Hold Me Closer, Tango Dancer

Nelson founded the festival while still a dance instructor at the newly opened Crystal Ballroom back in 1997, and it has since grown to a regular attendance of 600 to 700. This year, there will be 14 teachers, 49 tango classes and 22 milongas—events where tango is danced. More milongas will be danced here than at any other festival in North America this year. 

But it wasn't always this way. 

"When we first started," he says, "I would know everyone by name who showed up. At the very first ones, it was pretty much local people who showed up. It just felt like a real community, knowing everybody."

The first Portland ValenTango took place largely in Multnomah Village, with classes and milongas held in Nelson's 1,800-square-foot studio and the Multnomah Arts Center. The festival's grand ball—which now takes place on an 8,000-square-foot ballroom floor at the DoubleTree Hotel—initially took place on the tiled floor of the arts center. Nelson played a lot of his own music during the festival, thinking that people might want to dance to other kinds of music besides the traditional bandoneon music common to traditional Argentine tango dances. "I quickly found out that people just wanted to dance tango only," he says with a laugh.

The same was true of Nelson. Once an instructor at the Arthur Murray School of Dance in Champaign, Ill., he started teaching ballroom dance to help pay his way through college. But the rigid structure and firm emphasis on competition grew tired for him, and he went on hiatus from dancing. For the next 20 years, Nelson worked as a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Portland and Texas A&M. But he returned full time to dancing after his first brush with tango at a workshop in Corvallis, falling in love with the spontaneity and the social aspects of the dance.

"In tango…you're dancing heart to heart," Nelson says of the difference his first Argentine tango instructor pointed out between the ballroom "frame"—where partners hold their upper torsos bent away from each other—and the tango “embrace.” 

"He said, 'That's because you're dancing for your partner.' It was that moment when I said, ‘Of course, that’s what dancing ought to be about.’” 

There are five things in tango you can't get from any other dance, Nelson says. "Or really in anything else that I can think of—not in playing golf, not in skiing or anything." It is the dance as an art form, improvisation, angst, humor and, especially, the connection between partners.

"This dance is created by introverts who were lonely for their home country," Nelson says. "Every once in a while you see a little glitch or smile come over their face because something happens that makes them laugh. Most of the times, they're sad. But every once in a while there's humor."

This led him to found not just ValenTango, but the Portland TangoFest in October, the TangoMagic festival in Seattle and the Burning Tango in McCloud, Calif. He has since handed off festival-planning duties for TangoFest and TangoMagic, but holds on to ValenTango himself due to its size and the trust he's built with it over the years.

"When I started, I never thought these festivals would become international; they just kind of did on their own," he says, attributing this in part to Portland's tango-friendly community, where different styles of teachers and dancers get along even though they have different ideas. "It's a good place to catch the fever.” 

SEE IT: ValenTango 2015 is Feb. 18-23 at the DoubleTree by Hilton, 1000 NE Multnomah St., valentango.us. Classes $25, pack of six $138; milongas $10-$25, pass $155; everything pass $385.

WWeek 2015