Dancing Shoes! A Tanguera's Favorite Topic

NOTE: The new shoe pictures have been added below.





This is what the Universe wrote me this morning:

Happiness comes first, Cherie. Partners, abundance, and cool shoes come later.

Or at least this is how I'd line up my duckies.

Ungawa -
The Universe

P.S.
No, Cherie, cool shoes never came first.

(You can subscribe to your own Notes from the Universe here.)

While shoes are always on a tanguera's mind, they were in the back of mine until last week. I hadn't purchased any new tango shoes for over two years, and with the loss of one of my favorites (read about it here), I was jonesing for some new red ones.

Flo is always up for shoe shopping, so last week we went. First we checked out Taconeando (Arenales 1606), where the shoes are pretty and flashy and less expensive than other places, but none were of the design I need: a peeptoe. Flo managed however, as she always can, to find some lovely ones that were comfortable.






Then we went to Paule Tenaillon's, a young French designer that makes shoes to die for! And comfortable as well. However they are very expensive, fragile, and not made especially for dancing. The pair I wanted was made of hand-embroidered silver satin and black suede, and I could just imagine how they'd look after one night of hard dancing. She will be starting a line of tango shoes in a couple of months that are sturdier and cheaper, so I'm going to check back.




Inevitably we wound up at Comme Il Faut, and yes, I found some bright red suede shoes as well as a pair in silver lizard.






My back up position, if I couldn't find anything that I liked, was to order from Suipacha 256 Tango. My friend Dee always does and swears by them, and when I went, I was amazed at the beautiful leathers to choose from. They will make any design you can think up, and even put on buckle-snaps to make changing into them easy. And they are also very reasonable.

So some new cool shoes have arrived in my life, and it's as the Universe counsels, long after happiness.


Great article on feet and shoes.
Shoe stores in BsAs from Tango Australia.
Shoe stores in BsAs with a map
Revisit tangocherie's Sexy Shoes.

The Shoe of Salvation

Lately my mind has turned once again to shoes...

From Sole to Soul

As tangueros, or as denizens of Sex and the City, we are all rather over involved with our footwear. How can we express the music and our connection with our partner and our alignment with the cosmos if our feet hurt? Or appear ugly? Or are unmanageable? Shoes have power.

Look what Sandra Shea writes in her novel, The Realm of Secondhand Souls:

Annaluna didn't trust shoes. In fact, she thought they had the capacity for making their own decisions to conspire against us, and believed they were rendered powerless only if they were on feet or corralled in closets. Her rules were simple:

"Never leave them in hallways; there they can congregate and plot amongst themselves. Never leave them outside, unaccompanied, for they can wander where you don't want them to be. If you see two shoes lying together, imagine the worst."

If she found a shoe in the middle of the sidewalk...she would bring it home and bury it...Occasionally, though she would come home muttering darkly, holding a man's smashed oxford or a woman's bruised high heel...these she would not only bury, but light candles for three days.

Jamie asks in her blog, Lost Soles of the Highway-- Pondering the Mystery of the Single Shoe Along America's Roadways,

Have you ever seen a single shoe on the side of the road and wondered.......?

We've all seen abandoned solo shoes as well as lost and forlorn human beings along life's highways. And don't we always wonder?

I wonder where I lost one of my favorite Comme Il Fauts, the pair that I wore from day one with comfort and elegance, the shoes that helped me dance with flying feet.

Maybe if I light candles and/or turn San Antonio on his head, my beautiful left shoe will find its way home. If not, shall I bury its mate?

You Can't Tango in Any Old Shoes

Why do the words tango shoes have such impact, such a sexy connotation? Much more than salsa shoes or ballroom pumps? Maybe dancing slippers has a whammy, but of a different, "Cinderella," sort, unless the love of your life happens to be drinking champagne out of them.

“If you danced like that with someone in the nightclub scene,” said Russell Buckingham, a painter and club impresario talking about tango, “you would go home with them,” quotes the New York Times in You Can't Tango in Any Old Shoes. So maybe it's the dance more than the shoes.

Blogs and websites are devoted to tango shoes, and goodness knows, tons of different models are for sale on the internet, at dance festivals, and along Suipacha in Buenos aires. Tango shoes inspired my own post about My Sexy Shoes. (There are also lots of kinky blogs and fashion blogs just about shoes, but that's a whole other topic.)

But generally with tango shoes, it's the women talking, or men admiring the women wearing tango shoes. Some women even go so far as to say they dance tango for the shoes. I've never heard a guy declare such a thing.

Here are a couple of men's tango shoes from Darcos:







I wouldn't call these sexy, but they do make a statement.

