Dance therapy: Tango and the human connection

Guillermo De Fazio and Giovanna Dan are directors, performers, partners, choreographers, and teachers who live and breathe tango. Their touring production, Tango Argentina, brings a cast of eight dancers and four musicians to the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Thursday, Jan. 20.

In a world starved for human connection — thanks, COVID — the sight of four couples literally dancing cheek-to-cheek may induce an emotional reaction in the Santa Fe audience. The feelings may be even stronger for the dozens of local dancers who recently lost their Tango Tuesdays, a weekly tradition since 2001, when the restaurant El Mesón closed after 25 years.

“It’s all about the embrace,” says Dan, who was raised in Los Angeles by Argentine American parents (a professional tango dancer and musician) and has been partnered with De Fazio since 2015. “Social dance is like therapy. In this digital age, we are losing a physical connection with other people.”

De Fazio says that the tango is different than other dances like salsa, merengue, and swing. “Tango is intimate. It makes you calm.”

Raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, De Fazio toured internationally for many years as part of an act with his brother. Los Hermanos Macana offered a very fast, complicated style, he says, not at all romantic. “Tango was originally a street dance, a challenge between men.” Rural Argentina has its own folk dances, its cowboy gauchos and tradition of ranching, but the story of tango is an urban one about European immigrants who arrived in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay, en masse during the 1880s and early 20th century.

Read more @ https://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/performance/dance-therapy-tango-and-the-human-connection/article_0684b1d6-6f44-11ec-8d50-efee47740591.html