We recently connected with Adam Hoopengardner and have shared our conversation below.

Adam, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Being successful takes a combination of luck and hard work. Being at the right place at the right time, meeting the right people, and working very hard on your craft. Being successful also means never resting on your success. Always continue to create, and work hard. Try not to lose the joy that allowed you to fall in love with your craft in the first place.

When people congratulate me on, “making it,” I tell them, “making it is the easier part of the equation, keeping it is the harder part.”

Don’t be afraid to reinvent your motivation for doing what you are doing. Never stop learning. Never stop listening to people that know more than you. Stay humble and maintain an innocence in your craft.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

A combination of luck and a youthful curiosity to see where I fit into the world helped me to discover tango. I was traveling in Europe and for some reason chose Paris as my first stop. I happened to meet someone at a youth hostel who danced tango and he took me and a few of the other kids out to a milonga on the river Seine. When I saw the people dancing, and heard the music, the whole scene was extremely moving.
I was coming from an experience where I was working with a lot of visual artists and organizing art events. Most of the people I was interacting with I felt were full of BS. Lot’s of talk, no substance.
Here was something that you couldn’t stand around and pretend to be good at. You either danced, or didn’t. The truth was in the experience you shared with another person.

When I started learning to dance tango, I wasn’t sure where it would take me and I wasn’t planning to do it as a career. I didn’t even think that was a possibility.
I moved to New York City in 2004 and began working with a local teacher who was doing tango full time and it was then that I thought it might be a possibility.
In order to be financially stable in tango one must offer many services. The dancing itself, which for me is the fuel of the artistic process, is actually the least financially viable.
We make our livings teaching classes, organizing events, building community, and playing music at events.

Tango is a social, improvised dance. What people see on TV and in the movies is not what we do on a nightly basis.

When one is dancing tango, we are in a state of being in the present moment with another person, as we feel is being inspired by the music and the collaboration of movements we are executing. As it is all improvised in the moment, there is a tremendous amount of listening and responding. There is a constant conversation happening at all times.

What we try to provide, my partner, Ciko and I, in our classes, is the awareness to listen and communicate better, with the other dancer. This is exercised through musical exploration, physical training, and hours and hours of deliberate practice by the student.

I am most proud after over 17 years of teaching and helping grow the NYC tango community is the amount of students we have helped excel at the dance and the continued growth of the tango community in NYC. Many of our students have gone on to become teachers themselves or work in tango by organizing in their local communities.
A lot of them have also moved to Buenos Aires to live full time and embrace tango in the city where it was born.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I had just moved to New York in the spring of 2004. The friend who gave me a sofa to sleep also knew someone that she thought I would hit it off with. Within a few weeks of me relocating to NYC she introduced us and we started seeing each other.
This lead to us moving in together and after a few years we decided to try and go all in on tango as a business together.
Ciko, (Pronounced- CHICO,) real name Çigdem, is from Turkey and moved to NYC to finish her masters at NJIT. She was an architect for many years before moving into tango full time.

After dating and living together for several years we separated but maintained the business relationship.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Word of mouth.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.adamandcikotango.com
• Instagram: adamandcikotango
• Facebook: Adam and Ciko Tango
• Other: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tango-uncorked/id1459287554

  https://open.spotify.com/show/2rFP9WVs97sJznPuUdUm8Z?si=dd5bfcd127414ba7

Image Credits

Profile image – Carlos Andres Dueñas

Group photo in front of the stage – Steven Thull