last word
Meredith Klein
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
J ews started disappearing from
Argentina around the same
time tango dancing did.

From the 1930s to the ’50s, tango,
a style of dance and music that origi-
nated from the working class in Buenos
Aires, Argentina, was in its golden
age. Bands of a dozen members would
play the syncopated beats and dra-
matic strings for dancers across classes.

The social dance was popular beyond
South America in European metropol-
itans such as Paris, Berlin, Rome and
Vienna. By the early 1970s, however, a mil-
itary junta and national political dis-
array saw tango nearly disappear in
Argentina. The military dictatorship
was also the reason many Argentine
Jews — including descendants of
Sephardic Jews who fled Spain after the
Inquisition — left the country for Israel
or the United States.

Meredith Klein, the Jewish founder of
the Philadelphia Argentine Tango School,
is among the growing effort to rebuild
the tango community, both in Argentina
and Philadelphia, and she found Jewish
camaraderie along the way.

Founded in 2008 and originally
located on South Street, PATS has been
the center of tango in Philadelphia,
offering private and group classes,
workshops and social gatherings for
tango experts and neophytes alike.

Now in Fishtown, the school hosted
the 10th Philadelphia Tango Festival
last month. Klein performed with
dance partner Andres Amarilla on July
2 at the Philadelphia Welcome America
Festival, the first time the festival has
included Latin dance.

Klein, 47, has danced tango for
decades, partnering with Amarilla,
who is also Jewish, for 17 years.

After growing up in Narberth, Klein
attended Amherst College and studied
music theory.

A friend of hers was composing
music and had just forayed into com-
28 JULY 7, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
posing tango, and he invited her to a
workshop in the area. Klein immedi-
ately fell in love with the dance.

“We were both blown away,” she
said. “Blown away especially by the
communication that’s part of danc-
ing tango, because tango is a totally
improvised dance. With every single
step, one person is proposing, and the
other is receiving the information, and
it could be anything at any moment.”
Though Klein had a love of music at
a young age, studying piano and voice,
the discipline did not come easy to
her. Her first time dancing tango, her
instructor led her through a compli-
cated step, but the ebb and flow of the
improvised dance was intuitive to Klein.

“Because of the way you have to
listen to the music in order to impro-
vise with another person, you kind of
have an illusion that you’re making the
music,” Klein said.

After dancing tango in the Boston
area for several years after school, Klein
moved to Buenos Aires in 2005, where
she lived and danced professionally for
three years. It was there where she met
Amarilla and connected with a group
of other tango dancers, many of whom
happened to be Jewish and had rela-
tives who fled Europe to settle in South
America. “We’re from the same culture, the
Jewish culture,” Klein said. “The cul-
ture of being Jewish and valuing educa-
tion and thinking a lot about morality.”
Klein and Amarilla’s shared Judaism
helped forge an “instantaneous” con-
nection that transcended their time
together in Buenos Aires.

After leaving Argentina, Klein and
Amarilla toured and danced in more
than 40 cities in short bursts of time.

It was expensive to have long, drawn-
out tours and stay in one place for too
long. But after 15 years away from her
Philadelphia-area home, Klein wanted
to plant roots.

She returned to Philadelphia with
Amarilla and opened PATS at a friend’s
sculpture studio on South Street.

Even without experiencing the
political turmoil that precipitated the
waning of tango in Argentina, Klein
experienced the faltering and rebuild-
ing of tango culture in Philadelphia.

The studio rent increased rapidly,
forcing PATS to relocate. Around
the same time, the New Kensington
Community Development Corp. was
trying to build an arts quarter on
Frankford Avenue in Fishtown. Klein
took the leap and bought the build-
ing at the current location of 2030
Frankford Ave.

“They were enormously successful,”
Klein said of the project. “They got all
sorts of art space businesses to move in,
and the art space businesses attracted
lots of investment and people moving
into the area.”
But COVID, which limited the
in-person intimacy and community
upon which tango was built, threat-
ened PATS’ survival, though it tried its
best to pivot to online events.

“The pandemic felt like a hatchet,”
Klein said.

As PATS works to rebuild its audi-
ence to pre-COVID levels, Klein sees
a silver lining after more than two
years of struggling: Supporters within
the tango community have responded
with generosity, paying beyond what
is asked to keep the school and its pro-
gramming alive.

“It could make you cry,” Klein said.

“It’s so beautiful.” JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of Meredith Klein
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