Jartango

I just moved back to San Diego. The first thing I did was join a dance class. Why you might ask. Well I’ve been getting out of shape recently and thought I owed it to myself to start looking good again.
Jartango was the answer. I lost 15 pounds by dancing and having fun. How cool is that? The instructor here is really sweet and I’ve enjoyed my short stay here.

lots of fun. I wish the class pace was a little quicker.

Jay is a great teacher! His instructions are easy to follow and his style is fun!

I have never written a Unilocal review before but I absolutely wanted to write one for J. He is an amazing teacher! I took group classes and privates with him over summer and absolutely loved it. He breaks down things to simple concepts which makes it so much easier to really understand what is happening as you dance. His demonstrations are perfect and his emphasis on the basics has helped me notice and improve a lot of things that I had earlier overlooked in my dance. I wish I could stay in San Diego longer just to continue learning with him.

I’m pretty new to dancing as a whole– a few nights in clubs and one or two salsa lessons, but that’s it. Because of this, understandably, I was pretty nervous heading into the introductory class (begrudgingly) with my girlfriend. However, his ground-​up step-​by-​step approach ensured that even those with absolutely no dance experience could get a handle on the basics of tango. I appreciated the emphasis he placed on the students’ body position and movement two weeks before he even paired us up to dance. This class is well worth the money and I will definitely be attending the next level of classes.

Over the last 8 years, I’ve taken Argentine tango from various instructors. I always gave them at least 2 months’ commitment to understand their teaching style and made it a point to find something to learn from each one. Some were great dancers and not good teachers. Others were good teachers, but didn’t have enough depth with the dance to be able to offer MORE than just the basic movements and a few figures.
The thing about an improvisational dance with so much subtlety and complexity at the same time is that there is little room for error. And feeling the music through the connection and each movement in your bodies is something incredibly hard to describe and even harder to teach.
Jay does this. Jay breaks things down into body mechanics and explains how it works, organically, within the partnership and within your own body in a way that doesn’t feel rehashed. He understands both leaders’ and followers’ technique and is able to refine each one while helping his students to understand the opposite role and use that to better communicate with one another. He also addresses and fixes each students’ bad habits as he sees them forming — no easy feat in classes of sometimes 30 people.
My favourite part? He really wants his students to understand. He uses common English words — and only tells you the name of the figure in Spanish after the fact because his point is not to prove how advanced he is by how much jargon he knows — and by doing this he also can teach certain movements from a blank slate, rather than having to undo previous misconceptions of how a step is done or how it’s supposed to look.

I have danced with every instructor in the area. J. Abling is the real deal. He teaches you the dance from the inside out, makes the classes interesting, and surprises you how all the pieces fit together at the end…
I watched his beginning class while waiting for one of mine and wished I had had some of his input when I started the process.

Love this place and the instructors!