CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Ask Claire Barker how she became a tango dancer and she tells a story that begins when she became a nun. Barker - a professor of internal medicine at the University of Illinois - had a friend who was staging a production of "The Sound of Music" at a local theater and needed more holy sisters for the abbey scenes. Barker auditioned, and was cast not only as a nun but also as a dancer in the ballroom scene. Dance coaches for the production noticed Barker's knack for the Viennese waltz and encouraged her to continue dancing. She enrolled at the Regent Ballroom in Savoy, Ill., and soon fell in love with the Argentine tango. For the past five years, she has been hosting monthly "milongas" (tango dance parties) at the Channing-Murray Foundation on the Illinois campus.
Barker, though, is just one of several leaders of a surprisingly large and diverse community of Argentine tango aficionados at the U. of I. Joe Grohens, an English instructor at the university, has been teaching tango at Channing-Murray and hosting milongas at area nightclubs since 1998. Ron Weigel, a professor of pathobiology, and his wife, Susana Vazquez Weigel, an office support specialist in the department of communication, have been teaching tango and hosting milongas for the Urbana Park District and at the McKinley Foundation on campus since 1999. And Melih Sener, a postdoctoral researcher at the Beckman Institute, has been hosting milongas at local art galleries since 2002.
Though no one keeps record of attendance, organizers estimate that 40 to 80 dancers attend most local milongas, with some dancers coming from Purdue University, and from Chicago, Indianapolis and St. Louis. Sener, who was raised in Istanbul and has lived in New York City, said the number of tango dancers drawn to Champaign-Urbana is a pleasant surprise.
"If you do a sort of per capita comparison, this area actually has a very large attendance," Sener said. "The Champaign-Urbana community is like the Bohemian underground I always wished I would live in."
None of the dancers imitate television tango. The Argentine tango looks nothing like the dance of the same name shown on TV - whether it's on "Dancing With the Stars" or the ballroom dance competitions broadcast in years past on PBS. "With all the heads snapping around, it's just kind of ridiculous," Weigel said.
In fact, the Argentine tango is actually not a ballroom dance at all. "In ballroom," Barker said, "mostly it's expected that you know the steps of the cha-cha or the waltz or whatever, and if your partner starts a sequence, you will go through that expected sequence."
But in Argentine tango, the dancers have more freedom to improvise.
"It's not about steps, it's not about patterns," Sener said. "It has tradition artifacts in it, but if two people can embrace one another and walk within that embrace, that is tango."
Grohens, a former keyboard player, likens tango to soloing with a jazz band - following a structure, but playing freely within the form.
"It's more than steps; it's a language you learn, and then you and your partner end up having a conversation," he said. "Not all dances have that much of an improvisatory aspect."
The improvisation is led by the male partner, which Weigel believes explains why a certain type of man gravitates to this dance. "At least in the United States and Europe, there's an over-representation of men from the sciences, mathematics and engineering," he said. "The improvisational capacity as a leader is intellectually challenging."
The female partner's role is to follow the male's cues - a task that is neither as passive nor as stereotypical as it sounds, Barker said. "I think a lot of really intelligent women take up tango, and they have to give up the idea that they're going to predict what the leader's going to do. It probably took me 18 months before I even started to be able to do that," she said. "And you know, as the mother of three and a physician, I'm in charge of a lot of things. So if he wants to be in charge, that is OK with me."
The dance itself isn't the sole attraction; Weigel said he and Susana were drawn first to the passionate music. Tango is typically accompanied by music recorded in Buenos Aires during tango's "golden era," between 1930 and 1955. The Weigels make an almost annual pilgrimage to Argentina, where they spend up to a month at a stretch, dancing every night. They have brought teachers from Argentina to lead workshops in Urbana, and they strive to recreate the atmosphere of a traditional Buenos Aires milonga in Urbana's Phillips Recreation Center.
"We're kind of purists," Weigel said. "I feel that there's something very precious about tango that comes from the culture of Argentina, from the music of Argentina, and from the way that people dance that's uniquely Argentine tango. And we want to preserve that."
Sener, similarly, was drawn to tango by the music, growing up listening to Astor Piazzolla, the legendary bandoneon player whose compositions melded tango with classical and jazz. When Sener realized that tango was also a dance, he was thrilled: "You mean I get to embrace somebody while I move to the music of Piazzolla? Then came the disappointment," Sener said, "which is that Piazzolla is not ever played in a milonga."
According to Argentine tradition, the music of Piazzolla is unsuitable for tango dancing. A popular saying compares dancing to Piazzolla to "eating a rose," Sener said. So in 2002, he started hosting milongas specifically to dance to the music of Piazzolla - and any other musical group that strikes his fancy. Now, he and Chantelle Houghland host monthly milongas at Krannert Art Museum, on the U. of I. campus, where they regularly feature traditional tango music performed live by the band Tangotta, led by violinist Dorothy Martirano. During the band's breaks, however, Sener has been known to toss in a piece by the Black Eyed Peas, or a cut from Apocalyptica's Metallica album. "I wanted to have a dance event less burdened by traditions and customs and more about exploring what I regard as the fundamentals of tango," he said.
At his weekly tango dances at Cowboy Monkey, a restaurant and bar in Champaign, Grohens also strays occasionally from the "golden era" tango recordings, by adding older tunes, from the 1920s. He has taken up the bandoneon himself, and has established a group open to any musician in the community who wants to learn to play tango music. "It's intended to be a learning lab, to learn accompanying rhythms," Grohens said.
He estimates that, along with his partner Carlota, he has taught more than 1,000 people to tango over the past dozen or so years. What he loves about the dance is that, even as a teacher, he's still learning. "There is a depth to tango," Grohens said. "I could go on learning about it for the rest of my life. I like hobbies like that - where there's so much to it, you can't ever exhaust it."
To check out local tango events, visit www.cu-tango.com and www.centraltango.com.