Inside the Life of a Buenos Aires Tango “Taxi Dancer”

Travel Blog  •  Terry Ward  •  08.01.06 | 5:13 PM ET

I spent a single night in Buenos Aires earlier this year. Porteños are legendary night owls, and my sole desire was to dine on local steak as late in the evening as I could stomach it, then carry on to a tango hall to take in the national dance. Having two left feet and an innate shyness that prevents me from bounding onto the dance floor when copious amounts of alcohol aren’t involved, I had no desire to try the tango myself—I just wanted to be a fly on the wall of a quintessential B.A. experience. I had heard that there was a certain etiquette surrounding eye contact at tango halls, and my stomach turned at the thought that I would sidelong someone the wrong way and be swept up in a flurry of lightening fast steps and intense gazes that I couldn’t match. Then my stomach turned for another reason—tainted ferry food. It took a merciless toll on my insides, and I spent the rest of the evening in bed. As a result, I was happy to see an article from the Washington Post’s Time Zones column Monday offering a little insight into what I missed—a classic Buenos Aires tango evening.

Monte Reel’s story is a slice of late-night life taken from a tango hall—an interesting vignette about a freelance tango dancer (or “taxi dancer”) named Pablo Tamburini who gets hired by the hour or the evening to lead predominantly foreign female tango tourists around the dance floor.

Writes Reel:

A common scenario, he (Tamburini) said, is this: A woman comes to Buenos Aires, perhaps accompanied by a tango-phobic husband or a group of female friends. She dutifully learns her tango steps, then heads out to a milonga to put them to the test. She takes a seat at a table, sipping her Malbec wine as couples float about the dance floor. An hour later, she is still sitting there, with the sole of her new strap-at-the-ankle tango shoe tapping the floor impatiently, vexed by her apparent invisibility and cursing the terrible truth in the old cliché about this dance: It takes two.

The men determine who dances and who doesn’t, Tamburini explained, but the women have a role to play, too. The initiate might not even recognize when she’s being beckoned to the floor.

“There’s a body language very distinct to Buenos Aires that they don’t know,” he explained. “The women of Buenos Aires know the language naturally, but others have to learn it.”

That language is communicated principally through the languid glance, which is always in danger of being misread as its distant cousin, the lurid leer. The man needs to gaze at his target from a distance (getting too close is a patent violation of The Code), hold the woman’s eyes for a moment, then indicate his itch to dance by casually tilting his head. The process is kind of like fishing: The glance is like casting the line, the slight jerk of the head is like setting the hook.


Terry Ward

Terry Ward is a Florida-based writer and a long-time contributor to World Hum.


1 Comment for Inside the Life of a Buenos Aires Tango “Taxi Dancer”

tangoCLUBBER 07.05.08 | 8:12 AM ET

Well i am a tango dancer and i definitely agree that tango is all in your glance!
With tango sensuality and passion is pretty much obtained with the way you stare at your partner!

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