Stanisław Jerzy Dołżyk

That’s how it began

One day I decided to change something in my life. To take up something I hadn’t done before, and for it not to be too easy. As if on cue, a friend of mine got in touch — someone who, two years earlier, had been urging me to learn Argentine tango. Back then, that world didn’t interest me at all: guys shuffling from foot to foot to the rhythm of old, crackling tangos, their partners looking half-asleep, only occasionally flicking a leg to show they’re still alive. Just not my thing at all. Rock’n’roll, now that was something else — you could really tear it up with a partner on the dance floor.

But I had no other option for a change, so I went to the first class at the address I’d been given, at a well-known Argentine tango school. I’ll admit the first class didn’t exactly sweep me off my feet. But… after a few lessons something in me shifted, something that suggested this could become a bigger challenge for me. And so it did. Before long, I announced to the group of painters attending Thursday sessions that, from now on, every Thursday at 8pm, we’d take a fifteen-minute break for tango. The first steps I was learning in tango class, I immediately passed on to the painters in the studio — in the embrace of canvas-stretcher bars at first, then in pairs.

It wasn’t even that hard, until I understood what real tango actually is.

And it looked something like this :)

First steps.