Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Andres Amarilla began dancing tango in 1987 at age 11. While still a child, he studied with and performed in the dance companies of three of the greatest tangueros of all time: Gustavo Naveira, Juan Carlos Copes, and Rodolfo Dinzel. After 10 years of intensive immersion in the music, culture and movement of traditional Argentine Tango, Andres became part of a small group of young people seeking to push the limits of the traditional art form. Together, they analyzed and codified the movements, sequences and rules of traditional tango and began to play with the “grammar” of the tango language, thereby developing uncounted new sequences of movements, and giving birth to a new means of teaching, dancing and thinking about tango. This way of analyzing tango has become the basis of most good tango pedagogy in the world today.

Andres’s dance is characterized by the rich variety of material that he accesses in improvisation due both to an extraordinarily efficient lead and to an extreme precision of movement. Rather than seeking simple technical brilliance, Andres puts all of this technique and vocabulary to use to create a dance that possesses musical richness, responding to the subtleties of each orchestra with great understanding and feeling.

A greatly sought-after teacher, Andres has taught in more than 70 cities worldwide, including Istanbul, Beirut, Warsaw, Gdansk, Moscow, Sydney, Brisbane, Belo Horizonte, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal, and New York, among many others. In 2008, Andres and his dance partner, Meredith Klein, founded the Philadelphia Argentine Tango School. These days, Andres splits his year between Philadelphia and the world, as he continues to travel worldwide to teach & perform.

You can reach Andres at andresamarilla [at] gmail.com.