Marder says that she specializes in getting people on the floor right away. “We will not make you look silly. You don’t have to be a dancer, and you can be any size, any shape or any age. If you come with a partner, that’s great, but you don’t need to.”
The music selections will be primarily from the 1930s through the 1950s. “We play some modern music as well,” Marder says, “but the foundation is always in what is called the Golden Age of Tango. The music was very sophisticated then, composed and played for dancing in Buenos Aires – very much like the Big Bands in the ‘40s were, with thousands of people going out to dance.”
Marder began tango dancing a decade ago, purely by chance, she says, to accompany a friend at dances. She went on the Internet and found Dario da Silva, a young Argentinean dancer in Albany, and began taking lessons. While she had no formal dance background, Marder did have an extensive musical background starting at age 7, mostly in jazz and improvised music (which she says may explain her attraction to the improvisational nature of tango). Marder played the flute, and later became involved in playing North Indian classical flute music. After moving to Woodstock in 1972, she became involved with the Creative Music Studio there, hosting the group’s first workshops at her house.
At the time that she began dancing, Marder was working for the old Emerson Spa as a publicist: a career taken up after leaving broadcast reporting, when marrying former congressman Maurice Hinchey created a conflict between her personal life and reporting on the State Capitol. (The couple later divorced, but have recently remarried.)
Across the street from the Emerson was the Catamount restaurant, which was looking for events to host, and Marder, who had only been dancing tango for several months at that point, became involved in organizing tango events there. “I realized that if these events were going to be successful,” Marder says, “I needed a constituency.”
Finding people who could dance tango or wanted to learn involved bringing tango artists up from New York City, visiting tango teachers and performers from Buenos Aires whom Marder invited to the Hudson Valley. “We became a tango outpost,” she says, “and I started getting a good reputation because the quality of the artists was really superb.” Marder began offering classes and workshops using what she’d learned about organizing events from the Creative Music Studio, which evolved into monthly milongas and then weekly lessons to keep the interest high – initially at the Catamount, but soon moving to the Mountain View Studio, where Woodstock Tango has flourished. Many of the tango aficionados who will be at the tenth anniversary celebration have been with her since the beginning, Marder says.
And how did a girl from the Bronx come to love tango so much? “I can’t tell you why,” Marder says, “but nevertheless, it took. The love for music that I’ve had all my life got transferred into tango.”
Everyone thinks that tango is all about the sexiness, Marder says. “But it’s sexy because it’s about communication between two people. There are very strict codes about the ways bodies touch or don’t touch in tango, and a milonga is not about going out to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend. It’s more akin to tai chi than to cha-cha, because it has to do with centering and finding your balance.”
Argentine tango is healthy for people in all kinds of ways, she adds, not only in stimulating our sense of touch, but also proven in studies to stimulate brain cells and help cognitive function, even recommended for Parkinson’s patients.
“It’s very rewarding. I’ve been dancing for ten years now, and I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. But the rewards are more than worth it – not only in terms of recreational dancing, but in terms of finding out more about yourself. I can walk into almost any country in the world and find a place to tango without speaking the language, and I can immediately dance with someone from another country, another language, and we can dance a (near) perfect dance.”
Woodstock Tango tenth anniversary milonga, Saturday, December 28, 8 p.m.-1 a.m., $20, Mountain View Studio, 20 Mountain Avenue, Woodstock; (845) 399-9034, [email protected] or visit Woodstock Tango page on Facebook (ulsterpub.staging.wpenginetango.com currently being revamped).
