Our tango

For us, tango is above all elegant, passionate and driven by the music. It is marked by its improvisational and innovative qualities, yet always sustained by the best traditions of Argentine tango, and our emphasis is always on the connection between us as we dance. We dance mostly salon-style, social tango, adapting our style to the situation, the music and the moment.

In Buenos Aires, and on crowded dancefloors elsewhere, we dance most often in a close embrace, dancing ‘traditional’, more conservative figures. If we have more space, we dance in a mixture of close and open embrace, responding to the music, and experimenting with new movements and ideas, within the framework of the dance. We would probably describe this style as ‘nuevo-inspired’, as described on the page About Argentine Tango - Tango dance styles. In vals and milonga, we enjoy expressing the rhythm of the music. Vals is a particular favourite!


Our partnership

Jon was introduced to tango in 1997, and in 2002, he started teaching weekly classes in Canterbury, Kent. Sarah started tango in the late Autumn of 2003, and was seriously hooked! We discovered a shared passion for and commitment to this beautiful dance, and quickly became dance partners. A year later, we started teaching together.

When we first met, Jon was established in a long-term career as a chartered accountant, and Sarah was a Senior Lecturer and academic author at the University of Kent. In the summer of 2007, we decided to make the leap, and each of us gave up these professions to pursue tango full time. The path to full-time tango wasn’t entirely smooth, however. Just two weeks after we had quit our jobs, a large (but benign) cyst was found on Sarah’s cerebellum, and she was rushed to King’s for emergency brain surgery.

Although the ensuing weeks and months were a very difficult time, with amazing support from regular students and Sarah's family, Sarah recovered more quickly than expected, and in fact the experience of 'relearning' tango (even at a highly accelerated rate) really enhanced her understanding of what is required from the body and the mind in acquiring the skills for dancing tango. In this way, even this unexpected event has helped us to think about how to communicate the tango fundamentals to beginners.

We are lucky to have found a partnership in which each of us brings a different approach and personality to the creation of our dance and the formulation of our teaching, yet we share a common vision of what we are aiming to achieve. Increasingly, we enjoy the diversity of learning and dancing in varied styles: salon-style (open and close embrace), nuevo, and even milonguero. We want to share that enjoyment with the people who attend our classes and events. For more information about our teaching style, go to the page About us - Our teaching style.


Beyond our teaching: training, development & performing

Crucially, we continue to develop our own dancing, attending classes, specialist workshops and festivals, taking private tuition, and dancing as often as we can. In particular, we continue to study in England and Argentina with some of the very best dancers and teachers in the world, especially Gustavo Naveira and Giselle Anne, Fabian Salas and Carolina del Rivero, Luciana Valle, Thierry le Cocq and Veronique Boucasse, Carlos and Maria Rivarola and Gabriel Misse and Alejandra Martinian (for more information about our training, go to the page About us - Our training.

To raise awareness of and interest in real Argentine tango, we participate in numerous local festivals, offering workshops, demonstrations and social events; these include festivals in Canterbury, Rye, Herne Bay, and St. Leonards to date. We have been invited to teach and perform for a number of other dance groups, including salsa groups in Hastings, Herne Bay, Tonbridge and Rochester; in 2006 we gave a series of workshops and classes for Salsa South Connection; and in 2008 we ran a series of classes for Salsa Brisa.

We are regular guest teachers and dancers on the very popular ballroom dancing weekends in Bournemouth organised by the Phoenix Dance School. We taught and performed there in July 2007, February 2008, and July 2008. We also collaborate with, teach alongside and dance to performances by live tango groups (including Lost Tangos and especially Los Mareados). During our visit to Buenos Aires in August 2007, we gave a well-received, improvised demonstration in the tango class of established milongueros Maria Edith Bernatone and Roberto Dentone. Although we are teachers first and foremost, we enjoy developing more and more new choreographies for performance.

Page updated August 2008