Tango Queer Buenos Aires

By Mariana Docampo

A handful of people in Buenos Aires pioneered Queer Tango – an evolved version of the traditional tango dance that challenges stereotyped gender roles. We asked two of the city’s foremost Queer Tango instructors to show us their inclusive and loveable Buenos Aires.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Enrico Massetti
• Release date: Nov 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005737658

Book preview

Table of content

Table of content

Acknowledgements

The Milonga

The Embrace

Humanism

Tango Community

Theatricality

The Military Quality of TangoMilongueras

Family

The Military Edge

Rules

Hierarchies

The Discipline of One’s Body

The Marks of Gender

Subversion

How Did I Start Dancing?

El Zorzal Criollo

El Gallito

The instructor

The Milonga in the Provinces

Power

The Female Role

Learning to Lead

Women Who Lead

Marriage

Evita

Changes

To Be a Woman - To Make the Woman

Exchanging Roles

History

La Casa del Encuentro [The Meeting Place]

La Marshall

Symbol

Legitimacy

Besos Brujos [Bewitched Kisses]

And yet...

Hamburg

Help and Exchange

Enthusiasm

Queer

Break

Foreign Touch

Hamburg

Festival Internacional de Tango Queer in Buenos Aires

Power 2

Foreigners - Foreign

Power

Tango Today

Tango Lyrics

The Cultural Connection

Hinge Generation

Recovery after the Dictatorship

Tango Today

Old and New

Theory

Identity

Nostalgia

Identity

The Origin

Today

Tango Queer Manifesto

Tango Queer Manifesto

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all who have made possible the publication of this English translation, especially Lourdes Dávila for her professionalism and generosity and Daniel Canuti for including the work in his wonderful catalog.

Thanks to Gabriela Melcon and Karina Macchioli for the beautiful cover and their teamwork.

Thanks to Augusto Balizano, Soledad Nani, and Liliana Furio, with whom I share my journey, and special thanks to Astrid Weiske for opening the doors to the Queer Tango Festival Berlin, a home to which I always want to return and a source of inspiration.

I would like to thank all the individuals who work with tango queer worldwide, especially those who have been close to me in different moments of my trajectory through the tango world, offering opportunities, companionship and affection: Ute Walter, Marga Nagel, Magali Saikin, Mercedes Liska, Isabelle Macciacchini, Peggy LaBaronne, Birthe HavmØller, Sabrina Alonso, Irene Gwerder, Joke Koolhoven, Anna Grazia Aversa, Rut Rikey Tryggvadóttir, Birgit Hambrecht, Regina Rueckert, Angie Lawrence & Anna Jorgensen, Kate Smith & Kate Lancey, Gunner Svendsen, Rose Juel Nordentoft,Tina Solveig Koch, Charlotte Rivero, Karen Curtis, Litza Jansz, Cecilia Mirkin, Kim Richards, Nicole Roberts, Jen Elks, Dorothea Hammann, Ray Batchelor, Hellen Halldórsdóttir, Ray Sullivan, Walter Pérez, Damián Gargiulo, Edgardo Fernández Sesma, Celeste Rodríguez, Anahí Carballo, Liliana Chenlo, Juan Pablo Ramírez, Mune Giro, Julie August, Simon & Stephan (Los de la Haya), Lucas de Buenos Aires, Edgardo Dieleke, Simona Colombo, Mercedes Docampo, and Natalia Bril.

The Milonga

The Embrace

I was twenty-four when I faced an emotional crisis I wrote off at the time as a panic attack. Although the crisis itself lasted a long time, its highpoint coincided with the only joint I ever smoked. A first for me, smoking the whole thing triggered terrifying visions and set off a fit of uncontrollable weeping. Unconcerned, my friend, an expert in these matters (we were vacationing in Cabo Polonio at the pinnacle of its hippie splendor), tried to calm me down. Mariana, think of something beautiful. The effect of the joint will follow the direction of your thoughts, will intensify and enlarge them. (We were both literature students at the University of Buenos Aires.) Desperately, I started to look for images in my head to assuage the monsters threatening it. I finally found the right one: I saw myself in a milonga embracing a man with whom I loved to dance. At that moment of utter helplessness, this memory—which was also my desire—soothed me. That was how I was able to sleep that night, and all the nights that followed. I understood that tango was my possibility.

