Do you dance tango with your heart, or do you treat tango as a sport?

 

About Chan Park

Chan Park is the creator of Tango Zen, a milonguero, author, filmmaker, and former NASA engineer.

He began dancing Argentine tango in 1997. Several years later, while dancing with his partner Eugenia, he experienced an extraordinary moment in which his ordinary sense of time and space seemed to disappear. That experience became an important starting point in his exploration of tango as meditation and as a deeply embodied human experience.

In 2005, he published Tango Zen: Walking Dance Meditation, connecting tango with meditation, embodied awareness, and inner experience. The book was later translated into five languages.


Based on the ideas developed through Tango Zen, he has since conducted Tango Zen workshops in 25 countries, creating opportunities for dancers to explore tango through direct experience, presence, connection, and the embrace.


Chan also created the documentary Tango Your Life, filmed over several years in Buenos Aires. Through the voices and everyday lives of Porteños, the film explores tango


For Chan, tango is not primarily a collection of movements or techniques. It is a living culture that has to be experienced, embodied, and shared.




The following excerpts come from a recent personal conversation with him.

Lutin: I heard that many years ago you introduced close-embrace tango to dancers in Korea.


Chan Park:
Yes. Many years ago, I introduced close-embrace tango there and worked with many dancers. Some of those people later became teachers themselves.


But that was a long time ago, and my work today is no longer centered on Korea. Over the years, my own understanding of tango has continued to evolve through dancing, observing, and spending extensive time with milongueros and milongueras in Buenos Aires.




Lutin: Since watching your film Tango Your Life, I have been very interested in promoting close embrace.


Chan Park:
Close embrace is important, but for me the deeper question is not simply whether someone dances in close embrace or open embrace.


That is still describing the physical form.


The question I would rather ask is:

Do you dance tango with your heart, or do you treat tango as a sport?

Someone can dance in close embrace and still remain entirely focused on technique, movement, appearance, or accomplishment.


For me, tango begins to change when music, movement, feeling, and another person come together.


The embrace is important because it creates the possibility of connection. But the embrace alone does not create that connection.


It has to happen between two people.


Over many years, especially through my experiences with milongueros and milongueras in Buenos Aires, I gradually came to understand tango as a cultural and experiential phenomenon rather than simply something that can be taught as a system of movements.


Teachers can teach steps, posture, musical structure, and technique. Those things can be useful.


But there are aspects of tango that cannot simply be transferred through explanation.


They have to be experienced.


That is why, in my workshops, I increasingly see my role as a facilitator or guide. I try to create conditions in which people can discover something through their own bodies, through music, through the embrace, and through another person.


I do not want to tell people what they are supposed to feel.


I would rather let them experience something and then ask:

What did you feel?

Sometimes that experience becomes the beginning of a completely different tango journey.


For me, traditional tango is also inseparable from culture.


Tango did not emerge as a collection of figures. It developed through music, neighborhoods, social relationships, codes of the milonga, generations of dancers, and everyday life in Buenos Aires.


That is why preserving traditional tango means more than preserving certain steps or a particular embrace.


It means keeping alive the human experience behind the dance.


This is also why I am interested in presence.


Before connecting with another person, we first need to become present in our own body. When two people meet through the embrace, that individual presence can become something shared.


I call this shared presence.


And then music brings that connection to life.


I think these are subjects that are difficult to understand completely through words.




Lutin and I will have an opportunity to meet and dance together soon. I look forward to continuing this conversation through direct experience—not only by talking about tango, but by dancing it.

Go Deeper

Explore Chan’s Private Tango Immersion Program