Great Flora Tango Shoes

Mark your calendars for Saturday, February 18! 

9:00 pm -1:00 am

Wine/Beer Bar on Site
Snacks Provided
Cost $10

Metropolitan Ballroom
      2935 Providence Rd. Suite 200
Charlotte, NC 28211
(704) 364-1871

As usual, Stepping In Style will be there  selling shoes – come early so you can check out the great selection of Greta Flora, Tangotacion, Taconeando styles and more and try some on!  Ask about our Ballo dance sneaker collection – for style and comfort.

Just click on the CATALOG link above or select from the left menu “Women’s Shoes” –> and your size to view and purchase.

Contact marcia@stepping-in-style.com with any questions.

Monthly (4 week) course on the “Fundamentals of Tango Argentino”, suitable for Beginners & Intermediates. Content of classes is specially designed to develop and improve your skills on the dance floor  so you can enjoy social dancing at your best.Since each week will build on the previous week’s lesson, it is important to attend classes starting at the beginning of the month.

Passion For Tango’s Friday night class series on the “Fundamentals of Tango Argentino” is going to be held at the Metropolitan Ballroom. Metropolitan Ballroom, located in the heart of Charlotte, North Carolina, offers an elegant yet relaxed social atmosphere on a 3,000 square foot Danish maple dance floor.

Monthly Cycle Syllabus:

In the First class of the month cover the concepts around walking, embrace, and connection which are the essential elements of Argentine Tango.

In  the Second class of the month introduces the pivot which will be an important building block for changes of front and the famous ocho figure. Ocho in Spanish means “eight” and this figure takes that name because the movements of the feet resemble the drawing of an 8 on the floor.

The Third class covers concepts used in previous classes to introduce simple turns or giros which will use the basic elements learned in previous classes. Simple turns are fundamental elements for a good navigation on a dance floor, especially when it is crowded. Giros are generally performed by the follower stepping around the leader, who pivots or walks in the center.

Subsequent weeks will review all the concepts covered during the month, alternate ways to perform them, and put them together to play with them in different combinations.

Preregistration is encouraged since we want to maintain gender balance as much as possible.
For preregistration you may call 704-575-4278 or email us at PassionForTango@yahoo.com

Registration is also welcome at the door.

Time:   6:30 – 8:00 p.m.

Cost:
• $15.00 for drop-ins
• $50.00for whole month

No partner needed!

Metropolitan Ballroom
2935Providence Road – Suite 200
Charlotte, NC 28211
(704)364-1871
Parking is FREE!

Local artist pursued passion for the dance, now reflected in his artwork

Upon meeting William Temples, you may think he is from Latin America.

He is fluent in Spanish and calls himself Guillermo. He shops at the Spanish grocery store on South Boulevard and listens almost exclusively to Spanish music. His home is covered with paintings and photos from Buenos Aires and he often wears a wooden necklace resembling a rosary around his neck. To a non-Spanish speaking person, even his accent seems to hint at a foreign birth.

Temples, 42, is from southern Georgia. But he might not admit it.

Twelve years ago Temples was just coming out of a divorce when he decided to learn Spanish. To make himself more fluent, he visited Buenos Aires, Argentina, because he was told it was beautiful.

Before he reached the hotel there, Temples was stopped by a sight that would forever change his life.

All around him an accordion’s bittersweet melody filled the air. Couple’s torsos and cheeks pressed together as they floated to the music in a dance he had never seen before, and never forget.

That dance was the Argentine tango.

For the next two weeks, Temples forgot his pursuit of Spanish and learned to tango. He visited a different tango school every day. His instructors taught him as much as one can learn in two weeks.

Upon returning to his south Charlotte home, Temples went to dance studios seeking to continue his education. But he kept running into the same problem – the only tango taught in Charlotte was ballroom tango – an entirely different dance.

One day he met a man also looking for an Argentine tango class. Originally from Argentina, Daniel Arredondo knew significantly more tango than Temples. Temples begged Arredondo to start a beginner’s class in Charlotte and Temples, who worked at the former Tower Club in uptown, was able to borrow studio space.

Arredondo came up with the name Passion for Tango for his newfound school, and Temples, who had a degree from Savannah College of Art and Design, drew the logo, a couple dancing, inspired by what he saw in Argentina.

Having been put online by a friend, the logo started showing up at the top of Google image searches and Temples was contacted by people from all over the world, wanting to know if they could use his image for their tango school or music artwork.

