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Dancing in Two Worlds: Tango in New York and Buenos Aires

Tango is a very big part of Argentinean identity, especially for those born in Buenos Aires. I'm not from the capital, but I've lived there and—probably as some type of reaction against losing my roots—I've grown fonder of tango ever since I left Argentina. Hearing a bandoneón—an accordion-type instrument used in tango—brings images of rainy afternoons in a cafetín (neighborhood café) in Buenos Aires, mulling why life's so hard, pondering the reasons for the latest disaster in your emotional life. (I don't think I ever did this, by the way, but this is more or less tango's place in the Argentinean collective consciousness.)

When I found the milongas (tango dances) of New York, my first reaction was a bit defensive: "How dare these foreigners dance tango?" But that lasted for about ten seconds, since I had never danced tango in my life—like most people who grew up in Argentina in the '80s. How could I feel any sense of ownership of a cultural expression that I had never made my own?

Still, I could tell the milongas here are very different from the ones in Buenos Aires. Argentinean tango instructor Oliver Kolker says he found it unbelievable that Americans will get up on a Saturday morning to practice tango. In Argentina, tangueros sleep through Saturday mornings to recover from dancing till 5 or 6 a.m. the previous night.

So the goal in producing this piece was to look at what it is that New Yorkers get out of going to the milongas.

What we found is that the milongas are populated by all sorts of interesting people. Many of them find in the tango dances a place to engage in close but safe contact with a stranger—something unheard of in New York. And those who "get" the deeper, melancholy feeling that Argentineans instantly associate with tango simply become addicted to the dance and, in many cases, to the culture.