The word “tango” is familiar to almost everyone. Not only is it widely known, it’s also hard to confuse with anything else—that’s why pilots and air-traffic controllers chose the word “Tango” to designate the letter T.
Yet very few people—even in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the birthplace of tango—really know what tango is and what it looks like. And only a tiny fraction can actually dance it.
It’s easy to get confused, because there are different kinds of tango. There’s tango in competitive ballroom dancing, there’s stage tango, and there’s even Finnish tango. But many people have no idea what Argentine tango—also called social tango, or simply tango—really is.
Hollywood has created plenty of stereotypes about tango; for example, lots of people first see and become interested in tango after watching the film Scent of a Woman starring Al Pacino.
This site is therefore devoted entirely to social Argentine tango—a beautiful and complex dance in which the couple’s movement isn’t a choreographed, prearranged set of steps, but true improvisation. It functions like a dance language, where the leader and follower can dance together without knowing the exact sequence of movements in advance.
This is the very tango in which the dance is like a language: the partners understand each other without words, and the result is a harmonious, beautiful, unique dance—because it’s fully improvised and there is no prearranged sequence.
It’s hard for many people to believe that two partners who don’t know each other, but who each dance well, can create a good, beautiful dance the very first time they try. But that’s exactly how it works: once you’ve learned this language, you can dance tango with a stranger in another city or another country—and the dance will come together.