A Kinesthetic Force
For Tango BerretÃn owner Alex Krebs ’99, the beauty of tango lies not in how it looks, but how it feels.
Alex Krebs ’99 had settled into a routine: Get out of bed, check his email, prepare a playlist, take a shower, eat breakfast, teach five hours of Argentine tango lessons, and go dancing. He did this seven days a week, varying his schedule only to teach classes on the road.
“I never took vacations, I never had weekends,” Alex says. “Someone asked me the other day, ‘Oh, when do you plan to retire?’ I’m like, ‘Never.’”
Only during the pandemic did Alex begin to modulate his pace, reluctantly teaching virtual classes at Tango Berretín, the dance school he owns and operates in Portland’s Foster-Powell neighborhood. Amid the carnage of COVID-19, he remained in motion, yet felt robbed of his life’s purpose.
“COVID was brutal,” Alex says. “That was hard for me emotionally—to not be around people, to not be teaching the thing that I really do well. I was put on this planet to teach and dance.”
To appreciate the weight of those words, you have to hear Alex speak them. He’s not hyperbolic or braggy; he simply has a singular sense of purpose. An awareness that for him, tango long ago stopped being a pastime or a profession, evolving into a soul-nourishing obsession rooted not in how it looked, but how it felt.
“Aesthetically, from the outside, [tango] looks beautiful,” Alex says. “We stand up straight, it’s elegant-looking movement. But really, for the people that do tango, it’s a kinesthetic beauty. It’s a pleasurable feeling more than it is an aesthetic thing.”
It’s a feeling that Alex has spent most of his life chasing, from Reed to Argentina and back to Portland.
Effortless Struggle
“When you shift weight, the weight is in the ball of your foot—and then your whole foot is making contact with the floor,” Alex says. “Really feel your heel, your toes, the bottom of the floor. That’s what’s balancing us and that’s what’s powering us.”
It’s August 2, 2025. I’m taking my first class at Tango Berretín, and it’s not going well. Actually, that might give you the wrong impression. It’s going terribly—so terribly that I’m tempted to brandish a copy of Reed Magazine before the other dancers to prove that I do some things well.
“One of the nicest ways to get into tango posture is to open the ribcage and then just relax the arms,” Alex instructs. “We don’t want to overanalyze it too much.” Maybe that’s why none of this is computing for me: I’m analyzing everything, unable to reach that transcendent state where tango is not a series of moves, but one ceaseless move.
I wonder if Alex faced similar struggles when he first started dancing. “I’d never danced until I got to Reed freshman year,” he says. “I didn’t know anything about tango.” He was, however, intrigued enough to sign up for a ballroom class taught by Scott Qazzaz, a decision that proved formative and fateful.
“At the end [of class], he [Scott] would always say, ‘What rhythm—foxtrot, cha cha, whatever—do you want to listen to and dance to for the last 10 minutes of open dancing?’ And I was always like, ‘Tango! Tango!’” Alex says. “I don’t know why I was so drawn to it. I’d be the only one with an opinion about it.”
Though the allure of tango was mysterious to Alex, it was also undeniable. While pursuing a BA in music at Reed, he danced at a studio on Southeast Powell, biking from campus while wearing a pair of dress shoes he’d purchased at a thrift store. He was committed, and he had to be. Otherwise, how could he have embarked on a two-month sojourn to Buenos Aires in 1998, dancing 10 hours a day?
Known as the tango capital of the world, Buenos Aires is where tango music and dance blossomed into a cultural force, mixing Argentine, African, and European influences in the city’s working-class neighborhoods during the 19th century. It’s a place you’d expect a devotee of Argentine tango to feel at home, yet Alex never quite did.
“Down there, I’d be dancing and I’d smile and people would be like, ‘Why are you smiling? It’s sad music, the economy’s crap, we’ve just had four presidents in one week,’” Alex recalls. “Inflation was so bad at one point that you bought bread in the morning because by the afternoon, it was twice the price.”
For the next decade, Alex returned to Buenos Aires every year. Yet the culture clash that he experienced (between ingrained optimism and well-earned pessimism) forced him to accept that while the source of his passion was born in Argentina, his future wasn’t there. It was in Portland.
Adjusted Gravity
Back at Tango Berretín, I’m still galumphing. Despite being a tango neophyte, I’d hoped I might thrive thanks to Alex’s genderless approach to teaching tango, which allows both male and female-identifying students to choose between leading and following. Maybe, I speculated, being allowed to follow would mitigate my learning curve.
In tango, following isn’t simply a matter of being led, but about responding to the slightest shift in your partner’s weight. Seeing me stumble, Alex steps in, taking the lead so seamlessly that I briefly believe I’m a better dancer than I am. I don’t feel weightless, but I do feel as if I’m dancing in adjusted gravity.
“The people that stay in tango are there for a reason that’s beyond the dance,” Alex tells me a few days before the class. “It’s about them and how they relate to other people. Maybe it’s more of an American thing that touch relates to sex. That doesn’t work in tango. If you’re there to go home with someone, you’re better off at the bar.”
Alex began building a community that afforded that level of comfort shortly after 9/11, when he bought a fixer-upper on Foster that he deemed promising—despite the Scientology posters papering the walls and the two-by-fours keeping the building from collapsing.
“I got a home inspector to come in here and he said, ‘If I were you, I would run from this building,’” Alex says. “I was 24 years old, I just saw possibilities.” He cut short a trip to Europe, calling upon fellow tango dancers to help him paint, finish the floors, and install drywall—in a mere three weeks.
Tango Berretín opened in February of 2002, and in the years that followed, it became so prominent that it was featured in The New York Times. Alex, however, was never entirely happy with the article, which accurately described him (“owner, teacher and acclaimed dancer”) without ever capturing his contagious fervor for tango.
Expressing the beauty of tango to the world, Alex says, is difficult. If he uses the word “kinesthetic” more than any other human being alive, it’s because it’s the only way to reveal the intimacy and motion of tango—which is palpable to dancers, but difficult to explain to audiences and outsiders.
“How do I put that on display, aesthetically, for you to see what I’m experiencing internally with this person in this moment?” Alex muses. “It’s like someone reading your diary.”
Symphony of Self
As a music major, Alex once fantasized about becoming a film composer. He worshiped maestros like Danny Elfman, Bernard Herrmann, and John Williams, but ultimately decided that while he admired them, he couldn’t be them.
“I don’t know if I’m genius enough to be able to make it to a Danny Elfman kind of place,” Alex says. “I’m just not that good.” He is, however, that good a dancer and instructor, able to demonstrate and teach moves as elegant and pungent as an Elfman choral riff.
“I might be the only person teaching Argentine tango full time in Portland,” Alex says. “I rent out the studio, I have my band, I have multiple sources of income. My ego is not tied to it.”
(When Alex and I reconnect a few months later, he qualifies his comment, noting that “when I mention my ego is not tied to it, I guess what I meant to say is that tango is a big part of my identity, but I don’t use it to feed my ego—I just love the art form.”)
Mindful of my own struggles to separate ego from enthusiasm, I told Alex about my work as a journalist and critic—which has become synonymous with both my ambitions and my insecurities.
“Maybe as a critic, you have to be the voice of confidence: This is my opinion,” Alex says. “I think the difference in tango is, I’m not teaching you which steps to do in which moment. I’m teaching you, ‘If you want to balance on one foot, this is the body mechanics of how to do it.’ It’s like learning to paint: You need to know a little bit of color theory, shading.”
Remembering those words, I start to get it. Not enough to be a great tango dancer, but enough to think that maybe, the beauty of tango isn’t so hard to convey after all.
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