Lorea Arambarri’s white dress flowed and beige heels clacked as she moved across the wood floors with her dance partner at a beginners’ tango event.
Like Arambarri, about 25 other students from UF, Florida State University and University of South Florida gathered at the Gainesville Dance Association Sunday to do what they love — tango.
The FSU biology freshman said despite football, she left the animosity in Tallahassee to attend the social.
“I got over the rivalry thing for tango,” said Arambarri, 18.
She said her best friend is a Gator, and she wanted to dance with people from other areas.
“It doesn’t get much better than this,” she said.
More than 10 couples at a time tiptoed and glided across the wood floors, dancing to three songs in a row, which is known as a tanda.
Trista Brophy, the president of USF’s Argentine Tango Club, said the event was designed to teach beginners how to do a milonga, which is a tango social.
“A lot of the students don’t go to milongas because they are afraid,” the 27-year-old environmental science and global sustainability graduate student said. “We wanted to just focus on beginners to encourage them to dance.”
Kyle Kirwan, 22, the treasurer of the UF Argentine Tango Club, said Argentine tango is different from the traditional ballroom form.
“This tango is not patterned-based. It’s all improv,” the UF industrial and systems engineering fifth-year student said. “The leader is the person who puts the dance together.”
Leila Harriss, vice president of FSU’s tango club, said she loves so many aspects of tango.
“It’s so passionate, and it’s all about feeling,” the graduate student said. “Dancing is like an expression of someone.”
Trista Brophy, 27, a USF global sustainability and environmental science graduate student, dances the tango with Kyle Kirwan, 22, a UF fifth-year industrial and systems engineering student, at the Combilonga Tango Social on Sunday evening.
