BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – A woman in her 60s goes over her lips with red lipstick. Her lips become redder, almost the same color as the curtains that mark off the entrance to the “milonga,” or dance hall.
She is sitting at a square table with two other women about the same age and wearing the same shade of lipstick. The three women stare at the couples sliding around the dance floor.
Men and women dance in an embrace, hardly separating their feet as they move to the rhythm of the tango music. That is how it is done in the milongas of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina.
But the three women do not dance. No men invite them to be their partners. After several hours, they get up from their table to leave, revealing the shoes that never touched the dance floor. The outlines of their rouge lips remain on their champagne glasses, which they left half full on the table.
As they make their way to the exit, they avoid tables occupied by young, foreign women. They also sit at their tables as no men invite them to dance either.
Many older Argentine women and foreign women share the same problem in the milongas. They remain in their seats for the duration of the night, waiting for a man to invite them to dance in the exclusive tango scene. But few men do.
The services of “taxi dancers” are therefore becoming more popular in Buenos Aires, as foreign women and older Argentine women hire male tango dancers to ensure they will have partners in the milongas. Sometimes, foreign men also hire female taxi dancers to overcome cultural differences. Taxi dancers obtain their clients independently or through agencies that market their services, which do not include sex. Charging even for dancing was once taboo, but now taxi dancers openly advertise for their services.
In Buenos Aires, it is possible to dance tango from 2 p.m. until 6 a.m. Monday through Sunday. There is always a time and place to dance, except in the morning, which is for resting.
There are an estimated 135 milongas throughout Buenos Aires, says Tito Palumbo, editor of B.A. TANGO magazine.
Marcelo Mazia has been dancing tango for 18 years. He began offering his services as a taxi dancer about six years ago.
The service has been becoming more popular in recent years at milongas, he says.
“Little by little, I was realizing that some of the men whom I saw dancing with foreigners were also doing it for money,” he says. “Now I realize that there was more of that than I imagined. In the last three of four years, it began to get popular.”
A woman pays him to accompany her to a milonga, where he dances with her for three hours. The agreement often includes picking her up at her hotel if she is a foreigner. She pays for his entrance fee to the milonga as well as for a refreshment.
Some clients ask him to sit at their table and to dance with them all night, he says. Others ask him to sit at their table but to dance with them only in the beginning of the night to attract the attention of other men to invite them to dance later.
“What those women do is dance with the dancer so that people see them,” he says. “After, they begin to look around so that others take them out. Some even ask you to sit at another table. Just the same, they continue paying you.”
The milongas are full of codes, Mazia says. Older men invite women to dance with a sideways nod of their head, which they call a “cabeceo.” Meanwhile, younger men approach tables to invite women to the dance floor. But before inviting a woman to dance, the man has to be sure that she is not in a relationship.
“If you stay at the same table, some men come, and they ask you permission to take her out to dance,” Mazia says. “They liven up, because if she looks at other guys and I begin to take other women out, it is a way of demonstrating that others can take her out to dance. It depends a lot on the attitude. Tango has millions of codes.”
In the milongas, women do not receive invitations to dance without first demonstrating that they know how, Mazia says. That is why a large porcentage of his clients are foreign women, whom the regulars at the milongas do not know.
One of Mazia’s clients was Alison Cardenas, a 40-year-old woman from Los Angeles, a city on the West Coast of the United States. She came to Buenos Aires for a couple of days in September 2010 and March 2011 to learn how to dance tango, she writes in an email interview.
Cardenas’ teacher who had organized the trip hired taxi dancers so the students could practice what they were learning in class in the milonga. Dancing with a taxi dancer gave her the opportunity to enjoy the milongas, she writes, which she does not think she would have been able to do otherwise.
“The world of tango can be intimate, exclusive and closed,” she writes. “If you do not know people there, you can go and not dance the entire night. And the taxi dancer is good so that that does not happen to you.”
María Teresa López owns María Tango, a hostel in Buenos Aires that introduces travelers to the world of tango. In addition to renting rooms to foreigners who travel to Buenos Aires to dance, she also introduces them to taxi dancers.
“I accompany my guests to the milonga,” she says. “In each milonga, I have three or four dancer friends with whom I make arrangements so that they take my guests out to dance. I introduce them to them, and I tell them that if they want, they can hire them later as taxi dancers.”
Buenos Aires is a city that inhibits visitors when it comes to tango, López says.
“You have to think that many people spent years studying tango before motivating themselves to come to Buenos Aires to practice it,” she says. “To come to Buenos Aires – the birthplace of tango – and to dance in the halls where the local people dance is something that intimidates a lot of women. That is why the figure of the taxi dancer, who accompanies you at the table and takes you out to dance, helps.”
Cardenas discovered a lot of differences in the style of dancing she learned in the United States compared with the style that locals use in the milongas, she writes.
“It is very different to dance with men who have been dancing almost all of their life,” she writes. “They have a special rhythm. In the United States, they teach you very beautiful steps that require a lot of space. But in the milongas in Buenos Aires, there is not much space.”
