I get happy when I dance. It is that simple. Dancing unleashes a fecund happy elixir that just spreads through me, knocking down obstacles, overcoming barriers that would dare to hold it back. I take a tentative step, extend my foot, start playing with balance and weight on the floor and it is like a…

From outside the world of tango, people often see it only as a place where other people chase illicit pleasures, the kind that most cultures don’t easily allow: full-body contact with multiple partners in dimly-lit public places. Tango, they say, is all about sex. It’s hard to deny. There are all those quips that people…

I came to tango as an emotional refugee. I could have said “pilgrim” and it would have suggested a quest, something sacred and ennobling. But emotionally I was in rags, so deeply desperate and so thoroughly unaware of my desperation that I can only imagine myself descending from that plane shuffling and in rags. I…

I keep looking for simple beauty. We humans complicate things. We add layers and twists when none are needed. We obfuscate when clarity and silence would have been better. We elaborate when holding still would have been sufficient. My eye goes to the simple piece of wood furniture where you see the craftsman’s strokes rather…

At La Confiteria Ideal where I learned to dance tango on my lunch breaks while working at the magazine, the practice sessions begin at noon and run till 3pm. At 3pm, the afternoon milonga or “matiné” begins, running till about 8pm most days. Some nights there is a milonga that begins at 10pm. And so…

In Paris, anything interesting happens up five flights of curling stairs with no elevator. You go through a street door that is built to withstand the next French Revolution and then you climb those five flights of stairs. I have been in Paris three weeks now, but I have yet to see anything truly interesting…

by Kevin Carrel Footer When I arrived in Argentina in the early 1990s, all the tango dancers were septuagenarians. Or so it seemed. They were grandparents and pensioners and widowers. They had aches and pains and afternoons free. I remember going to a milonga at Salon Canning in 1994 and being the only person in…

What I remember most about Yvette is her bed vast like a football field. It filled a room which otherwise lacked furnishings. Dark and always shuttered against the day like the haunt of a vampire, the room was surprisingly sterile. It held nothing but that endless bed that swallowed us when we tumbled into it.…