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| Wolf and I in 2005. |
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| Celebrating our 20th in 2023. |
This month, on July 25, 2023, to be exact, my partner, Wolf, and I celebrate our 20th anniversary. We're not officially married, so we don’t have a wedding date to mark, but, quite fittingly, we do have a tango date. Thanks to a video that appeared online a few years ago, we know that our very first tango together was precisely on Friday, July 25, 2003, so we mark that date as our anniversary, even though it was a few weeks later that we became romantically involved. (The video is here. The very short clip of us is at exactly 4:49; look for the young man in a white shirt and young woman in a red dress.)
Over the years, many people have asked, wondered and speculated about how we met and how we got started in tango, so this momentous occasion feels like a good time to tell our story.
I took my first tango course in 1997 at Graffiti Tango, one of Montreal’s first tango schools, which closed just a couple of years later. My teachers, recognizable names now but new instructors back then, were Mylène Pelletier and Mireille Painchaud. I had danced ballet for many years, was a salsa-dancing aficionado at the time and had become curious about tango after an event I had attended with a friend. I especially liked the elegance of the dance and the way the women dressed, in their slit skirts, black stockings and high heels. I also enjoyed the classes I took and might have continued, but I had a difficult work schedule that didn’t coincide with upcoming sessions, so my tango journey ended there for the time being.
I kept working like crazy – I was doing in-house tech support, training and page layout in the newsroom at The Montreal Gazette, had started doing some freelance writing and was teaching a desktop publishing course in the Journalism department at Concordia University. Most of my free hours were spent in salsa clubs, which led to a couple of amateur performances here and there, and I also occasionally helped out as an extra in salsa classes a friend of mine was teaching. In 1998 she started renting space at a newly opened tango studio, the Académie de Tango Argentin on Saint-Laurent near Mont-Royal. There, I was introduced to owner Santiago Gimenez, who encouraged me to start tango classes again, and soon after to start working with him as an assistant teacher. And this time, I got hooked. Santiago’s encouragement and infectious personality gave me a taste and a passion for all that was Argentine tango: the dance, the history, the music and, of course, the milongas.
That same year I took a leave of absence from work and booked a six-month trip to South America that was supposed to wrap up with a two-month stay in Buenos Aires. But luck was not on my side: The airline I had booked all my flights with went bankrupt while I was in Venezuela, and no amount of trudging around Caracas to airline offices and travel agencies could get me to Argentina without paying full price for a new ticket, which was beyond my means. So I flew back to the island of Margarita, danced salsa and partied until I had spent what money I had left and came home.
I returned to The Gazette and to l’Académie, where I began teaching tango again and had the privilege of taking lessons with the legendary Carlos Gavito, who was touring with Forever Tango and was invited by Santiago to give workshops on several occasions. That summer, Gavito went to Toronto (which had a tiny tango community compared to ours at the time) to teach a weekend of workshops, and I had the privilege of being invited to assist him. It was an honour and I jumped at the chance, even though I was nowhere near ready. The late ’90s were a very cool time in tango in Montreal. Our city was considered the tango capital of North America, there were already milongas seven days a week, and along with Gavito, we had regular visits from such big names as Pablo Verón, whose career-making movie, The Tango Lesson, had just come out and who made (and still makes) regular visits to Studio Tango, which was downtown on Bleury back then.
That fall I met someone and got pregnant. It became clear quite quickly that he was not interested in being a father, but I was 30, wanted kids and decided to keep the baby, even though I knew the relationship wouldn’t even last the pregnancy. The following July my son was born, and as a single mother with a demanding career I figured that once again, my tango journey was pretty much over.
But a few months later I got a call from Mylène Pelletier, who had taken over managing classes at l’Académie, inviting me to return to teaching. Lucky to have a brother and parents willing to help out with babysitting, I once again jumped at the opportunity and re-entered my beloved tango world. Juggling motherhood, my evolving career at The Gazette (around that time I got promoted to copy editor) and two part-time teaching gigs (Concordia and tango) didn’t leave much room for salsa dancing, so that was the one thing that pretty much fell by the wayside.
In the summer of 2003, a tango friend and singer named Stanley Colimon asked me if I would be interested in dancing with him during a musical performance he was giving at La Tanguería. He had one tango song as part of his repertoire and needed two female dancers to perform with him while he both danced and sang “Pardonnez-Moi Si Je Vous Aime,” about a man apologizing for being in love with more than one woman at a time. The dancers were Tanguería owner Laura Steinmander and myself.
