Campus tango needs us all

A shared project to grow the next generation of dancers, organizers, and cultural stewards

💌 A personal letter to tango teachers, mentors, leaders in the community

If you are seeing this, you are someone I appreciate, admire, have learned from, have danced with, and want to keep in my life. So I want to share this with you first.

I know you (and lots of others) have worked hard to build a presence on a college campus. So you’ve seen the same challenges play out year after year…

• Tango clubs on campus forming and fading
• Students losing steam or shifting to scenes like Zouk or salsa or swing that get youth culture
• Dwindling beginner retention
• Less energy, less continuity, and fewer pathways for leadership

And across our broader tango community, we see:

• Aging demographics
• Shrinking pipelines
• A default scarcity mindset that keeps us small

I just know it can be better!

💡The idea

Tango on Campus is an idea that has been gelling ever since Homer Ladas first invited me to assist him at Caltech in 2004, developed over conversations with amazing campus leaders like Ramu and Daniela, furthered through the campus tango research I did in 2017. The impulse we all seem to have is to grow university tango in a sustainable, scalable way. What if we could create the systems that:

• Support student clubs with training, community, and structure
• Equip intermediate dancers to teach peers using a proven curriculum