Tango: Manuel Patiño
"...the tango itself...you take someone in your arms and you're very close. You move with the music."
By Tracey Minkin
Friday, February 29, 2008
Photo by Angela Shoemaker
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"Tango is simple to explain," says Manuel Patiño, "but difficult to understand." So says the 62-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant who made his way to the Argentine dance form via another style profoundly un-Latin—contradance.
"I was single, in my 40s, living in North Carolina," he recalls. When a friend suggested he attend a contradance, he did. "There were all these women wearing long cotton skirts, not a lot of makeup, men with whiskers and this mountain look," he says, fondly, "and they were all into these good, wholesome things. So they were dancing around, and someone picked me up and took me and made me dance."
Patiño loved the warmth of his contradance community, but when on a whim he went to check out an Argentine tango class, he was hooked anew. "Tango was something they played on the radio when I was little," he says. "My dad and mom danced at parties."
Feeling the circle pull seamlessly around him (and meeting his future wife, Ronda, pictured with Manuel, a dancer as well), Patiño embraced the dance form that echoed his roots. "Tango's music has a certain rhythm, a plaintive sound," he says. "Not mournful, but full of sentimental nostalgia, and the words are very evocative of romance and love. Then the tango itself...you take someone in your arms and you're very close. You move with the music."
No wonder Ronda and Manuel Patiño make the tango a center for their lives, running their business, Tango Rio, that combines teaching, performance, and bringing tango experts to Atlanta. In addition to Patiño's day job as a design engineer, he teaches tango every week. And why not? "There's passion in it," he says.
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