Photography: Amitava Sarkar
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Mardi Brown and Stephen Shortnacy have been dancing nothing but Argentine tango since 2005, after a long hiatus from it in an introductory workshop in 1998. Sometimes it just takes awhile for things to come back around.

Our philosophy is to teach people techniques to connect with each other, adapt and enjoy themselves with dance vocabulary for social settings, where space is often at a premium. Our focus is to teach you vocabulary for maximum variety in a small space in a musical way. We promote a friendly atmosphere, where we encourage students to work cooperatively on problems through the medium of us, the instructors.

We’ve had our fair share of classes with masters who focus on larger movements or performance steps, but found that in the end something was missing and we began to lean towards strictly social tango. To that end, for the last couple of years we have studied with several teachers who, after many trips to Buenos Aires, made social style tango their specialty and who teach social dancing. By social dancing we mean we prefer the subtle connection of close embrace, and the wonderful musicality that comes from focusing on the smaller rhythmic aspect of this style with its compact, space saving movements that work in any milonga anywhere, no matter how crowded it is.

We both spent some years dancing social ballroom before making the switch to tango and think that gives us an edge to help others who may also be trying to move to AT from another dance form. We’ve been through the pitfalls and know what it’s like!  However even if you have two left feet and closest thing that you have come to dancing is watching  “So You Think You Can Dance” or “Dancing with the Stars”, we have a curriculum that is geared to get you out social dancing in no time!