who she was, but whatever went on it brought an end to Dad’s dancing era, and so I never got to see him dance.

Despite not dancing any more, my parents, and particularly my father, kept a keen interest in the subject and talked about it a lot. As I grew up we would watch ballroom dancing whenever it appeared on the television, and Dad would give his comments on the performances. There was a show called Come Dancing that ran from around 1950 until the late nineties, and we would watch that most weeks. This featured televised dancing competitions from around the UK, and unlike the modern version “Strictly Come Dancing” (known as “Dancing With the Stars” outside the UK) the competitors were regular people and not celebrities. It was a popular show for many years, and so I picked up the atmosphere of the ballroom world without realising it.

But competitive dancing was not really my thing. I had no regular partner, no money for lessons, and much more of an interest in science and engineering at that time than I had in dance, so I never took it up. It was only much later when I was in my very early forties that I had a random conversation about dance with someone at work and it made me think. I told them that I could not dance to save my life, but despite this confident statement I had no idea if this was true. I am a scientist, and the only way to be sure about a statement so definitive and positive as that is to test it. So I started to look for dance classes in order to prove my assertion that I could not dance.

Ceroc

I began my search in places that I could get to relatively easily, although initially I made a point of looking out of my immediate area as I did not want to meet anyone I knew. I dismissed the nearby ballroom classes despite their excellent reputation as they all made a point of discussing the competitive element of dance from day one. After a while of not finding anything suitable I vaguely remembered hearing about a dance called “something-roc” that had been quite popular so I started to look for that. It took a while as I could not remember exactly what the dance style was called, but eventually I found a “Ceroc” class in Dartford that that seemed to be what I was after. It was easy to get to, far enough away that I was unlikely to meet any neighbours or colleagues, and looked like a fun thing to try on a Wednesday evening, even though I expected to be useless at it. So a few weeks later I sorted out my diary and went along.

That first evening was chaos, I had no idea what I was doing and messed everything up. It would have been easy to tell myself that the theory that I could not dance at all had been proven, that the experiment could be concluded, and that it was time to go home and try something else. But I was determined to see this through and all I had really found out was that I had no idea how to dance, not that I could not dance or would never be able to dance. I realised that it was like learning a new language; turning up to your first French class and being unable to pronounce “bonjour” would not mean that you could never learn French, just that you needed more practice. And so I went back the following week, and the week after that, and the week after that, and within a month I was completely hooked. Because it turned out that I could dance after all, and moreover was actually quite good at it.

Many Venues

One of the great things about learning a dance style that is popular everywhere is that you can find a class or event near you wherever you happen to be. This was fortuitous as shortly after discovering that dance class I changed jobs and found myself relocated from Kent to Hampshire. Travelling from there to Dartford one evening per week was not practical so I started to look closer to where I was staying. I found classes in Winchester and Chandler’s Ford, and so I spent two or three nights per week dancing at Ceroc, Le Roc, and Modern Jive venues up and down the M3 motorway corridor. I learned fast and eventually ended up as a teaching assistant at a venue that I found a few years later, but that is another part of the story as the important thing about dancing in Winchester was that it led me to discover tango.

Tango

Modern Jive is danced to pop music with an upbeat tempo of around 120 beats per minute, and at the time that covered almost everything that made it into the charts. But some tracks are closer to ballads than dance music and they do not work well with the rhythmic step-based moves that Jive gives you. Slower variations of Modern Jive do exist, and they focus on tension and fluidity to allow them to work with slow music, but not everyone dances them as the technique is quite different, and so when slow tracks are played a lot of dancers take the opportunity to go to the bar for a drink.

One Friday evening I was dancing at a social event (known as a ‘Freestyle’) that was being held in the magnificent Winchester Guildhall. The DJ had been playing a relentless selection of up-beat Modern Jive tracks, but then to give everyone a bit of a break he switched to something a little slower. I was already at the side of the dance floor having missed the previous dance, and so as the pace changed and the mood shifted I was in a good position to watch what was going on. Some people were dancing one of the Slow Jive variants that were being taught in venues around the area, but others were doing something completely different. Instead of the open hold used in Jive they were dancing close together, moving as one around the room and performing intricate twists and wraps with their legs. It was mesmerising, and for the next two tracks I just stood and watched.

