Every Sunday evening, a co-working space in Hyderabad’s busy central suburb Ameerpet transforms into an Argentinian dance floor. Couples jive to a different beat—a refreshing change from the usual Tollywood tunes—getting cozy while mastering the art of ‘close hold’ and ‘open hold’. The tutor is teaching them abrazo (hug), making eye contact, volcada (overturned or tipped over) and colgada (hanging or dangling). “We call this the Sunday tango boot camp,” says PSN Prasad, the founder of the Hyderabad Tango Society, which started in December 2022. Ten members of the society recently qualified for the Abrazo Tango, a national event, in Mumbai.
An advocate by profession, a vacation to Auroville in 2013 introduced Prasad to tango. “I attended a session and enjoyed it so thoroughly that I kept returning to Auroville to learn enough to teach others in Hyderabad,” he says. Prasad converted the co-working space he owns into a makeshift dance studio. “All that tango needs is a smooth floor, and of course, two partners—or as they say, a tanguero (man) and tanguera (woman), hence the term tango,” says the 65-year-old, who holds a fundamentals of the dance form class on Wednesday, a practice class on Saturday, and a full-blown social dancing session on Sunday at a fee of Rs 1,000 per person. In the last 18 months, he has trained over 100-odd people, who reached out to him through his Facebook page (Hyderabad Tango Society) and Instagram handle @TangoInHyderabad.
The Argentinian social dance is known to help people open up, ditch their inhibitions and get a solid workout. “It’s a romantic and sensuous dance form. Even when a man invites a woman to dance, he does it using his eyes and body language. He seeks non-verbal consent. The woman accepts or declines the offer using her eyes. We teach these little gestures as part of the training,” adds Prasad.
The students range between the age group of 21 and 65 and are as diverse as chalk and cheese. For instance, Sadhana Basangar is a sales manager at a pharmaceutical company and her weekdays are all about cold calling and number crunching. The tango session is her only creative outlet. “My sedentary lifestyle was screaming for some movement. Tango fills that slot,” she says. She and her bestie have signed up for the Wednesday and Saturday classes and are all excited to get decked up in red and dance away their blues the coming Sunday. Then there are young enthusiasts, or as Prasad calls them, ‘tango toddlers’.
“Our focus is on quality and natural movement. Plus, tango is the unique equation that drives conversations,” Prasad adds, as he gears up to ready the group for the Goa Tangathon in October.