As for Argentine women who hire taxi dancers, they are usually older, as men tend to pursue younger women, Mazia says.
“In general, it is about women who are more than 60 years old, for whom it is more difficult to go out to dance because people no longer take them out,” Mazia says.
One time, a group of local, older women even hired Mazia as a gift for a friend, he says.
Going to a milonga is also sometimes problematic for foreign men, López says. On some occasions, she has had to arrange for “porteñas,” or women from Buenos Aires, to accompany the foreign guests as taxi dancers.
“Men in general come with their partners,” she says. “But when they come alone, they also have problems dancing in the milonga. The porteñas, we do not pay attention to the foreign men. We do not like how they dance.”
Many foreign men also feel embarassed to look at women in the milonga, which is necessary because men invite women to the dance floor with a look and the cabeceo, López says.
Mazia agrees that there are cultural barriers hindering foreign men in attaining a dance partner.
“There is a cultural issue,” he says. “The [Anglo-]Saxon man, for example, is more reserved, and the milonga gives him a bit of fear. He takes a girl out to dance who perhaps is beautiful and dances well, and he remains frozen. So it gives him certain security to have someone hired beside him whom he can take out to dance.”
Taxi dancers often obtain their clients through personal contacts or agencies, Mazia says.
“To work in an independent manner, you have to have your own blog, busy yourself with sending emails to promote yourself,” he says. “You can earn a lot of money working in an independent manner.”
There are some milongas that are popular among foreigners that taxi dancers frequent day and night in order to find customers without agencies, López says. A taxi dancer who works independently may charge about 550 pesos ($100) for three hours.
“When you enter those milongas, it is very clear how the taxi dancers compete among themselves to win the client,” she says. “They approach them. They talk to them. In general, they are young men.”
Mazia usually works as a taxi dancer when one agency, Tango TaxiDancers, offers him a client. For the three-hour service, the agency pays him 250 pesos ($45). He does not live on his earnings, also working in a video store.
In order to hire taxi dancers without seeing what they look like, Mazia says that clients can choose dancers according to physical characteristics, such as age and height. Mazia, for example, is 51 and fairly short.
In addition to physical attributes, it also helps if a taxi dancer speaks English, which few can do, he says.
Before Mazia continues to talk, he smiles. It is difficult to know whether his cheeks turn red because of the cold Buenos Aires winter or the thought that precedes what he is about to say.
“The services of a taxi dancer do not include having sex,” he says.
On a couple of occasions, he says he was attracted to clients but did not want to make a move.
“I was afraid of misinterpreting the situation,” Mazia says. “I try to be professional. I was very tempted, but I did not want to go further.”
López says that although the service does not formally include sex, her taxi dancer friends tell her that some foreign women confuse the situation and try to have sex with the dancers they hire.
“The men say that the women invite them to eat dinner, they offer them champagne,” she says. “In my house of tango, it is not permitted that the women bring men or the men, women. That is why women who come with another idea finally decide to rent an apartment.”
It is difficult for a local, older man to not make a move if a foreign women proposes sex, she says. In contrast to younger men, older taxi dancers seem to jump at the opportunity.
“The much younger men have another way of being,” she says, “but the adult men take flight right away.”
More experienced tango dancers used to find even the concept of taxi dancers off-putting, though.
Palumbo says that for every “milonguero” – men who have been dancing in the milongas for decades – dancing is a pleasure. That pleasure contrasts with charging for dancing.
“To dance and to charge for it before was a bit mercenary,” he says. “It was as if you adulterated the essence of the milonga. But with time, it was becoming accepted that someone charges for that.”
In his magazine, three agencies and 11 dancers advertise their taxi dancer services.
“It is an activity that before did not have publicity and that now does have it,” he says.
The change in popularity came from the large influx of tourists that came to Argentina to dance tango, he says.
"In recent years, the affluence of foreign people in the milongas was growing,” he says. “That tourist comes for a few days and wants to take advantage. There came the rise of the taxi dancers, who guarantee the tourist that they will dance and, on top of that, they will dance with someone who knows how.”
López, 67, says she is proud that she continues to receive invitations to dance at the milongas. But she is happy that other options are now available for the future.
“I cannot complain,” she says. “Now, the day that I go to the milonga and I do not dance, I am not going to have any problem in hiring a taxi dancer.”
Mazia says that, at first, he found the idea of charging for dancing uncomfortable.
“A friend introduced me to an Asian women who wanted to hire a taxi dancer,” he says. “In the beginning, I said no. But after, I thought about it. I needed the money, and it did not seem bad to me. I think that it is not something bad to dance for money. I think that it is normal.”
His cheeks turn red again, resembling the rouge lipstick marks from the women on the champagne glasses. But this time, it is definitely not because his trade embarasses him. It is simply because of the cold that arrives when night falls in the winter of Buenos Aires.
Interviews were translated from Spanish.
