Our Students Are the Nicest People on Earth!

We meet the nicest people in our work! Ruben likes to say that our students arrive as strangers and they leave as friends. We are very lucky indeed.

We just received a note from Dawn Scarrow from Canada, forwarded by Sandra of My BA Travel Guide:

Ruben was a fantastic partner! Both my friend and I enjoyed dancing with him immensely! I called Cherie after to let her know how happy we were and she was lovely to speak to as well and offer us other fabulous tango opportunities that we were unable to take advantage of (I didn't arrive back to BA from the estancia in time) but they would have been great.

Last night Ruben did milonga accompaniment at Canning with five ladies!
Not a bad job he has!

Tango Lessons, Tango Tours, Tango Taxi Dancing 2010

About us: our tango classes are bilingual, and concentrate on the music, embrace, connection, improvisation, and sensuality of tango milonguero, the most popular and traditional style of the Buenos Aires milongas, where we are well-known. We do not dance stage tango, and do not teach choreography. We've been dancing together for more than four years, and were finalists in the Campeonato Metropolitano de Tango de Buenos Aires 2006.





I've been dancing tango since 1997, and have studied with Fernanda y Guillermo, Julio y Carina, Francisco y Natalia, Suzuki Avellaneda, Juan Bruno, Nito y Elba, Fabian Salas, Gustavo Naveira, and, most of all, Carlos Gavito.







Ruben has been dancing tango in the milongas of Buenos Aires since 1980. He came to the tango from a background of folklore and rock 'n roll.

What Ruben and I offer for dancing tango in Buenos Aires:

Private lessons for one person with Ruben and me, 1 hour; for a couple, 1 1/2 hours; (rates on request)



Note: With lots of tango teaching experience, we feel that it's better to start out with a few private lessons to make sure you don't develop bad habits (which can take years to break), and learn the fundamentals of technique before you learn steps and figures. After you develop a base of tango technique, then it can be fun to take group classes to meet new people.





Here in Buenos Aires, "everyone" is a tango teacher, even if they've had only ten lessons more than you. Cheap lessons aren't necessarily the best. There are shoe stores and hotels which offer free lessons. But sometimes you get what you pay for.

Group classes: to be arranged

Packages: a discount given when purchasing a package of classes and/or other tango services in advance;

Milonga accompaniment with both of us, explaining the codigos, etc., including entrance fees, soft drink, transportation to and from our studio in Boedo. (Discount given if a private student.)

Taxi Dance Service: Ruben or I will accompany and dance with a client in the milonga of their choice--$30 usd/hour -- two hours minimum, plus expenses (transportation, entrance, soft drink.)

If you are a tanguera from out of town and only have a brief time in Buenos Aires and want to dance as much as possible, Ruben's professional milonga accompaniment will allow you to hit the ground dancing! Everyone looks at who Ruben dances with! A great way to kick-start your tango vacation! Ruben is one of the very few milongueros who offer this service; the agencies use tangueros with much less experience.

Ruben does not sit at a table with his client but a short ways away, always with his eye on her, thus allowing other men to cabeceo her for a dance. This arrangement also looks more natural and will help the lady dance more when she goes alone to the milonga the next time.




Two-Day Intensive Tango Tour: a one-hour private tango lesson, coffee in an historic cafe, a parrilla lunch or dinner (not including drinks), a cultural/historical excursion, tango shoe shopping, a milonga accompaniment, transportation between activities: Inquire about rates for your private tour.




Escorted Day Trips to the Gaucho Fair at Mataderos, La Boca and Caminito, and to the Delta of Tigre.

We also can advise and help with music and CDs.

All of our friends and students are invited to join us at our table in La Milonga de los Consagrados, Saturdays from 7:00-10:00, Humberto Primo 1462. Please just let us know in advance that you are coming so we can save room.





Here's a video that shows some of our Tango Services:






YES, we accept credit cards in advance by way of safe and secure PayPal.

Hasta pronto!

FOR TESTIMONIALS: please see the Comments, or email me for referrals.

More On Taxi Dancers

This topic continues to be HOT!
Here's a video interview (in Spanish):

(If you're having trouble viewing the embed, go directly to YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJdnzwfRwGM )





Check out previous posts on this topic here.

Milongueros For Hire

Currently there's a tango buzz about taxi dancers/milongueros for hire. It seems to be a favorite topic because it comes up regularly in milonga conversations and on the internet. Now we all have a game we play in the milongas: pick out the taxi dancers.

The other night in Gricel there was a large tour group of Americans from the east coast, mostly older women. Soon after they settled in in front of the bar, a horde of young men, many barely out of their teens, came in and joined the group. We watched the action with interest from our table nearby. The boys were badly dressed and didn't know how to dance; they looked uncomfortable, but no doubt were very glad to be earning a few pesos. The women seemed happy to be dancing tango in Buenos Aires. So what's the problem? It's certainly none of my business, plus it afforded those at our table a chance to gossip and stare at the unlikely couples on the floor.

