Andres Amarilla, Guest Instructor

In 1986, Andres was a bored 10-year-old sitting around his house in Villa Crespo (a neighborhood of Buenos Aires), watching TV. Although tango had existed for nearly 100 years by that point, there was practically no tango being danced in the city of Buenos Aires at that moment. As luck or fate or chance would have it, a program came on TV featuring Juan Carlos Copes (the most famous tango stage dancer of all time) dancing tango. Transfixed and fascinated, Andres sat through the program and then promptly began a program of whining and cajoling to get his mom to find him tango lessons, of which there were practically none at the moment. A year later, when the local blacksmith began teaching tango classes in a neighborhood community center, Andres's mom enrolled him, and the rest is history.

Within a year, Andres was studying tango with Gustavo Naveira, who has since become tango's most famed pedagogue. And within three years, Andres was dancing on stage in the dance company of the very same Juan Carlos Copes whom he had seen on TV just a few years before.

In the 23 years since Andres began dancing tango, the dance has been transformed from a throw-back danced quietly by several couples of grandparents in outlying Buenos Aires neighborhoods to a worldwide phenomenon enjoyed by people of all ages and backgrounds in hundreds of cities. Andres has had a unique vantage point on this explosion. He remembers taking the 93 bus with a group of tango students for over an hour to get from the city center to the far-flung neighborhood of Villa Urquiza in order to seek out and learn from the few die-hard milongueros (milonga-goers) who had stopped dancing tango neither during the 1950s when everyone cool started dancing rock n' roll, nor during the 1970s when the military government effectively quashed all cultural life in the city of Buenos Aires. And while Andres is recognized today as one of the foremost dancers of contemporary tango, having taught & performed in over 40 cities on 5 continents, the roots of his dancing and teaching are firmly grounded with those abuelos in Villa Urquiza.

As Artistic Director of the Philadelphia Argentine Tango School, Andres has created a curriculum that gives students a strong foundation in the traditional fundamentals of tango (what Andres learned at the other end of the 93 bus in the early 1990s), while preparing them to take part in the extremely diverse, often electric, contemporary tango scene that continues to explode throughout the world today.