Argentine Tango is not about flying legs and melodramatic performances of emotion. It is a social dance that anyone of any age can do, to any music or no music, to create an extraordinary level of connection with another person. It does not require previous dance experience or rhythm. (In fact one tango musican claims that tango dancers are often “atemporal”).

We require our students to learn both leading and following. There are several reasons for this.

1. We think it is important to dance with compassion for the difficulties of the other role.
2. It is very hard for leaders to learn if they cannot be led.
3. Some people may find themselves surprised to enjoy a different role than the one they expected to do.

All teachers focus on the fundamentals of tango, but have different ideas about what those fundamentals are. For us, the fundamentals are

• connection
• posture
• balance
• disassociation
• moving from the core (another way of talking about leading with the chest)
• musicality

We emphasize these aspects of connected moving which we believe are more fundamental than standard sequences of steps. We believe that it would be wonderful if students had the patience to just walk for one year to fully establish these aspects. However, we understand that is a bit boring, so we do continue with additional moves. We try to avoid sequences that require memorization, and we focus on quality of motion and connection.

We recommend that you dance with lots of different people, even if you have a main partner.

• Tango can be frustrating, and one of the best ways to reduce frustration between partners is to dance with other people.
• Also as you change partners, you must recalibrate your balance, clarify your lead, and focus your concentration. this is an aspect of practice which will improve your dancing.

Close embrace tango involves touching another person with half or more of your body. This is very intimate. The codigos of tango are a set of “codes” that make some structure around this intimacy. The codes vary a little bit from milonga to milonga, city to city. We have not found a comprehensive list of the codigos in English. Although the codes are highly gendered, much of their intent is also relevant to queer people. Eventually a new set of codes will develop that incorporate the complexities and ambiguities that queer tango introduces.

We’ve written about the codigos that we encourage you to follow.

We think tango would be much more fun with gender complexity and exploration. We also feel passionately that we want gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to have access to tango’s unique experiences of connection, healing, self-expression, and rapture. together, we join an international movement to queer tango.

The leading voices of the queer tango movement from Berlin, BA, and New York City agree that it is very hard to maintain enough teaching and milonga resources to maintain a fully queer scene. (see this interview). Taking this into account, here is our plan.

1. The first step is on a local level by creating learning spaces that are comfortable entry points for GLBT people.
2. Then, since we may not be able to build queer tango spaces, we need to build queer tango community, and go places in groups, so that we can be comfortable and supportive while using tango spaces.
3. Then we need to find teachers who will be supportive of women leading, men following, and unfamiliar gender identities (butch women, femme men, trans and genderqueer folk) in their classes. When visiting teachers come to give workshops, we will call and ask about this before promoting their classes to the local queer tango community. When attending non-queer classes and workshops, queer dancers should arrange to go in even-numbered groups, so we can at least change partners with a familiar group. (Make friends in your classes!)
4. We should organize occasional queer milongas and also women-leading milongas. these will explicitly assert space for glbt tango and for the larger community to join us in experimenting with gender roles. (For example, it would be nice to have a milonga at which straight men were comfortable following.) These should be publicized regionally.
5. There are queer tango festivals in Buenos Aires, Stockholm, and Hamburg. In Berlin is the pinktangoball. We encourage students to travel to join and expand on the concept of queer tango as a transnational culture. We put links to all these in the right hand column here.
6. Lexa is a queer leader and teacher in NYC. We plan to invite her to Boston to give workshops. You might want to read her blog. In 2007, she and her partner were the first same-sex couple invited to dance at the Mundial in Buenos Aires. Here’s the video. If you find other internet resources we should link to, please comment this article and we will add!

The most important part of improving your tango is practice. We hope that you practice at least once a week in addition to your classes. If you are not learning with a partner we recommend that you invite someone from the class to meet up for a practice session once a week. your body needs to learn this dance, and that takes time.
We recommend that you find a teacher who you like and stick with them. Since every teacher has a different approach, if you bounce around too much you will get a lot of confusing information. Also, we recommend learning from teachers instead of other dancers, who may not be well trained, and who also may give you a lot of confusing information. Once you find a teacher you like, we recommend following their approach for one to two years. it’s fine to take workshops with visiting teachers, but when you have questions or problems, go back to your teacher.

After your first 6 months of dancing, we recommend taking a private lesson once per month. Here you will get essential corrections to your dance which will take you about a month to integrate.

It’s great to go to workshops with visiting instructors. These are often very interesting, draw a mix of people so you have the opportunity to meet new people, and you will get very good instruction in more difficult moves. Be sure to call in advance (or have us call for you) to make the sure the teacher welcomes women leaders and queer students. Go with a friend or in a group to make sure you have partners to change with.

While practicing, it is likely that you will have some frustration with your partner. Here are some tips:

• When something is not working, it is VERY hard to tell what’s wrong and who is at fault, tempting though that is. When two people are moving in this way, the dynamics are very complicated.
• Share the responsibility. Don’t blame each other.
• We do not recommend trying to analyze it and talk about it. This easily leads to blaming the other person, etc.
• Each of you should worry about what you are doing, not what the other person is doing.
• Each party should just keep doing their best to remember the corrections the teachers made in the previous session and integrate those.
• Any questions or difficulties that come up should be written down and brought to your teacher. Let us figure out the problems.
• For the leader: if what you want isn’t happening, don’t say anything to your follower, just try to make it more clear, try to make it unavoidable. You will hear “it’s always the leader’s fault”. Even though it’s not true, this phrase is a good idea, because if the leader tries to solve the problem, it makes them a better leader…