This story appeared in several magazines, including Westways (Jul/Aug 2010) the travel magazine of AAA Southern California
Why I packed up my dancing shoes and headed to Buenos Aires
Story by Camille Cusumano
Photographs by Patrick Bennett
No Clocks grace the belle epoque walls of Niño Bien, a salon in Buenos Aires where I have danced tango for the past four years. I can’t be late for my next date this Saturday night—across town at another old dance hall—but not to worry. I’ve learned to track time in Argentina by the tanda, a series of three or four like-themed tangos that you dance with the same person, lasting about 15 minutes altogether.
I fit in two more tandas, with Carlitos who hugs me as if it’s our last day on earth, and Jorge who tells me “You are a plumita (little feather).”
Ah, but Ramon, who makes eye contact just as I’m slipping out of my nine-centimeter heels to head to Salon Canning, will have to wait until next week. And he will, too, as will my other favorite partners. An embarrassment of riches I call them, my stable of tango dancers, many of them friends I’ve been making since 2006. That’s when I arrived in Buenos Aries for a brief visit; I had been studying tango back home in San Francisco and wanted to experience the dance in its birthplace. But I unwittingly fell head over stiletto heels in love with the dance and the city called “Paris of South America,” and four years later, I’m still here.
And still in awe of the beautiful French and Italian Renaissance-style buildings with their old-Europe balconies, and the operatic architecture of such crown jewels as the world-famous Teatro Colon and the stunning enamel-studded Palacio de Aguas Corrientes. I never tired of walking under the broad-canopied jacaranda and sycamore trees that line streets where busy sidewalk cafes, jazz bars, restaurants, and chic boutiques form the heart and soul of the barrio. 
How could I not be enamored of a city that has so many great bookstores? My favorite one is El Ateneo with its majestic Greek-theater interior, frescoed ceiling, and a cafe where patrons can sip espresso and read a book before deciding to purchase it. There are the wonderful museums, spanning a spectrum, from fine art to a marvelous showcase of Evita Peron’s life and times. The food—not just the grass-fed beef—is cheap, abundant, and delicious, from the plump empanadas to the pizza and pasta to the indigenous specialties like corn-based locro and humita. But for me, the city’s most compelling allure remains the tango, day and night.
This evening, as I taxi over to Salon Canning to dance into the wee hours of the morning, I think about how lucky I was to have come Buenos Aries in the heat of tango’s renaissance. The dance had fermented around a basic hunger for love and intimacy among society’s most disenfranchises, gauchos and immigrants, in the early 1900s. It enjoyed its unparalleled Golden Age from the 1920s to the 1940s, when you could walk down Corrientes, “the street that never sleeps,” and hear live tango orchestras playing in cabarets, theaters, and salons.
Tango went dark in the ‘50s, under repressive military regimes and was reignited in the ‘80s, here and around the world when Argentina’s last dictatorship toppled and democracy was restored. Still in the midst of its spectacular comeback, tango is on tap everywhere in the night-owl city, in salons, classes, theaters, restaurants, workshops, plazas, and under al fresco gazebos.
Corrientes is a bit tired from wear these days, but it still sizzles with enduring hot spots, such as El Gato Negro, a café where you can buy spices and teas from around the world, and Café La Paz, a 1960s hangout for artists, musicians, and political dissidents. Corrientes runs for 69 blocks and right past the city’s iconic Obelisco, a 220-foot-high landmark with a bird’s-eye view of the many milongas—the venues where tango is danced—in this downtown area.
Although visitors can see professional tango productions at many places in the city, Argentines also welcome foreigners at their milongas, the venues where tango is danced. For a few pesos admission fee (US$3 to $7), visitors can watch ordinary people dance “organic” tango—the social dance the way it has evolved—in old atmospheric halls and salons. Most milongas seat patrons
at linen-covered tables around the periphery of the dance floor. All milongas have a DJ who is skilled at playing crowd-pleasing music, but occasionally they feature a live orchestra and a dance performance for some part of the evening. Milongas are divided into seating sections for men, women, and couples. For refreshment, they generally serve a simple menu of empanadas, pizza, salads, antipasto, wine, beer, and other spirits. Of course, visitors who’d like to dance can learn some basic steps and easily join the line of dance on the floor.
