TangoConnection™ Sessions – Winter/Spring 2025
for absolute beginners through advanced students
TangoConnection™ Group Classes
NOTE! NO CLASS on Christmas Day 12/25/24 or New Years Day 1/1/2025!!
The Avalon Ballroom, 6185 Arapahoe Ave, Boulder, CO 80303
All levels
$15 per person or five lessons for $60
DEEP DIVE CLASS DESCRIPTION:
Whether you are a BEGINNER or an EXPERIENCED dancer, our goal for you and all our tango students is to facilitate your potential to become the most popular social tango dancer for a thousand miles around! After close to 30 years of very full rich tango life travelling the world (training, teaching, performing, social dancing and organizing successful tango events across 3 continents), we’re very proud and also humbly grateful to have assisted thousands of students to achieve their tango goals and we’re delighted to have the opportunity to do the same for YOU – even if you don’t know what your goals are in the beginning, we’ll discover them together.
We look forward to welcoming you to the exciting world of Argentine tango social dancing – all levels welcome in our class schedule, group and private lessons alike! Join us to discover for yourself why brand new through experienced students return week after week, month after month, year after year to enjoy the pleasures and challenges inside a unique dance community of learning and deepening tango skills by attending our thorough, delightful, effective and delicious classes.
RESULTS!
We’re very proud of our students because so many develop into popular and talented Argentine tango social dancers (and even teachers themselves!). After decades of teaching across 3 continents in group and private lesson settings, we’ve taught thousands of people the joys of Argentine tango social dance. We’re confident we can do the same for you!
Students are delighted to discover our class material builds in an engaging, smooth and accessible way, whether you bring a group of friends, a partner or attend our classes solo. Among the many necessary ingredients in our highly successful ‘secret sauce’ TangoConnection™ classes includes an embedded rotating curriculum we deliver in a methodical, structured yet dynamic way so that no two classes are alike. Absolute beginners through highly skilled veteran dancers are attracted to our classes because we simultaneously introduce fresh material while reviewing and reinforcing clean fundamentals. In other words, don’t be surprised by very skilled students who take classes repetitively and don’t be surprised if that includes you one day soon!
Delivered with professionalism, humor and warm personal attention by our dedicated DoTH team, our classes support each student to pursue the universe of endlessly fascinating Argentine tango material at your individual pace. Our DoTH commitment is to deliver playful yet powerful learning experiences that facilitate individual creativity, confidence and personal style while inviting students to investigate our very diverse tango social dance community.
OUR APPROACH TO LEARNING TANGO:
Before you can fly a plane or sail a boat, you go to “ground school”! Argentine tango dancing is absolutely the same (but MUCH more fun)!
The 7pm class features an introduction to the fundamental tango connection that we call “The Magic”! Unique to our approach, we’ll share with you the simple “secret” to discovering a GREAT tango dance with ANY partner. This has nothing to do with memorizing the “right” steps and much more to do with how you and your partner are experiencing each other’s movements in the moment. You can even apply “The Magic” with a partner who’s never heard of it – and it only takes about five minutes to learn!
Then we introduce you to the “geography” of tango – what we call the “tango river” – so you internalize right from the start the safest and most secure way to move around the tango dance floor (“flowing downstream” in line of dance), regardless of the level of skill of the other dancers on the floor. Not only does this allow you to feel safe and confident dancing near more advanced students working on other material, it’s the ideal training for dancing in the “real world” of tango social events.
From there, we guide you through a thorough rotating curriculum packed full with essential, fascinating and delightful tango fundamental “figures” or “steps”. Divided into 5 separate topics, we urge students to take these lessons at YOUR convenience, designing your attendance as best suits your unique schedule and learning style. This can mean attending every week, taking all 5 lessons sequentially. Because these classes also accommodate drop-in students, they can be taken in any order and with whatever level of frequency and/or repetition works best for each individual. Return/rinse/repeat or move on to our Int/Adv classes as your skills grow.
We note most people have more fun and achieve longer-lasting success when offered the freedom to take the classes in any order, frequency and with whatever repetition promotes relaxed learning at YOUR preferred pace. Read on below for complete class descriptions.
We name our five tango classes after popular tango composers, so there is no suggestion about sequence that you’d need to follow. Start with any of them as your first class, skip a class if you need to, take them in any order – like eating a pizza! Who cares which slice you eat first, as long as you eat them all!
“Di Sarli” – Walking and ochos
“D’Arienzo” – La Cruzada, Corners and Turns
“Canaro” – Milonga!!
“Pugliese” – Musicality and Expression
“Caló” – More Turns, and the Vals Rhythm
Each class has a different emphasis in vocabulary and in the technique suited to that vocabulary. In addition, the “Canaro” class will introduce and develop dancing to milonga rhythm and the “Caló” class will do the same for the tango vals rhythm.
When appropriate, we’ll also have a special series of classes uniquely suited to the current attendees, which will be described each week in our e-newsletter, “Tango Training Notes” filled with resources, reminders, notes from class, book and video reviews pertinent to your tango explorations – yours for free.
No matter which class you take, our signature teaching approach still applies:
“Everybody Leads, Everybody Follows, Flowing Downstream in Line of Dance”
No partner needed, just your willingness to explore, discover, enjoy! You’ll be accompanied by marvelous fellow students and gorgeous inspiring music with caring professional teachers dedicated to your progress. Each class builds world class quality social dancers from the ground up – easily, elegantly, playfully, expertly.
START ANY TIME!
In our TangoConnection™ class structure, we look at the basics of tango from five different perspectives in each of our five class sessions we’ve named after famous tango orchestras – Di Sarli, D’Arienzo, Pugliese, Calo and Canaro. We parse the fundamentals of Argentine tango dancing into a rich curriculum of five individual classes so students receive a structured presentation of rotating topics that delivers a thorough exposure to the foundations of Argentine tango. This approach lures not only brand new beginners who appreciate a supportive and exciting learning environment, but students with years of tango training who return again and again to refine their technique. We’ve successfully launched THOUSANDS of students into the exciting world of Argentine tango through these classes which prepare students to enter the social dance arena with confidence and pleasure.
No partner is required, but we recommend bringing a sense of humor and adventure! For a complete exposure to learning the basics of tango, take all five classes. It’s typical that individuals enter our series with different schedule constraints and levels of previous preparation from a variety of other experiences and teachers. We strongly recommend rotating through all five of our fundamentals classes at least once. Repetition is also a very popular option and a great method for integrating the basics and laying a strong foundation for more.
For students with the ambition to explore deeply, we offer a glorious constellation of training opportunities to go for your full tango potential! Private Lessons with Brian & Deb will maximize your enjoyment and accelerate your tango potential in our Boulder Dance of the Heart studio (other locations also available upon request).
Use all the above as preparation to register for our TangoIntensivo™ Intermediate/Advanced training sessions in Buenos Aires, Argentina featuring LUCIANA VALLE and our acclaimed TangoIntensivo™ team!
SEE YOU IN CLASS!!!