Warming up to Latin rhythms: cheek-to-cheek and chest-to-chest, Latin dancing is bridging cultures & peoples.

• Author: Hood, Lucy

The dance studio at Bette Runge's house is a glassed-in porch with tile floors, and it's about the size of a one-car garage. It was an afterthought, built to accommodate her passion for dance, and on Monday and Wednesday nights it also accommodates the passion of a small but dedicated group of dance enthusiasts who return week after week in search of the ever-illusive tango.

Jorge Pereyra, a professional performer from Argentina who made Washington his home some ten years ago, works hard to transcend cultural differences and to impart the true essence of his native dance. "What are you looking at? You're looking off into space. You have to look at me," he says to a student as he turns her face from its fixed gaze on the steamy glass walls.

"You have to look into my eyes. When we're dancing together, our heads are side by side. But when we are a little bit a part, then we look at each other. You are dancing with me."

And so, North meets South. A middle-class baby boomer from Richmond, Virginia, is introduced to a dance that acquired its intensity from a mix of despair and sensuality that were predominant in the Buenos Aires brothels where the tango originated at the turn of the century.

It's a large gap, but dance is becoming a medium for integrating the cultures of North America and its neighbors to the south. The tango and other forms of Latin dance are being adopted by the mainstream in the United States as an ever-increasing number of people take to the dance floor and move their bodies to the rhythms of Latin America and the Caribbean.

"I think Latin dancing is sexy," says Annette Jurkonie, a twenty-two-year-old student of salsa and mambo, who grew up as the disco era was trailing off and being replaced by techno pop, heavy metal, and rap. "It has a lot more emotion," she states, during one of the brief intervals when she would reluctantly turn her head away from the dance floor and add a few words to a conversation about Latin dancing.

Jurkonie and three of her friends had just finished taking a mambo class at the Habana Village Gallery. From sundown until the early hours of the morning, the beat of merengue, salsa, mambo, and an occasional tango permeates the Caribbean atmosphere at Habana's, a small nightclub in the Adams Morgan area of Washington, D.C. Jurkonie was hooked. Her fixed gaze on the dancers and the expression of joy on her face when she took to the floor were testimony of a Latin dance addict in the making.

Like any addictive substance, Latin dances have a forbidden quality to them, a physicality, which the more puritanical nature of North America has traditionally rejected. The swaying hip motion of the mambo, the rumba, and the cha-cha, the more pronounced gyrations of merengue, salsa, and cumbia, and the body-to-body contact of the tango have a common denominator--sensuality. That sensuality is like a temptress. It teases. It cajoles. It winks, and it nods. It's as if it were a hand gesturing with a come-hither motion. And for many of those who take the first step...