Tango: It Takes More Than Two

Through the high windows at the Harbor Rose, passers-by can see what could be the closing scene of a old movie, just before the credits come across the screen. Two lone dancers, captured in the frame of a window, circle the warmly lit restaurant, disappear, glide into view in the next window.

Photo by Author

It's tango night at the Harbor Rose, but Bert Waife and Caryn Coopmans are the only ones dancing. They're there to give lessons, and sure, a whole crowd of wannabe tangueros would be nice, but they don't seem to mind having the dance floor to themselves.

Midweek, midwinter in Sag Harbor. What do you expect?

Cool As They Come

The two instructors glide along, seeming to weave in and out of each other. Students will trickle in. The people sitting at the bar will watch, and soon enough there will be a couple that gets the bug and absolutely must learn at least how to do that flourishing turn.

Tango has an infectious quality. If you've ever danced, you'll want to know the tango, and even if you haven't, you'd probably recognize the steps.

Something like the waltz can seem stuffy and old-fashioned, strictly for your grandparents' generation, but this Argentine-born dance is the epitome of cool. Exotic. Sensual. A heart-stopper.

Riding the wave that began with the revival of simpler forms of partner-dancing, tango is slowly finding its own niche on the South Fork, much the way country line-dancing did a few years back, but with soul.

Unlike the wildly popular line dancing or the macarena, the tango is not for everybody. Despite what they say, it takes more than just two - it takes real skill.

"It isn't something you just do by instinct," said Sag Harbor's Canio Pavone, bookseller, publisher, and erstwhile ballroom-dance instructor. "You can't just pick it up by feeling the rhythm."

Dangerous? Could Be

"Tango is a dancer's dance," said Alfonso Triggiani, the owner and director of the Touch Dancing studio in Westhampton Beach. He teaches all the dances from the polka to the lambada, but his specialty is tango.

"The general public thinks you can come in and in one lesson you're going to tango away. You have to have the basic skills under your belt first.

"This is not the dance to start out with. . . . It could be very dangerous," he warned enigmatically.

"All that kicking, you can wreck your shins," confirmed one of his students, Diana Chang of Water Mill, a writer.

Hazards aside, the tango is cropping up in ballroom-dance classes, adding South American flavor to local restaurants, and will soon appear on the screen at the Sag Harbor Cinema in Sally Potter's film "The Tango Lesson."

It has all the signs of something about to be really big all over again.

In Argentina and elsewhere, tangueros are known only by their first names. Bert and Caryn, both American, met in Buenos Aires last fall. Caryn went there to teach English, but stayed on for more than two years after discovering the city's milongas, as the dance gathering spots are known.

She learned that the dance has not only a vocabulary of movement, but a spoken slang distinct to it, called lunfardo.

Polished Moves

Bert, who has been dancing much longer, learned Argentine tango, a closer, more improvisational form than American or "International" tango, in the United States.

In Argentina, however, he polished his moves. He has danced socially with some of the tango masters featured in "The Tango Lesson."

Around the time Bert and Caryn met, Alfonso, too, was in Argentina, studying the tango closely in order to complete an Argentine-tango syllabus for the World Dance Council.

For The Olympics

His syllabus will lay out teaching and judging standards for the original form, so that it can be included in next summer's Olympics along with its offspring styles.

There are standards for American and international tango but as of yet the Dance Council has not adopted any for the South American style. If Alfonso achieves his goal, that will change.

"It's not just a tango phenomenon," Alfonso said last week. "All the dances have been on the rise."

Inclusion in the Olympics certainly has something to do with this, but he also attributes the phenomenon to a "return to family values" and a renewed appreciation for tradition.

"Tango Argentino"

Truth be told, where tango is concerned, the Broadway production a decade ago of "Tango Argentino" and now of "Tango Forever" have helped spread the word: "Psst, hey, check this out."

The New York fever over "Tango Argentino" reached the East End, too. Alfonso saw the production 10 times and fell in love with the Argentine dance. He started taking lessons with some of the show's stars, and has gone on to study with some of the world's master tangueros.

Canio was once a professional flamenco dancer in Spain, "in another lifetime." After the success of "Tango Argentino," people who knew him when asked him to put on his dancing shoes again and give lessons locally, which he did for three or four years.

Farmhouse Demonstration

Even now, mention tango or salsa or almost any other dance and people will invariably ask, "Did you talk to Canio? To Alfonso?"

Alfonso often teaches and dances with Agnes Bristel of East Hampton, and Agnes teaches many of Touch Dancing's satellite classes, at the former Harbor Cove Cafe in Sag Harbor on Tuesday nights and at Gurney's Inn in Montauk on Thursdays.

Last week, Agnes and some of her students led a tango demonstration at the Farmhouse restaurant in East Hampton that drew close to 100 spectators.

"For me," said Agnes, "the greatest enjoyment comes when I see regular people dancing and discovering what a wonderful time it is."

She has no "favorite" dance, she said. "To see someone do any dance well, makes you want to do it."

Powerful Paradox

Ms. Chang, who participated in last week's demonstration at the Farmhouse, is especially hooked on tango.

"I love it. It possesses more than any other dance a fiery restraint, a controlled abandon."

That paradox is what gives the dance its power and why it's so drop-dead sexy even in a nearly empty restaurant on a quiet Thursday night.

Bert and Caryn give lessons at the Harbor Rose each Thursday at 7 p.m. Alfonso and Agnes teach various dances on Tuesdays at the Harbor Cove between 6 and 9 p.m., and Thursdays between 7 and 10 p.m. at Gurney's.