What would have been more appropriate for this group would be hiring older dancers and milongueros. But they cost more--$50 US instead of perhaps $7 that the boys earned. Obviously a lot of money was being made by the organizers. They're not bringing tourists to Argentina for their health, of course; they're trying to run a business. It's just a shame that the tourists pay so much for so little. Sure, without taxi dancers they might not have danced that night, but if the tour organizers really wanted to give them a good time and value for their money, they would have contracted with older men who dance well to partner with the ladies. You know, like they do on cruise ships.

Because Ruben sometimes does milonga accompaniment, people have asked me if he and the other milongueros are ashamed to be doing it. Heck no, is my reply. It's honest work, they need the money, furthermore it helps the ladies who hire them to know what good tango is all about. Ruben wants to show the best about tango; this gives him pleasure, and really is his mission in life.

For more on this topic, check out an earlier post: http://tangocherie.blogspot.com/2007/03/taxi-anyone-which-taxi-would-you-hire.html

(The beautiful painting above is by Dvora Kanegis.)

The Milagro Milonguero Bus

Apropos of taxi dancers, I have a crazy idea to make American tangueras happy, Argentine milongueros some spare change and a free vacation, and me rich.

I round up fifty of the best male dancers from the milongas in Buenos Aires, arrange for visas and buy them round-trip tickets to the United States, and make sure they have two sets of beautiful clothes and sufficient Italian cologne.

From Los Angeles we begin a cross-country bus tour to all the cities with tango communities, selling tickets in advance with lots of promotion and PR on the Internet. Our bus load of milongueros will play from Seattle to Atlanta to New York to Florida at special Milagro Milongas for which a maximum of 50 women must pay $50 each. Local men may attend free. Private lessons may be arranged separately.

Cheaper than a trip to Buenos Aires, yet American women can experience the thrill of the real thing, and perhaps American men might learn a thing or two. If the first tour is successful, we can go back for 50 different milongueros, and even go international. The best of both worlds.

Taxi Anyone?

Which taxi would you hire?



Maybe it all depends on where you want to go!

My first trip to Buenos Aires was in 1998 (read about it by clicking the link below.) I went with an organized tour of about 40 people from all over the U.S., none of whom I knew until our first get-together at La Ideal after we arrived.

Very astutely, the organizer hired local dancers, called teaching assistants, to dance with us during the classes and at the milongas. Not only were they paid a salary, they were also able to make separate deals with us, the tourists, for private lessons. So everyone was happy, and one assistant even went back to the States to marry one of the tourists.

The term "taxi dancer" wasn't used in tango until recently, coming from the cabarets of the 20's and 30's where young women danced with strangers for tickets and encouraged the purchase of champagne. The popular torch song, "Ten Cents a Dance" was about this custom.

When big tango festivals began several years ago, people traveled all over the world to dance. But, as usual in social dancing, there were more women in attendance than men. These women were often very unhappy about not having someone to dance with in the classes that they paid large sums of money for.

So the organizers started bringing in young male dancers from the local community, and the women paid for them. Then at the festival milongas, when there were so many more women as well, it was a short jump to figure out taxi dancers were needed at night too. Soon the practice became highly organized, with the taxi dancers wearing special tee shirts and the women buying tickets and choosing who they wanted to dance with. Sometimes there were also a few young women taxis as well.

When all of these tango dancing foreign women then descended on the milongas of Buenos Aires, where they were already more women than men, it wasn't hard to see that paying a taxi dancer to dance with you might be preferable to sitting planted in your chair all night, especially for the tourists who don't know the codigos or how to carry off the cabeceo. So the profession of "milonga accompaniment" was born. (This is something that Ruben (cel # 15-57-99-20-38) does a lot, and me too, on occasion.) There are now several websites devoted to the taxi dancer business in Buenos Aires.

The problem is that, because they are cheaper, organizers hire (usually for 20 pesos). young twenty-something boys who are beginning dancers themselves. And most of the foreign women who request this service are over fifty. You can spot these couples a kilometer away at the milongas: older bejeweled foreign lady/boy in a suit looking uncomfortable. The taxi is used to dancing open and nuevo, the client close-embrace milonguero. Everyone can see what the arrangement is, nobody else will ask the lady to dance, and it's all a bit awkward.

An alternative way of handling the taxi situation is to hire someone close to your own age, and not to have him sit with you. He sits with the men across the room, and you sit with the women. He will cabeceo you at pre-arranged times (not every tanda!), and you will have the chance to dance with others as well. Your taxi should be an excellent dancer/teacher, and then the milonga becomes a dance learning experience, just dancing several tandas with a great dancer. Normally this arrangement is for 3 hours and the client also pays expenses (transportation, entrada, a drink). Once again, as when I wrote about tango teachers, you get what you pay for (unless a middleman is taking advantage.)

This week in Buenos Aires begins the big CITA conference, where taxi dancers are used extensively. People even sign up for them in advance. I think it's a great idea, but would prefer to go back to the more dignified term, "teaching assistants." There's something just, um, a little smarmy about "taxi dancer," but then smarminess is also part of the allure of tango.

But you sure don't want to travel all the way to Buenos Aires to be taken for a ride!