The Yale Tango Club was started in 2003 by a group of graduate students who had taken interest in Argentine tango after having taken classes at the Payne Whitney Gym at Yale. The founder and first president was Tine Herreman, who was a graduate student at the Genetics Department at the time. She would lead the club from infancy to becoming a top university tango organization in the world during her five year presidency.
She had opened up the presidency to elections, but no candidate was found to challenge her, though many were willing to be vice-presidents. Part of the problem was that her success was hard to match, and the responsibilities she was carrying was too daunting for the officers in the club. And so, she continued to be the president until shortly before leaving graduate school.
As president, Tine did just about everything. She was a frequent teacher before the club, under her financial planning, had the money to invite guest teachers. She organized the so-called bootcamps that quickly inducted new people into the tango world by showing how, only after a few hours, anyone could dance to tango. She often taught at those bootcamps. She also did much of the promotion. While these events happened every couple of months, a more regular and demanding task she undertook was the running of the Sunday practica, four hours of music during which people of all levels dance and practice to improve their levels. Until a year before she had left school, she was the only DJ for each Sunday's practica. She would unlock the doors, set up the speakers, and play music until it was time to close shop. She would also decorate the place, to give it some warmth for especially people who were still skeptical about whether they belonged in the Argentine tango world. But her work would start before the doors were unlocked; she had to prepare music. Granted, by the middle of her tenure there, she had started DJing for other events in the Tri-State area. Her fame was becoming more widespread and growing, and she often used the club's practica as a test tube of any new DJ ideas.
However, eventually, the pressure was too much, compounded by the pressure for her to actually graduate from school. And despite the failure of finding a replacement, she decided to simply not run anymore, forcing the club to come up with a new president. And despite her immense contribution to the founding and growth of the club, there was growing internal discontent among the officers, some of whom found her demanding tactics on the borderline with dictatorship. She, on the other hand, thought the club too frail, too childish, couldn't stand on its own, always relying on her to figure things out. It was partly this conflicting relationship that expedited her decision to end her role as the president there. But before she stopped, she had to realize an immense project that would expand her reputation greatly as a tango organizer. What was better than being the founder and promoter of the largest student-run tango club after Michigan's? It was organizing a tango festival. So in 2006, she organized, with the help of a large group of fellow tango dancers, her first festival. It was a resounding success in terms of surpassing expected number of attendees and projected profit. She used her meticulous skills as an organizer, her connections built over the years with people in the Northeast, dancers as well as teachers, and in the end, Yale Tango Club was on the top list of tango festival locations. It attracted a great number of young people, which was the new trend in Argentine tango that, until recently, had attracted mostly older people. Also, the fact that its admissions prices were still lower than most other festivals, given that all the venues were free to the organizers, attracted even more young people of student backgrounds.
Tine reaped a great deal of benefits from having successfully launched the first festival. And she would outdo herself in the subsequent annual festivals, even though she would no longer be the president. The presidents that followed her would no longer be bearing the full set of responsibilities she had carried with equal measures of pride and reluctance. The responsibilities were distributed to other positions, particularly the treasurer, but also to volunteer organizers, promoters, marketers, and DJ organizer. The last position became important when it was clear that Tine had burned herself out being the DJ every week and not dancing very much at the same time.
While the distribution of work meant less of a load for the presidents, none of them shared the enthusiasm or the motives that drove Tine to success. Any given president did not always attend the Sunday event. Key access was given to at least two other people, and so the president isn't always needed to open for the practica. And the lack of ideas also drove down innovation. How to attract more people, creative ways to raise morale, nothing was new. The new presidents simply took whatever Tine had come up with and did the same thing. And each new president didn't last very long, one lasted just a little more than a month.
Doing what Tine had set a foundation to sustain the club is not that simple itself. Finding space for the monthly classes, dealing with the space given to the club free of charge by the Graduate and Professional Students Society can become a huge headache. And unlike Tine, the new presidents actually had to put at least as much focus on their studies. This might explain why the current president has lasted so long. He used to be a teacher, when he started as president, but now is a postdoc, with a bit more time on his hands. He is basically riding still on the wave of success generated by Tine's time. But he does it very effectively, and it is partly for this reason that the club has seen a resurgence of membership and interest.
The Yale Tango Club will see its fourth tango fest in less than two weeks. It is also organized by Tine. While her tactics and attitudes were not always welcomed by people at the club, they worked, at whatever expense, in bring fame to the club and put it on the map. Event though she had left the club many years ago, the club's leadership still finds itself standing on her shoulders, which apparently are tall enough that they need no climb any higher.
