Under the Spell of the Tango

Karlo Abouroumieh’s eyes were nearly shut. Anamaria Menendez smiled in bliss. They swayed in each other’s arms as if in a trance.

Then the song ended.

“I release you now so more women won’t get mad,” Menendez said abruptly to her partner.

As she walked away, sweat covered her arms and matted her shoulder-length hair at her scalp. She had been dancing nonstop for nearly two hours. Minutes before, a frustrated woman had tapped Menendez’s shoulder and asked to dance with Abouroumieh. That wasn’t unusual.

At El Encuentro tango club in Sherman Oaks each Saturday night, Abouroumieh commands the dance floor like John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.” The slender, blue-eyed native of Iran keeps the ladies riveted with his sensitive, heartfelt steps.

Although Menendez dances with Abouroumieh nearly every Saturday, she is not sure how he makes his living.

“I think he sells magazines,” she confided. “I don’t even know what car he drives.” Actually, he owns a West Hollywood newsstand and drives a Toyota Avalon sedan.

At this milonga, as tango clubs are called in Argentina, dancers generally do not know much about each others’ lives off the floor. They know and judge each other by their dance prowess. Under dimmed lights and at their candle-lit tables, women carefully watch how the men lead, trying to gauge which ones have a sincere feel for tango.

Abouroumieh has it. And not just an ability to lead to the music. It is a vocation symbolizing love and freedom and a radical departure from an oppressive past.

“For me, going to the milongas is like going to church,” said Abouroumieh, 33, with a laugh. “It’s not something I’m going to tell any woman, because they’re going to say I’m like a priest.”

As he tells it, he came to the U.S. as a political refugee in 1989. In Iran, he suffered discrimination for being a Christian in an Islamic republic that is overwhelmingly Muslim. He was arrested twice for possessing homemade vodka, he said, and was sentenced to lashings, 50 the first time and 25 the next.

“My back was black like a blackboard [after the whippings],” said Abouroumieh, who lives with his parents in Northridge.

Under conservative religious laws in Iran, he was not at ease in public around women who were not relatives, he said.

“You couldn’t hold a woman, kiss a woman, and they were making you feel miserable if you did that--that’s why tango means a lot to me,” said Abouroumieh, who danced with a professional tango company for five years. “I had to really learn about this dance, about how to make women comfortable.”

To dance tango well, practitioners must feel comfortable with their partners because they hold each other so close. Close enough to smell their skin and sweat.

“You can feel the other person’s heart beating,” said Julie Friedgen, a Studio City television and film writer. “It reminds you of your humanness.”

From 80 to 100 mostly middle-aged tango aficionados dance at El Encuentro (which translates to The Meeting Place) each Saturday night. Friedgen, her companion Angel Echeverria and friends Alexis White and Barbara Thomas have operated the club for about two years.

It is among nearly a dozen milongas across Los Angeles County, about half in the San Fernando Valley, which cater to fans of the romantic dance that originated a century ago in Buenos Aires brothels and slums after waves of nostalgic and poor Europeans immigrated to Argentina.

“The music speaks to the soul. It’s full of longing, nostalgia, sadness, hopes, dreams, illusions,” Friedgen said. “You discover a lot about yourself. If you’re a very controlling person, tango is a very difficult dance. You have to trust the other person. You make a commitment to that person for three minutes. Tango does not work if a woman insists on leading.”

Some of the dancers are recently divorced or widowed, but they generally do not date one another, several said. They restrain primal desires awakened by tango, fearing that relationship complications will ruin the dance.

“We’re not a pickup place,” Friedgen said. “People are really here to dance.”