Actually you can dance tango in any old shoes, but who would want to?

Howard's Buenos Aires Tango Map

Howard Barsky, my friend from L.A., has danced tango longer than I, and has danced in the milongas around the world. He comes to Buenos Aires twice a year, and has put together a useful interactive map of all the milongas and tango shoe stores in town. Not only does it help you when you're deciding where to stay, once you're here, it's useful for where to go and how to get there for your tango needs.

He's also a respected artist, as you can see below:




This post will eventually be in the archives, but there is a permanent link on the sidebar for MAP.

Thanks, Howard. This will be useful for many people.

My Sexy Shoes

How tall am I ? Honey with hair, heels and attitude, I'm through this dammed roof! --Ru Paul

My sexy shoes are black silk stilettos with an ankle strap. They are also my tango shoes which, depending on my partner and my point of view, can be the same thing. I first realized a few years ago why high heels are so sexy: they make our legs look longer, sure, but the real reason is that they make us more vulnerable. We can’t run away. (Or it looks like we can’t.)

But amazingly we can dance in them, which takes practice and skill. We must remember just how high the heels are so that we can go up on our toes and down again without whacking the heel. We have to learn how to keep those heels 1/4” off the floor, and to put them down with control so that the wood doesn’t clunk and we can spin like dervishes during the Tropical Tanda.

Dancing shoes have a mystique all their own. There’s no way we can dance ballet, tango, jazz or salsa without the right shoes. Well we can, but we don’t want to. If our feet are looking good, well then, we’re going to be dancing great. We’re more than half-way home.

In Cuba, the salsa homeland, where they don’t have the right shoes for anything, they dance in whatever or even in no shoes, but it’s no problem. If fact, our fancy specialized shoes seem kind of silly down there, where the best dancers are torching the floor in sneakers and old sandals.

But in the hot salsa clubs and smoldering tango salons both to the north and south of the Equator, looking the part is part of it. And it all begins with the barest, strappiest, sexiest shoes we can spin in, and if they match our outfits, so much the better.

We pick glittery and jeweled shoes (or white) if we have great footwork and are proud of it. The rest of us go for basic black if we don’t want glow-in-the-dark feet, but also, what is more sexy than black? And it goes with everything.

Soul to sole: what about Reflexology, when pressure is applied to certain areas of the bottom of the feet to promote relaxation and healing in other parts of the body?
Is that why we feel so great after an amazing night of dancing wearing the right shoes?

Your dancing shoes can have soles of suede, smooth leather, felt, rubber—depending on your feet and the floor you are dancing on. If you aren’t happy with the soles you’ve got, you can take the shoes to a cobbler and he can put on a different kind. As for your dancing soul, just let it out!

Unlike soles, which are of light-to-medium interest, heel height is a huge and passionate issue. Whenever a group of women huddle together at a milonga, if they’re not gossiping about a man, it’s heels of another sort that have their attention. (Actually the higher heel helps us to keep our weight forward in tango, so there’s more than aesthetics involved.) Sometimes short women like to wear the highest of the high (over 4 inches) and even platforms, and tall women opt for lower altitude.

I am tall (5’ 7”) and it has actually happened to me that a man has told me I’m a great dancer and he’d love to ask me to dance, but I am too tall! (How rude is that? I’m not too tall, he is too short!)

One night at The Mayan in Los Angeles years ago, a man invited me to dance, and when I stood up in my stilettos, he looked panic stricken as he gazed upward to the top of my head. Then he told me his recurring nightmare was to dance with a woman taller than he. But when we got into the groove, he loved it! Dance after dance, he tried new spins, lifts, jumps and dives. I finally had to beat him off with a clave!! He was overjoyed to realize he could dance well and have fun with a tall partner! He wasn’t exactly my mercy dance of the evening; I had fun, but I looked on the experience as educational for him--he will never hesitate to ask a tall woman to dance again.

A lot of women of my distance from the ground choose low-heeled shoes to minimize any height difference and to perhaps get more dances. I’m sorry, but I think you should wear the shoes that are right for you, that you dance fabulous in, that make your feet even more gorgeous and sexy. If a man can’t handle how tall or short you are wearing them, that’s his problem.

But for hot moments after the dance, we just need to know how to gracefully get undressed with those shoes on. Sometimes we go to bed wearing our shoes, and then we have to not forget that we are wearing stilettos that might get buried in some guy’s torso, or worse.

We have to know all these things about our sexy shoes. And even if we look vulnerable, we must learn not to be. Sometimes we can even take those shoes off.



argentine tango