Dancing through the pandemic

Originally published in The Montreal Gazette

Photo by Dave Sidaway

I am one of the lucky ones.

I haven’t always thought so over this past year and a half. Like so many, I’ve had plenty of emotional lows through this pandemic and all it has entailed, and my industry has been among the hardest hit by COVID-19 lockdowns.

I am a dance teacher and own an Argentine tango school. Tango is a social dance, so it combines two things that have been largely forbidden or ignored by our provincial government: socializing and dancing. My passion, my outlet for artistic expression, my main means of socialization and my family’s only means of revenue (my spouse is also my business partner) were all eliminated in one fell swoop.

So how am I lucky? Well, first of all, I live with my (highly skilled) tango partner. If we wanted to, we could dance around our kitchen or our empty studio just for fun, every day. We don’t actually do that very often, but we have taught and run events online throughout the pandemic and are enjoying a (very limited) return to in-person teaching. Although we missed having a proper income, dressing up for milongas (that’s what tango dancing events are called), switching dance partners and hanging out around the bar with our tango friends, we continued to see some of our students and friends, even if it was on a computer screen, and to dance a few times a week.

The physical and psycho-emotional benefits of tango are many. Its complex, ever-changing movements work the brain as well as the body, but it’s not so demanding that one needs to be young or super-fit. Tango, with its uniquely improvisational nature, has been shown to slow the effects of both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Included since 2009 in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists, tango has therapeutic benefits similar to those of meditation and listening to music. And then there’s the social aspect, the importance of which has been oft touted this past year and a half.

While I believe lockdowns and physical distancing have been an unfortunate necessity, the extent to which dance has not received consideration has repeatedly angered and frustrated my partner and me. When society temporarily opened up in the summer of 2020, dance schools were lumped in with gyms and almost never specifically mentioned. We were eventually allowed to open — with so many restrictions it was nearly impossible to run activities or attract people to classes.

People could only register with a live-in partner, even when in other situations couples who did not live together were allowed to get together. When “bubbles” of several people were permitted to have contact for combat sports, dance schools were told they could not benefit from the same allowances.

After the winter lockdown, we felt unfairly left out when spas, hairdressers and estheticians were allowed to resume business, yet even private dance (or yoga or fitness) lessons were still forbidden. When they were finally allowed, we were to avoid instructor-student contact, even though I could have contact with my massage therapist, hair stylist and a host of other professionals.

The very nature of social dance means the best-loved parts of it were — and still are — prohibited even once bits of it could resume. People think of tango (like ballroom, salsa or swing) as a couples’ dance, but in fact most people who attend classes or events do so alone or with friends and find partners on the spot. Even those who arrive as part of a couple often have more dances with others than with the person they came with.

So when tango stopped, devotees lost not only their favourite form of physical activity, but also their primary social activity. More than one dancer has confessed to me they couldn’t listen to tango music for months because they missed dancing so much it made them cry.

This has been hard for my partner and me to hear, but even if professionally the pandemic has been a near disaster, through it all we still had each other, the music and enough students to keep us going.

Many out-of-work artists felt insulted when our premier famously said we should just “reinvent” ourselves. When you’ve spent a lifetime refining your skills and years building a business from scratch, it’s hard to take it in stride when you’re so blatantly shrugged off. But reinvent ourselves we did. Like most other dance instructors on the planet, we went online and learned how to use Zoom. This meant investing in new equipment, upping our internet speed and figuring out how to teach, market and price classes given on a screen. Tango online was a hard sell: Most of our students don’t have a live-in dance partner, many of them are intimidated or put off by the technological aspect. They all sorely missed the atmosphere of their beloved milongas. Dancing in their living rooms — with or without a partner — just wasn’t cutting it.

But some people stuck with it and with us. And, luckily, I teach yoga, too. Essentially a solitary practice, yoga lends itself quite well to the online, practise-at-home format. And my own daily practice has helped keep me sane through it all.

We did hesitate when our commercial lease came up for renewal this spring, but our landlords were understanding and the federal government has helped businesses, so we signed and kept going. We kind of had to once we were reminded just how much our school means to so many. As soon as it became clear the lockdown was not going to last the two to three weeks we had originally expected, we put out a call for donations, and they came pouring in. We were absolutely floored, realizing not only how much we were appreciated, but how much we appreciated our community.

I also “reinvented” myself this year by publishing my first book, something I’ve wanted to do for … well, pretty much my whole life. I’ve been blogging about tango for years, and with a drastically reduced teaching schedule I took the time to compile some of my posts into a collection titled 25 Tango Lessons. I teamed up with a local artist and had the book translated, as well. It was released simultaneously in English and French this summer.

These days, I’m again feeling pretty lucky. Although I still can’t find dance mentioned anywhere on the Quebec.ca website and the rules for indoor classes are still extremely restrictive — as far as we can make out — at least we are working more and sharing our passion in person once again. We’ve held some outdoor classes, fun because the rules are looser, and some indoor classes, rewarding despite the small numbers and masked faces.

I am optimistic that the vaccination campaign and the implementation of the controversial vaccine passport will mean we can open further come September. I look forward to enjoying, once again, the embraces and smiling, mask-free faces of a studio full of dancers.

Andrea Shepherd, a writer and former Montreal Gazette copy editor, runs the MonTango dance school in Montreal with her partner, Wolf Mercado.