At Canning, the host seats me with friends at a table with friends. Now that I am well-seasoned and can move with the best of them, sometimes I love to simply sit and watch this dance that is more than a hundred years old. I notice that many tangueras, like me, close their eyes as they give themselves over to what is summarily called a “three-minute love affair with a stranger.” Perhaps, like me too, they imagine that they are back in the Golden Age of tango—the 1920s to the 1940s—when you could walk down Corrientes, “the street that never sleeps” and hear live tango orchestras playing in all manner of cabaret, theater, and salon.
A cabeceo, an eye-lock and head-nod from a man, breaks my reverie at Canning. I accept this traditional invitation and meet him on the floor. I see that it is Gonzalo, a young man who likes to lead me in fancy moves like leg wraps or enganches (leg hooking). I give his pant leg a playful “shine” with the top of my shoe. Most couples adhere to a basic vocabulary of steps, which includes walking (caminando), figure eights (ochos), and tight turns (giros). But whether showy or smooth, social tango is always a dance of improvisation with no predetermined sequences, unlike American tango and other ballroom dances.
A cortina, or short piece of non-tango music, marks the tanda’s end, and Gonzalo regales me with a requisite piropo (flirty remark). My dancing is divino! he says, and guides me back to my seat. All of this—the dance’s spontaneity, the theatrical spirit of the milonga, the close embrace of tango that each time relives the primal urge for oneness—prompts me to tell people that tango is learned from the feet up, but danced from the heart down. It is as much a free-form dialogue as the Castellano I am learning to speak here.
Now that I speak fluent tango, I love taking friends who visit me to La Boca, one of the city’s barrios where the dance was born. They watch me tango with perfect strangers, the street performers who set up shop with boom boxes around the cobbled pedestrian alley, el Caminito. La Boca preserves tango’s turn-of-century atmosphere, including the conventillo, the Crayola-colored tenements, once crowded with mostly Italian immigrants, but now packed with fun shops and tango kitsch. Strolling the inner courtyard, I can almost hear the immigrants channeling their disillusion and grief into guitars and the bandoneon, the instrument that gives tango music its human-voice quality.
Those of us who want the whole world to dance the dance that elevates the common hug to a lyrical art form feel validated: In 2009, the United Nation gave Argentine tango protected cultural status, designating it “part of the world’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” Bruno Coda, a seasoned milonguero friend who learned his first steps by copying barrio dancers more than 50 years ago, says the UN’s international seal of approval means “Tango belongs to everybody.” And he loves that in Buenos Aires’s milongas, he dances with more foreigners than ever before.
As for me, a foreigner, hopelessly hooked on tango, it is the locals, like Bruno, to whom I gravitate for their deeply organic feel for the dance and music of their forebears. And, there’s Ramon, waiting for me at Niño Bien. We meet in the middle of the dance floor and embrace. The violins cry, the bandoneons (concertina-like accordions) moan. I await his salida, the entrance step to tango. But salida is Spanish for exit and so I’ve come to think of this step as the moment we exit measured time and only the present spreads blissfully before us, no past or future. Good thing, because no clocks grace the walls of Niño Bien.
SIDEBAR: Where to Find Tango
Stage Shows
Tango fantasía is what Argentines call stage tango with its spectacularly choreographed pyrotechnics. Most tango shows offer a dining option. Prices run from about $60 (show only) up to $300 (show, gourmet dinner, VIP seating).