During rehearsal one day there was a guy in the studio doing administrative work on the computer. I found him kind of attractive and I could have sworn he was checking me out. Then, the night of the performance that same guy was there and during the milonga portion of the evening he invited me to dance. I remember that I thought he danced well and that when I asked his name and he replied, “Wolf,” I thought he was kidding and said, “non, pour de vrai.” It was more than a decade later that I came across a video online of that night that captured not only that first-ever dance of Wolf’s and mine but also a portion of the performance with Laura and Stanley.
Wolf (short for Wolfgang) was a little insulted that I didn’t think his name was real, but nonetheless, over the next weeks our paths continued to cross, sometimes by accident and sometimes by design, and before long we were an item. I was still teaching classes at l’Académie, where I had worked with Caroline Demers and Luis López among others, and was once again teaching with Santiago, but he was in the process of giving up teaching, so I asked Wolf, who had begun assisting with classes at La Tanguería, to teach with me. He accepted, and we continued to give classes together up until I was about six months pregnant with our daughter in late 2004. Classes shut down at l’Académie after that and once again I thought maybe my tango days were over. Not only are two kids more than twice the work of one, but it seemed I had no more tango school to go back to.
But the summer after our daughter was born I got a call from my old friend and colleague Caroline. She had recently opened her own school, Tango Rico, in Chambly, and was looking to grow her teaching staff. So Wolf and I joined her team for a couple of sessions, then also taught some classes that Mylène was organizing in Montreal. Wolf, who has a background in fitness, had meanwhile started working at the YMCA, and he launched a beginners’ tango class at the Westmount Y.
In January 2007 we rented space in a ballet studio in our neighbourhood, N.D.G., and launched another beginner group, followed soon after by another class in another space on another night as well as a small práctica. We began to realize that there was room and demand for tango in N.D.G. and started to dream pretty hard about opening our own school, even going so far as to register our company name, MonTango, and to visit a couple of commercial spaces. But we had two young children (3 and 7 at that time), no money to speak of and I had a solid career I enjoyed with a good salary and a benefits package that is pretty much unheard of these days.
So our dreams remained just that – until that fall when The Gazette announced they needed to chop 18 newsroom jobs and would offer voluntary buyout packages before beginning to lay people off.
Once again, we started to dream our tango dream, but it seemed too rash, too irresponsible, too impossible. So I didn’t apply for a buyout and on the last day, when I found out the colleague who sat next to me had been approved I started to cry – not because she was leaving, but because I wasn’t. That night Wolf and I had a very serious heart to heart and decided that I would go see the boss the next day and ask if they still needed to lose some bodies. They did.
It took 24 hours for my request to be approved. That was in November 2007. I worked my last shift in December, we found a space for our school in January and at the end of February 2008 we were teaching classes in our very own tango studio, MonTango. It felt surreal and unbelievable, and we had taken the leap against the sensible advice of my parents, my financial advisor and others. We were fully aware that failure was a big possibility, even a likelihood. But still we knew we had made the right choice. Had we not tried, we would have wondered “What if?” and regretted it forever.
We’ve grown a lot in the years since, as teachers, dancers, partners and people. There are too many stories to tell of our experiences and adventures in everything from parenting to performing. We did finally make it to Argentina several years ago (and will return next year), we’ve studied, trained and practised and we’ve taught and organized countless classes, milongas and special events, meeting an amazing array of people along the way.
This year, 2023, our studio celebrated 15 years in business and this week Wolf and I celebrate 20 years of tango – and love – together. Neither road has been smooth or easy and we work incredibly hard to keep it all going, but through it all, despite the hurdles, the frustrations, the injuries and, of course, the pandemic, we are incredibly grateful to be able to do what we love every day and to do it together.
Now that I’ve told our story: I’ve been thinking of starting a new series of articles about some of the interesting characters who make up the Montreal tango community. Look for it in the coming weeks and months, and if you or someone you know has an interesting life/tango story to tell, let me know!
Enjoying my writing? Check out my author website here, with links to purchase my tango book, 25 Tango Lessons, as well as my new novel, The Curtain Lady.
