Tango
Lessons

dance your own tango

Tango
Lessons

dance your own tango

A Dance Of Relationship

Sharna is an internationally recognized tango artist with over twenty years of teaching experience. Her teaching reflects an interest in the transformative effect of social dance: how we learn about ourselves by intentionally being present with others.

What’s a tango study guide?

The Study Guide is a 16-page, three-in-one download. Based on twenty years of teaching and troubleshooting, it’s designed to help you improve your retention in classes and workshops, get the most out of private lessons, and communicate effectively with practice partners. By navigating these three learning methods successfully, you’ll begin to develop your own style.

Find more joy in social dancing.

Get Your
Tango Study
Guide Today

and start developing your own style of dancing

What’s a tango study guide?

The Study Guide is a 16-page, three-in-one download. Based on twenty years of teaching and troubleshooting, it’s designed to help you improve your retention in classes and workshops, get the most out of private lessons, and communicate effectively with practice partners. By navigating these three learning methods successfully, you’ll begin to develop your own style.

Find more joy in social dancing.

Get Your
Tango Study
Guide Today

and start developing your own style of dancing

Trust and Belonging

Along with the sheer fun of learning to improvise, tango is also an amazing opportunity to shed some of our usual caution and hesitation around others. Instead, by showing up with generosity and openness, we sometimes get to experience the kind of trust, intimacy, and belonging that is otherwise scarce in the competitive, hyper-capitalist culture we are living in.

Tango is indeed beautiful, both because of its elegant footwork and also as an invitation to personal growth, creative expression, and community building. Many of the incredible people I met through tango are now my closest friends and colleagues, and my life has been greatly enriched by those connections, both on and off the dance floor.

Argentine Tango

Local Private Lessons

Rate: $120/hr for one or two people

Private tango lessons for all levels in Long Beach, CA.

Guest Workshops

Rate: please inquire

Tango workshops for social dance communities and lively, memorable movement-based workshops for training events, retreats, and conferences.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

BRUCE LEE

Sharna’s Tango Story

Sharna has been involved with tango since 1997, when she received her first lesson in the corner of a dance hall from a fellow beginner. Her early and most influential teachers include Brigitta Winkler, Daniel Trenner, and Rebecca Shulman. She was also fortunate to study with such tango legends as Mingo, Esther, and Pablo Pugliese, Nito & Elba Garcia, Juan Bruno, Pedro “Tete” Rusconi, Mariano “Chicho” Frumboli, Gustavo Naveira, Omar Vega, Aurora & Jorge Firpo, and Pablo Veron.

In addition to tango, she has also trained in an abundance of other modalities including contact improvisation, contemporary and postmodern dance, yoga, Pilates, and Laban/Bartenieff Fundamentals. She has an MFA in Dance from UCLA.

Sharna performed as a member of the all-woman dance company TangoMujer between 2003-2006, and then directed her own performing company until 2011. She founded and directed the nonprofit organization Tango Mercurio in Washington, D.C., spearheading the DC community tango orchestra and outreach programs to youth and senior groups, as well as establishing a curriculum-based tango school.

Throughout her career, Sharna has been an outspoken advocate for learning both leading and following roles independent of gender, an approach that cultivates empathy, inclusion, and creativity. Between 2011-2018, she produced a series of workshops and extended retreats for women to study the leading role.

Over the past twenty years, she has taught guest workshops and master classes for dozens of community organizations across North America and Europe, and by special arrangement in Havana, Cuba and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Between 2014-2017, she designed original partnering courses for dance and theater undergraduates.

Sharna is praised for her ability to both articulate and demonstrate the subtle details of tango movement and improvisation. Her approach is holistic and exploratory, informed by both the anatomy and the poetry of the body.

What Students
Are Saying

What Students
Are Saying