Temples found that he couldn’t stop drawing tango dancers and scenes from Argentina. The dance that was becoming more and more a part of his life was spilling onto his canvases.

It also was spilling into the Charlotte community. Soon the class moved to various sites, including Bistro 100, RiRa’s, Patou Bistro, Morehead Street Tavern and now, Lynn’s Dance Club.

“We basically go where we can practice without having to pay a large fee,” Temples said. “Tango is an art and unfortunately, Charlotte isn’t really known for being an art town.”

Arredondo, who went to Argentina every year, made friends with Facundo Posadas, one of the most revered tango instructors in the world. Posadas came to Charlotte several times where he gave workshops and made a big impact on the novice tango community.

Arredondo and Temples also visited Atlanta and New York to learn as many new steps and techniques as possible.

After a few years, Temples also started instructing in Charlotte. Now, Passion for Tango offers classes at various locations four days a week and usually at least one milonga (tango dance) per week.

“It’s become a very diverse group,” Temples said. “It’s all nationalities and ages, from grandfathers to teenagers.”

Temples has frequently visited Argentina where he met his current wife Mariana. Thanks to her, he says his connection to Argentina is stronger than ever and he is becoming more inspired with his art.

“I can’t imagine a life without tango,” Temples said as he swept a piece of charcoal down canvas to outline a woman’s leg in the midst of dancing.

With tango music filling his studio, tango paintings all around him and tango shoes on his feet, it would be hard for anyone to imagine Temples without tango.

Lauren Bailey is a freelance writer. Email her at lbailey.charlotteobserver@gmail.com.

A journey down the Leheigh river and into the world of tango.

Love tango?     You may be interested in reading ‘River Tango’.

“River Tango” is a short novel by Perri Iezzoni: a tango dancer in the Charlotte tango community, and whitewater river guide. Here ‘Deliverance’ meets ‘Dancing with the Stars’.

Perri Iezzoni’s novel takes us down the Lehigh River on an unforgettable trip and into the world of Argentine Tango. For some it is a trip of no return. For Odie Larson, the lead character, it is a story of awakening. Iezzoni combines his knowledge of the natural world and the world of tango, revealing an original sensibility.

“ His writing is often beautiful; sometimes surprising, in what he is able to “pull off,” and always engaging in the twists and turns of this adventurous tale. A ‘River Tango’ is thought provoking and evocative.”

If you are interested in purchasing the book, you can find it on Amazon.

Modification

I have a problem with my new tango shoes, Tangotacion’s Jenny, green fish skin, size 37. They are absolutely beautiful, but too wide at the heel and not tight enough at the front. What I mean to say is that the peep-toe is too wide for my toes to merely peep out. Instead, all four of them shout out the front of my shoe in a chorus of potentially crying toenails. I don’t like having to modify the shoe with inserts and it breaks my heart (at least the tiny part reserved for attachments to footwear) that the shoes do not fit perfectly.

I was hoping to find a cobbler skilled enough to remedy this. A cosmetic surgeon for my shoes, if you will. I visited two yesterday and both said they couldn’t change anything about the shoe. One woman said the shoes were just too beautiful and well-made, and that it would just be easier to add inserts to them.

I took that home with me. The shoe is already perfect in its own right; it is made of superior quality materials, and “putting it under the knife” to try to modify it would compromise its integrity (not to mention scratching up the patent leather piping and potentially adding on sub-par materials). Fortunately for the shoes both cobblers were wise enough to tell me there was nothing they could do. I’m going to have to relent and add insoles. I’m not completely happy with this (I still long for a perfect fit, but I can’t exactly buy another expensive pair of shoes at the moment). In the same way, going under the knife to change some thing about someone’s physical makeup could needlessly alter who that person is. Mind you, different people have different reasons for cosmetic surgery, but in my case I feel that changing anything the easy way would detract from what I am supposed to learn here on earth. I’m already crafted perfectly to whatever purpose is mine. Perhaps frustration with how clothes fit me is a cross I am meant to bear, to teach me patience or to give me just enough push to learn how to make my own clothing. As with the shoes, the easiest thing is to just add padding and dance like nobody knows.

There is much more to be said about the relationship between a dancer and her shoes. In the case above I am comparing the shoes to the dancer, but more can be said when we compare her shoes to her partners. That is a topic for a later post.

