Bloomington High School North
“She sells happiness with a little tango on the side.” – Joan, age 96, resident at the Belmont Retirement Village, Oak Park, Illinois (2019)
It is exactly what Winnie wants to achieve: to make life more liveable for everyone everywhere, regardless of age, sex, culture and class. It is a lifelong ambition that Winnie is eager to pursue through a culture as inclusive and universal as tango.
Winnie has led over a hundred outreach events using live tango music as a vehicle of connection and communication across the US, Asia and Canada in K-12 schools, universities, retirement communities, community-and-professional music schools, medical facilities, dementia homes, farmer’s markets, art galleries and cross-cultural festivals. She was covid-canceled for the big workshop in Danville Correctional Facilities in 2020 – a medium-security all-male facility – but she was rebooked for 2023. She is slated to do a workshop at the juvenile detention center in rural Ohio near Cleveland in October, 2022.
Multicultural, multi-lingual, trained in academia and thriving outside of it, Winnie is the connector between many worlds. She especially specializes in bringing tango to people who have never heard of tango before.
Events Winnie has led range from specialized masterclasses for university composition students at prestigious music departments eg. Jacob School of Music, Indiana University; to Cultural and Music Appreciation courses at numerous liberal arts colleges (to name a few: Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, Butler University, St Mary’s College, Notre Dame University, Purdue University, Columbia College Chicago, University of Dayton, University of Pikeville). For Winnie, the most enjoyable school outreach events happen in front of younger audiences: K-12. She has also personally witnessed so many moments where tango brought life and light back to seniors and the infirmed – there is no better reward for Winnie to keep taking tango to everyone, especially to those who cannot come to tango.
There is a short video Bandoneonist Ben Bogart and Winnie made in 2019 to inspire others to do what they can to make the world a better place: https://youtu.be/xVIYD6YAj60
