A celebration of the people and stories of the worldwide tango revolution
Tanya Gardel
People of Tango | Portraits: Tanya Gardel Recoleta, Buenos Aires I don’t buy tango clothes because they all look the same and are a little pricey. I buy nice outfits on sale and modify them myself – shortening them, adding slits, lace. Everyone...
Ruth Offen
“As a woman who runs her own world, I’ve had to learn how to let go in tango” – Ruth Offen
Mayumi Urgino
Mayumi Urgino for People of Tango. Mayumi Urgino is a tango violinist from the US. She pulled up stakes to follow her dream and play tango in Buenos Aires. Riding her bicycle across the night from milonga to milonga, her violin strapped to her back and her...
Jun Yi, Tango DJ
Photographed at Bissap Baobab in San Francisco, CA on 26 December 2017 A phone message from dear friends alerted me to the milonga at a Senegalese restaurant in San Francisco. Though it was the first time I visited this venue, all the usual subjects were...
Gwen-Haël Denigot: Touching Humanity
Author of Dictionnaire Passionné du Tango (SEUIL, 2015). Photographed in Paris, 2016. Tango is half-Argentinian and half-French. Paris has been so important in this back-and-forth between the two countries. There are four key moments in the history of...
Celia Meredith
Celia Meredith – photographed in Portland, Oregon, August 2016 EDITOR'S NOTE: I met Celia at Tango Queer in Buenos Aires when she was an exchange student. She was the way-out-there woman with the shaved head. I was intimidated and fascinated but eventually...
María Carbonetti
If I embrace my husband lovingly, romantically, erotically, it is at home, rarely in public. But in a milonga we all embrace each other like that for hours on end, in a public place. I find it absolutely fascinating.
Magid “El Guerillero”
“I like to protect the milonga,” El Guerillero says. He sits in a canvas campaign chair, smoking, smiling gently over the dancers…
Marie Zanotti
Marie Zanotti -- Poet and Dancer Photographed at Quais de Seine Milonga, Paris July 2016 I began dancing tango as a pastime at the university. But then it became a way of living, a way to exist. If I don't move with another body and with my body, I am no longer alive....
Soledad Nani
The ladies… were sitting there and nobody was asking them, so I started dancing with the ladies. To this day, there are milongas where, when I enter, the ladies shout my name: “SOLE! SOLE!”
Sasha Cagen
Sasha Cagen Writer and Coach Photographed at La Glorieta in Buenos Aires Hooked on tango since 2010 Tango helped me to heal from trauma. I'm interested in putting that out there because I am interested in seeing what comes back. I would like to know if other people...
Rory Aurora Richards
When the Syrian refugee crisis started, I applied in vain to the Red Cross. But they wanted people with medical skills, or that were bilingual. What do I know? I know how to dance…
Edgardo Fernández Sesma
When I started dancing tango, the hardest thing for me was my relationship with my partner. We were together for 16 years. He still says that tango was the cause of our break up…
Mariana Docampo
Mariana Docampo Academic and Founder, Milonga Tango Queer, Buenos Aires Hooked on Tango since 1998 “I used to be a milonguera in a short skirt – but I wanted to dance with the girls. I began dancing tango at a práctica called “El Gallito.” There I learned my first...
Norberto Gradilone
Norberto Gradilone Caminito, La Boca “I've been playing here for just three years but my story with the bandoneon began a long time ago. I was born listening to a bandoneon because my father played. When I was 11 I learned to play myself. I had an argument with my mom...
Eleonora Brantz
I met Eleonora at the time of my life when I spent far too many hours in La Confiteria Ideal dancing tango. Back home, they say “Show me a good pool player and I’ll show you a man with a misspent youth” (Mark Twain). I suppose the same can be said of tango dancers. If...
Diego Alvaro y Zoraida Fontclara
For 20 years, Diego Alvaro Zoraida Fontclara have hosted the Friday afternoon milonga at the Confiteria Ideal, one of the sacred places of tango. Like me, many people learned to dance or took their first tentative steps in a real milonga on these tiles. I used...