When they finished and the music picked up the pace again I walked over to one of the couples who had been doing this interesting style and asked them what it was. “Tango”, they said, and explained that they had learned it elsewhere but that it worked well for all sorts of slower music. Apparently the event we were at occasionally ran a “tango room” upstairs as well as the main Modern Jive room, and if I came along the next month I would probably be able to see more of it there.

I did go along, and I did go upstairs to watch the tango. At that point I was still convinced that I would never be able to do anything more complex than the notoriously easy-to-learn Modern Jive and so I was ready to let it drop and remain forever a tango spectator, but a few weeks later, Hannah, a friend from one of the other venues, told me that there was a tango class the following night down in Southampton and that I would be joining her there. I laughed, but she said that she was completely serious, that I would love it, and that she would not take no for an answer. So with some trepidation I drove down to Southampton after work the next day and walked into my first ever tango class.

Unexpected

If you had asked me what I had been expecting I would not have been able to give you a sensible answer, but whatever I might have thought would happen there the reality was very different. The class was mostly men with Hannah helping Joe (the teacher) run the class, so from that first lesson I had to learn both the leader and follower roles. I discovered tango was completely different to anything I had encountered before, that nothing I thought I knew about dance applied to tango, and that if there was an “opposite” to Modern Jive then tango was probably it.

I carried on going to that class for a couple of months and enjoyed it, but then my job changed again so I could not easily get to Southampton any more. This was annoying, but I assumed that finding a good tango class would be as easy as finding a good Modern Jive class had been. Unfortunately however this proved to be a lot more difficult than I expected, and I went through quite a few classes with very strange teaching styles before eventually finding a good one.

By this time I was back in Bromley and had become a teaching assistant at the local Ceroc Modern Jive venue. I was dancing more than ever and making new friends, and then one evening I asked Nathalie if she would like to try out tango sometime at a class I had found. She said yes, and the following week we went back to the same venue in Dartford where I had gone for my first ever Ceroc class and joined a tango group taught by an Argentine teacher called Omar Sosa.

Hooked on Tango

Although by that time I had been dancing tango on and off for some years, this was really when I began my deep and lasting relationship with the dance. Omar’s style was traditional so he played music from the old tango bands of the 1930s during the class, but despite never really engaging with the music we found his teaching style to be fun and he kept the class interested and lively every week. We went there for some time, and then found out about Warren and Irina’s classes in Brighton so started to go there. They had yet another approach to teaching that I would now consider to be quite modern, and although they mostly played the older music they did introduce some modern or alternative tracks from time to time.

The more I learned the more I realised there was still a lot that I did not understand about tango. Anyone can set up as a dance teacher with little or no formal qualifications, but all Modern Jive teachers, whether Ceroc, Le Roc, or any other variant all follow the same basic approach. Salsa classes in London or elsewhere all teach the same steps and the same way of interpreting the music, and ballroom classes are regulated to the point that the order you learn things varies little between classes anywhere in Europe.

Tango teachers on the other hand seemed to be a law unto themselves. No two classes were taught the same way, and where one class would focus on steps and sequences another class would concentrate on technique. You might learn about giros and ochos at your first ever beginners’ class at one venue, but another would start with walking and let you do little else for weeks. And yet wherever you learn and whatever style you follow you end up being able to dance the tango with someone who has learned from a completely different teacher.

This made no sense to me. How could one dance be approached from so many different directions and follow so many different paths, and yet somehow end up being similar enough that students of one path could dance seamlessly with dancers from another? What was it about tango that made it so unique?

That was when I realised that if I was ever to understand and become good at this dance I would have to go back to its origins and learn how it had developed. Maybe then I could begin to unravel its intricacies and decipher its contradictions. I needed to learn about the history and origins of tango.