There is an element that differentiates tango from all the other dances I know and perhaps defines its uniqueness: the embrace. Not just a simple physical contact, the embrace is a sincere encounter that initiates the movement of the bodies together across space. It initiates the dance. Not before, not after. In that instant, intuitively, the codes of possible movements with the partner begin to appear.

That moment, that beginning, implies a surrender so intimate and profound to the self and to the other that it may lead to unforeseen emotions, from unstoppable sexuality to indifference, rejection, calm, nostalgia, impatience, or happiness.

The embrace initiates another unique element of the dance: improvisation. The movements across space do not form part of a previously rehearsed choreography but are rather composed in the moment itself. One step is combined with another, and if it is true that the leader is responsible for the combinations, many factors affect the moment of the dance: the proportions of the bodies, their skill, the amount of dance space, the number of couples dancing simultaneously, the music, the shoes, the clothing, the gazes of those watching.

Clearly, improvisation follows certain predetermined guidelines. There are some specific movements in tango: caminatas (walks), ochos (figure eights), giros (turns), barridas (dragging), boleos (throws), planeos (pivoting), sacadas (displacements). These movements are learned in class independently or in a sequence. There is a technique that prepares the body for its surrender to improvisation. But before acquiring that technique and becoming a dancer, at the very beginning, for once and forever, is the embrace.

Perhaps it is this embrace, and the emotions it provokes, that is responsible for the success of tango around the world. To milonguear is no mere pastime, an opportunity for socialization or an exercise (though it may well be all of that). Dancing tango in a milonga is a physical and emotional encounter that follows specific codes and allows a special type of surrender I have never experienced in any other area in my life.

In my first year as tango instructor, I met a student from Otta, a small city in Norway. He was about sixty years old and heterosexual; an engineer by profession, and very shy. I was just starting up and my classes were cheap. At first, he seemed somber, so I didn’t like him. He needed everything: a heart, for starters. I understood him immediately when I leaned against his cold chest. I felt he was not used to sunny days or physical contact. And yet I think that my Catholic education made me pity him immediately. I decided to help him despite my distaste. I knew that my class would be useless if I did not begin by increasing his blood flow. I offered myself without presumption but with the hope of lighting at least a small fire within him. It turned out to be a dramatic experience. I remember that at the end of the class his hands had warmed up, his chest was more receptive, and he had managed a smile on his face. I was exhausted, vampirized. I got sick. Never again. Perhaps he enjoyed a few hours of well being, but it had a seismic effect on me.

I once overheard a very well-known tango instructor impatiently tell a young man unable to give himself up to the movement, If you do not surrender you cannot dance.

It takes many years in this profession to accept that not everyone can dance tango. The potential appears only to those dancers who are open to the embrace.

Humanism

At the end of the nineties Torquato Tasso was my milonga destination on Sunday nights. One night a beginner, a Dutchman, asked me to dance. After one round he followed me to my table and asked me on the spot to give him private lessons. I was working at the time as a secretary in an office and I had never thought about tango as a job possibility. However, the offer was so unexpected and attractive that I accepted. The Dutchman understood immediately that I was new at this when he saw me hesitate about my price, so he suggested an amount: twenty dollars. It’s what I pay Barbarita, he said. Barbarita was a young and talented teacher that placed ads about her private lessons in tango magazines. So I taught the lesson as best I could, and then I taught another, and yet another. I was able to share, with an intuitive pedagogy, the knowledge I had acquired, and started to develop my own teaching style. My student seemed satisfied, and I felt I was quite good at it. A few days later, after a session I thought had gone particularly well, the Dutchman threw my twenty dollars to the ground. Here, have your money, he said. I had to stoop down to pick it up.

Once he interrupted the lesson unexpectedly and went to the adjacent classroom. Suddenly I heard a thunderous cry that seemed intimate and sad at the same time. He was sobbing, as if he had decided to make me