It’s amazing how relevant this illustration was to me; the whole past week I had been struggling with my own issues, and realizing that cutting up the shoes would make them less beautiful was like being told, “you are perfect the way you are.” This is how tango speaks to me.

16 March 2011
beginnings

In the beginning was the year that was 2001. And was that ever a year.

Sometime in the fall, after September, but still warm enough for me to be sitting outside the Mechanical Engineering building at the University of Illinois waiting for an astronomy class to begin, through tears in my eyes I see a green flier taped to the door, the number pull-off tabs waving at me like twenty arms reaching down to grab me. LEARN ARGENTINE TANGO! it said. Thirty bucks for a semester’s worth of weekly classes. I was in. Not because of the programmed dreams of passionate leg kicks and roses in lovers’ mouths or the opportunity to meet people, but because I had fallen in love with Argentine tango the semester before (thanks to The Tango Lesson, directed by Sally Potter, and Paper Tangos, by Julie Taylor), fallen in love in and with Argentina the summer before, and fallen hard to the bottom of a depression fed by evaporated illusions and the effects of five calculus-based courses with no outlet for my right brain. Not to mention the overall climate in the culture at large shortly after September 11th.

I show up to the first class, black suede-bottomed ballroom shoes (to which I have been extremely faithful, despite their low heel and worn away parts of the sole, they fit me perfectly and I still dance in them) in hand, not a word leaves my mouth and I am addressed by an Argentine woman: Sos la esposa de Mariano? she says, coincidentally asking (assuming I am Argentine or at least fluent in Spanish) if I am Mariano’s wife; Mariano, the name of evaporated Argentine illusions. This question was the first yellow arrow on the camino that would become the dance of my life: a synchronicity that told me, before I had the vocabulary or the capacity to understand its meaning, that I was on a path that would lead somewhere towards that place underground where my heart was buried.

The classes came and went. I learned the salida, ochos, ganchos, had my big toe bloodied by a clodding moron in work boots, and went to two milongas. It was only the beginning. My legs learned how to move, my muscles memorized the steps, but I failed to learn how to really dance. Argentine tango has a lead and a follow, and they must maintain a connection between themselves so that she can feel and respond appropriately to his every move (or invitation). I was still stuck in ballroom-dance mentality, believing that tango had a count to be kept in one’s head, that every dance always started with the same move, that every move was programmed and set in stone. I had no concept of the subtle, wordless communication between partners that makes the entire dance worthwhile. I was twenty and had a lot of growing up to do before I could understand it.

The next year I spent in Buenos Aires. As part of a study-abroad group of thirty or so students, we were encouraged to attend cultural affairs. I took a tango class at the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas taught by Domingo Pugliese, but all the more experienced male dancers continually lost patience with me and my anticipation of their dance moves. I lasted a month. Being a 21-year old in a city known for its night life, I soon lost interest in tango and traded it for nightclubs (boliches). Consider it a cultural study of a different kind.

After that year I came back to university, but tango lay dormant. Then came graduation and the beginning of “real-world” life, and tango got stuffed in the decorated shoe box filled with my memories. I took it out and looked at it several times, once on a return visit to Buenos Aires in 2004, dancing with a partner who was telling me how beautiful physics was, and twice while I was coupled with a non-dancer in Charlotte in 2007 and 2008. It wasn’t until I was alone with very few friends in Charlotte that I decided to take up tango seriously, take it out of the shoe box and prominently display it on the mantle piece. In May of 2009 I started dancing with a wonderful group of people, taking beginner classes on Monday nights and learning everything else by dancing with more experienced dancers. The first lesson I learned from tango was that it is essential to dance with the better dancers if you are to improve your dancing, even if you are intimidated by them. As in life we grow by learning from souls greater than our own despite our fears.

When anyone asks how long I’ve been dancing tango, I tell them it’s a complicated story. I learned it ten years ago, but have really only been dancing it for almost two years now. I didn’t understand it when I first learned it, but now it makes sense to me.

Tango was reaching out to me. The classes I took in 2001 were the fling whose flame was soon outshone by the numbers of young Argentine men continually complimenting my blue eyes and calling out piropos in the street (which, unlike in the USA, are actually flattering). Tango called me every once in a while and we went out on a few dates, but, comfortable where I was, I stopped returning its calls. But tango waited patiently and, alone and without a path to follow, I came back to it and it opened my own world to me. I will be dancing as long as I am able.