• Esquina Carlos Gardel. 3200 Carlos Gardel, tel., (54-11) 4867-6363, info@esquinacarlosgardel.com.ar
• Café de los Angelitos. 2100 Rivadavia Avenue, tel., (54-11) 4952-2320, reserves@cafedelosangelitos.com
• El Viejo Almacen. 1064 Av Independencia, tel., (54-11) 4307 6689, info@viejoalmacen.com
• Sabor a Tango. 2535 Juan Peron, tel., (54-11) 4953-8700, info@argentina-tango.net
• El Querandi. 302 Peru Street, tel., (54-11) 5199-1770, reservas@querandi.com.ar
• Esquina Homero Manzi. 3601 San Juan Avenue, tel., (54-11) 4957-8488, info@esquinahomeromanzi.com.ar
“Organic” Tango
At milongas, you can sit at tables around the dance floor and simply watch, or you can step into the line of dance. For exhaustive listings, pick up the Tango Map guide, El Tangauta, La Milonga, and B.A. Tango, available free at most hotels and milongas. Some favorites among the locals:
Confiteria La ideal. 384 Suipacha, Mon. 3-10 pm, Wed. 3–8 pm, Thurs. 10 pm–3 am, and Fri 3–8 pm; tel., (54-11) 4454-5488
Club Gricel. 1180 La Rioja, Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, 9 pm–4 am, tel., (54-11) 4957-7157
Salon Canning. 1331 Scalabrini Ortiz, Sun. 6 pm–12 am, Wed. 3 pm–11 pm, tel., (54-11) 4832-6753.
El Beso. 416 Riobamba, Tues., 9pm–2am, Wed., 11 pm–3 am, Sat. 11pm–4am, tel., (54-11) 4953-2794
Niño Bien. 1462 Humberto Primo, Thursday 10 pm–4 am, tel. (54-11) 15-4147-8687 (cell).
Sueño Porteño. 3330 San Juan, Wed, 7 pm–3 am, and Sunday 5 pm –1 am tel. (54-11) 15-5768-3924 (cell)
Classes
Most dance halls feature a lesson an hour or so before the milonga starts—call ahead to confirm. Wear comfy shoes. You don’t need to bring a partner. If you do, expect to change during the lesson. There are hundreds of classes and teachers listed in the guides mentioned above. A few recommendations:
The Argentine School of Tango has a full schedule of classes, including beginning ones. It’s located in the Centro Cultural Borges at Viamonte and San Martin, tel., (54-11) 4312-4990.
Oscar and Mary Ann Casas offer private and group classes and promise to have you dancing the night of your first lesson. Held at El Beso, 416 Riobamba, and in their studio. Tel., (54-11) 4382-0463, ocasa1712@hotmail.com; www.tangoargentino.ca/index/html.
TangoTaxiDancers offer private and group classes. Also, for a reasonable fee, you can hire a so-called taxi dancer to accompany you to milongas and dance with you. Dancers still learning to get comfortable with the milonga’s etiquette often do this. Tel., (54-11) 4382-5947, info@tangotaxidancers.com, www.tangotaxidancers.com.
Milonga Etiquette
What to know before you go:
• Dress is casual to flamboyant—some dancers like to put on the Ritz. For others, comfort demands simple outfits. Dress jeans may be acceptable, sneakers almost never.
• While it’s welcome to drop in, do make reservations if you want to be guaranteed seating for a party of three or more.
• The cabeceo, the nod of the head, is the traditional way men invite women to dance. Today, you may see a lot of dancers ignoring this venerable ritual, but most still honor it. Woman can also initiate the invitational nod. So, unless you intend to dance, watch where you put your eyes!
• Never say “thank you” before the tanda is over, or that means you want to sit down. When you hear the cortina—a short piece if music that is not the tango—the tanda is over, and you can say “thank you” or “gracias.”
hormonally charged youth as a writer. If only Coppola had been around to tell me this back then: Do not go back and read your day’s writing when you are on a project—a screenplay in his case. He says do not go back and read it for a good 30 days until you have about 80 pages. Give yourself a chance. He says your reaction will be very different. He didn’t say why, but I know why: It’s because if you got that far you have made a commitment to your material and your process. You have a “baby” and it is growing inside of you. You want to nurture it now. He suggests you make a “ceremonial” reading of that 80-page draft. (My ceremony/ritual is to breathe and rub my palms together like a fly. It works for me, don’t ask why.) Make notes on your draft. Then rewrite. “Rewrite is the middle name of writing,” he says so succinctly. My mantra, adopted from William Zinsser, is “The essence of writing is rewriting.” Coppola says, “I rewrite a trillion times.” I only rewrite a million. There is such a thing as over-kneading the dough.
needs. Here is a list of several workshops I teach. Contact me for details and rates – ocaramia@earthlink.net or ocaramia@mac.com: