"My Tango Story"
by Helaine Treitman
In 1981, armed with a bachelors degree in Fine Art and 2-years under my belt of doing social work with tough Russian immigrant teens in Brooklyn, I found challenging work in a big bank on Wall Street. (Demonstrating that "transferable skills" can take you far!) My New York life was frenetic and, naturally, in the banking world it was essential to keep your emotions tightly under control. Besides the absence of simple human expression, there was certainly no "platform" in this environment for the deep artistic expression that I craved.
Seven years after landing my banking job, I left Wall St. to start a school of drawing, painting and sculpture in Umbria, "the green heart of Italy". I wanted to create an environment that was tranquil and fertile for artists from the US and abroad, to enable them to study and develop their work in close contact with nature and with the great heritage of Italian art. I believed I had found a way to satisfy my need to live a more humanistic life, filled with art and what I referred to as the "poetry" in everyday life.
In Umbria my life was no longer frenetic, but I was always feeling stressed. With my new entrepreneurial responsibility, I always felt the need to be "productive", a common symptom of my generation in the 80’s and 90’s. I was the director of an art school, but I didn’t have the time, the silence and the mental space I needed to reflect and to create. So for years I sacrificed my own artistic expression to be a facilitator for others. I felt more and more the need for personal expression and for a deep reciprocal communication with others.
Aside from that, always working at my desk or sitting in meetings and lectures, I lost the sense of my body and watched as both my sensuality and my physical vitality went into hibernation. Going to the gym bored me. But I noticed that when I would go to dance Italian country-style ballroom ("ballo liscio") to accordion music at the village fairs, I happily danced all evening and the more I danced, the more I got in shape. I told myself "Either I become a dancer, or I’ll keep growing heavier and more sedentary".
Backing up a few years: before my departure from NY, in 1987, I had just heard about and started seeking the Argentine Tango – the music, the history and - somewhere, somehow - perhaps a first glimpse of the dance. (We didn’t have Internet in those days!) Finally, in August 1994, when I was already well established in Italy, the famous young company of Miguel Angel Zotto and Milena Plebs, "Tango X 2" (Tango Por Dos), was on tour in Europe, and I went to see their show "Perfumes de Tango" outdoors in the main piazza of Foligno. The very first tango I ever saw was the fast and powerful "Cumparsita" of the great couple Miguel and Milena. It inspired me profoundly – I gasped to myself, "I want that!". . . and that was my turning point. I was bitten.
The following month I was in Chicago, working in a friend’s booth in the gift expo at the McCormick Center and by chance I walked by the Aerolineas Argentinas booth, where every half hour a couple danced a few tangos. Mesmerized again, I asked the male dancer if he gave lessons, and the next day – my last day in Chicago before returning home to Italy, I had my first tango lesson. All that evening and throughout the 12 hour nighttime flight back to Rome, my hands trembled with emotion.
I wanted desperately to study tango, but there was no tango in Umbria. So, thoroughly bewitched, I would drive 100 miles each way to Rome or twice that distance to Bologna for classes and milongas. This went on for several years (with a few visits to Buenos Aires in there), with gasoline back then at $4 a gallon in Italy. My first teachers were Eliana Montanari and Alì Namazi, and Italian tanguera and her Persian husband, new tango teachers who had established the first full-time center of tango in Rome, "Centro del Tango Argentino Astor Piazzolla", housed in the charming "Tango Bar" they had created. It felt like my second home, and in addition to nourishing my passion for tango with theirs, they graciously hosted me in their guest room at home at least 100 times so I wouldn’t have to face the two-hour drive home at 4 a.m.
Finally, I started building a tango community in Umbria. I was a pioneer - I had been the first person to dance tango in this whole region. In 1998 a school of modern dance in the city of Terni invited me to teach. I felt I wasn’t ready, having danced only 3 years and not being prepared didactically, so I invited a more experienced friend from Bologna to teach a few workshops there, and I was his assistant. Over time I brought various friends to Umbria to help me demonstrate and teach tango. I organized the first Umbrian milongas, outdoors in the summer in Montecastello di Vibio, the small hilltop village where I lived; all the dancers came from Rome, and scores of local people gathered around to watch. Once about 15 Roman tangueros and tangueras spent the night in sleeping bags on the floor of an empty painting studio in my art school!
In 2001, after 14 years as director, I left my art school to my business partner and moved to nearby Todi, a beautiful and dignified medieval hill town. What a year that was! Already successful at running weeklong intensive seminars for painters and sculptors, I started bringing Argentine maestros to Umbria to do the same for tangueros from all over. Each month I ran a 7- or 10-day seminar for 15-20 people and my handful of local students could also attend. In the hours I had the maestros all to myself, I would always ask them to teach me how to teach. I already had a group of about 20 beginners from Terni and a few from Todi and Perugia, thanks in part to Daniel Lapadula, the maestro from Miami who came for two weeks that February to help me get started. I then brought legends like Gloria and Eduardo Archimbau, and the elegant milonguero, the late Nestor Ray, as well as younger great talents like Ricardo Barrios, Claudia Codega and Esteban Moreno, Diego Reimer "El Pajaro" with "La Negra" Elina Roldan, and later with "Mecha", Mercedes Espinel.
This was a special time for me because I hosted the maestros in my home. When the students would leave us late at night, the mate or a new bottle of wine would appear, and Tango University would begin. I learned what I couldn’t get from books about the history, the neighborhoods, and the orchestras, and heard stories about the dancers and other characters who had shaped tango over the years. Eduardo Archimbau would put on music and quiz me on the orchestras, the singers, the pianists. Ricky Barrios helped me listen to the dialogue between the various instruments and appreciate great singers I had previously ignored. They all made me listen to the lyrics and explained the culture behind the narrative. (And the learning doesn’t stop – even in the past year Jorge Dispari and Maria del Carmen taught me about the history and the culture of tango "estilo Villa Urquiza" that I love, and in a series of private lessons where I remained seated on the sofa, Jorge taught me his unique approach to musicality.)
At the end of 2001 I organized the first New Year’s tango festival in Italy, a weeklong event in Todi’s medieval center, with a 2-day marathon gala in a glamorous 16th century palazzo with famous musicalizador Vassily from Bologna, 6 days of workshops, and milongas every night. I invited guest artists Milena Plebs and Ezequiel Farfaro, and Carlos Copello and Alicia Monte to do the New Year’s Eve exhibition and teach classes during the week. Then I arranged a municipally funded performance by these two star couples in the Piazza of Todi that freezing cold New Year’s Eve. The festival attracted 250 dancers from all parts of Italy and abroad and received extensive press coverage. But I did almost all the work myself and didn’t think of finding sponsors for this prestigious event. I totally exhausted myself and I didn’t break even – I had to take a bank loan to cover the expenses at the end. I learned about a hundred lessons from that event. However in terms of quality it was a huge success, because over the following years people would stop me in milongas and at festivals around Italy, saying "Aren’t you Helaine? I heard about your New Year’s in Todi. My friends are still talking about it. When are you going to do it again?"
One year was enough for me as a tango organizer. I wanted to focus on teaching. By necessity, since I was 2 hours from any center of tango, I became an autonomous teacher, occasionally working with a male colleague from Rome (in 2002-3 the young Daniel Montano, recently arrived from Cordova), and I started building the tango community in several towns. On Saturday nights, my beginner students from the different towns met in my big living room in Todi, the geographic midpoint, for a milonga. We always finished the evening with a late-night "spaghettata" and watching tango videotapes, all huddled around my small monitor. (No Youtube back then!) Every Saturday night after midnight I’d find 5 young women collaborating busily, expertly, in my narrow kitchen and a bunch of men at the fireplace toasting, and sometimes burning, the bread for bruschetta; done with dancing, we could now enjoy garlic. I spent every Sunday morning cleaning up my house. But those are precious memories. Some of those first students are today’s new teachers.
By 2003 I was driving over 1,000 kilometers (about 600 miles) every week, teaching all over the place. Finally in 2004 I moved to Perugia, the city where my classes were growing the fastest, and gradually trained a team of teaching assistants from among my best students and brought visiting Argentine and Italian maestros once a month for workshops. Since 1998 I have taught 600-700 Italians and other Europeans to dance tango.
Now in Perugia there is at least one milonga every night of the week, attended by 30-50 people - many more for special events. Eight other schools have sprung up in Perugia and other towns in Umbria, five of which are run by my former students and assistants for whom it was time to leave the nest. In May 2008 we had the third annual Chocotango* Festival, founded and run by two of my former students, this year with Roberto Herrera as a guest artist. There were 400 people at Chocotango’s Saturday milonga, which attracted many visitors from out of town.
I also helped a wonderful young Greek couple, Frini and Dimitris, become competent teachers and build a tango community in Chania, Crete. But that’s another story.
(*Perugia is the Italian city of chocolate, famous for it’s chocolate factory Perugina, bought out about 20 years ago by Nestlé).
What have been some of my most personally satisfying moments in tango?
As a teacher – a few examples from a long list:
Taking 20 students to a big milonga in Rome, two hours away, and sitting at a long table reserved for us, and later taking a look and seeing the table totally empty - every one of them, even the shy ones, on the dance floor dancing with someone they didn’t know before.
Or taking my most advanced tangueras to a milonga in a far away city, and within the first hour all of them are continuously invited by the best tangueros in the room.
Traveling 2 hours to a milonga in Florence and hearing a great night of music put on by a musicalizador that I mentored years ago when he was my assistant.
Lately my biggest satisfaction comes when I notice that a man starts to be more of a man and a woman more of a woman, thanks to his and her personal growth through tango. It’s a thrill for me to witness their increase in self-esteem and how they become stronger in their masculine and feminine identities. They become naturally more charming people, more self-confident, more relaxed and secure, more handsome and more beautiful, regardless of their specific physical characteristics. This is my secret agenda when I teach today and the most gratifying aspect of my teaching.
The happiest moments for me as a tango dancer and as a woman, are still when I find that person in a milonga with whom I feel in our embrace and in our musical interpretation a great affinity. You know the feeling, I’m sure: the rest of the world disappears and you open up your mind, heart and body to an incredible, dynamic dialogue.
Helaine Treitman is an Argentine Tango instructor from Naples, Florida. She moved to Naples, Florida after being in Italy for 20 years.
