Understanding and imparting the dialogue of dance

Helaine Treitman COURTESY PHOTO

"O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
- W.B. Yeats

Fluent in English and Italian, Helaine Treitman is nevertheless most conversant in a sophisticated language of the body known as Argentine tango — a physical communion of man and woman at once sensuous, rhythmic, lyrical and passionate.

When she flew into Naples from Italy about six weeks ago after two decades in the Umbrian hill town of Perugia, Ms. Treitman finally brought the dance home with her, alive in her body and mind, a thing to be shared.

What the Italians lost, the new world Neapolitans have now gained: a master at the art of conversation in tango, a dark and supple beauty of 55, who teaches both group and private lessons.

Here is how she described the dance in a recent conversation:

"Learning Argentine tango is simply learning a language… The elements are like the alphabet. And you study a few points of movement that start here (she pauses), and end here. If you use that structure, then all your dancing is a matter of deconstructing and connecting elements of it. It becomes a continuous improvisation.

"It tends to attract intelligent people fascinated with the challenge of learning a language that you speak with your body, and in dialogue with another person."

Especially in America and Northern Europe, she notes, Argentine tango also butts heads with sexual role models laid out for men and women.

"In dance, people talk about lead and follow, and what they mean by that is the man leads and the woman follows."

But Argentine tango is more sophisticated, more realistic and a lot more thoughtful, she explains. And it doesn't play merely to the wooden and lumpish stereotypes sometimes imposed on men and women, both in daily life and in dance.

Tango is not merely leading and following, but something else.

"Instead, it's always a conversation between a man and a woman," Ms. Treitman says.

"Every movement by the man is a proposal or a question, and the woman's response is an answer. So when you get to a certain level, it's a real dialogue.

"That's how I dance and how I teach my students to dance."

Although Ms. Treitman has been dancing the tango for more than 15 years — first traveling from her home in Umbria 100 miles to Rome to study, and later flying to Buenos Aires to dance with the world's greatest masters — she is looking not only for intermediate or advanced dancers, but especially for beginners, even those who have never danced much of anything, she says.

If they come willing to converse, willing to pour themselves into this physical conversation between a man and a woman, she can teach them, she insists.

"When somebody says, 'I'm not cut out for dancing,' I say, 'If you can walk, or you can embrace a woman, you can dance. And if you have problems with either of those, I've got a program for you.'"

In the Argentine tango, one learns a good embrace, a good communication, and how to walk, but with pauses and variations, she says. And in a mere three months, her students can learn enough to take pleasure and joy in the dance.

In her case, though, it didn't take three months to get to that point; it took many years.

Born and raised in Bergen County, N.J., after high school Ms. Treitman began studying art — drawing, painting and sculpture — in New York City, at the New School and at Parsons School of Design. She supported herself as a waitress in Greenwich Village and spent her evenings, she remembers, crowding into smoky jazz clubs to hear the likes of John Coltrane and the Charlie Parker spin-offs of the early 1970s.

Talented, young and independent, before long she found herself in Italy, running a school for artists in Umbria, one of the most famous physical locations for great Western painting. Ultimately that school began hosting students from such American universities as Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

While the Umbrian blue sky is famous in painterly circles for its unique hue, Ms. Treitman didn't see it that simply. Instead of describing the sky in itself, she draws it into a communion with the earth.

"That sky changes a lot with clouds and other elements of weather," she says. "It speaks to the hills."

But none of that was enough. Her long personal relationship with another artist had become merely collegial. "I started dancing tango because I was missing passion in my life, and I could do it without (misbehaving)," she says.

For three minutes, in her experience, each dance is a beautiful and intimate conversation, not only like sex, but like life and love.

And when she tangos, perhaps all of the eloquence of that trinity becomes real at once, spoken and written in the dance.

Contact Ms.Treitman at either 776-6535 or at the Fred Astaire Naples Dance Studio, 592-7737.