Dancers for Hire: Foreigners Rent Porteños

In the popular imagination of the foreigner, there exists an image of Buenos Aires as the world’s sensual centre of tango, where a night on the town means dancing until the wee hours of the morning with a seductive porteño at an old world milonga.

But those who arrive in the city for the first time expecting to show up at a milonga and tango the night away are often in for an unpleasant surprise. The dance’s endless codes and rituals, known as codigos, make it so that it can take weeks for a newcomer to get a first dance. Vacationers generally do not have this kind of time to wait, and so many turn to a growing service in Buenos Aires: taxi tango dancers, basically dancers for hire.

“For a lot of people, they’ve been bitten by the tango bug and it’s their dream to come here. It’s almost like a pilgrimage,” said Rachel Sloan, a native Brit who runs a tango taxi company called Tango Taxi Dancers. “Some of them go away terribly disappointed. And we’re trying to help them avoid that.”

Instead of braving the milongas solo, foreigners can hire a dance partner to accompany them. This allows them to bypass the intimidating process of asking or being asked to dance, known as the cabeceo, or “head nod”. This gendered ritual dictates that a woman first stare at a man with whom she would like to dance, and if the man reciprocates the interest he will stare back and nod. The woman must nod back to confirm, and then the man approaches the woman’s table and waves. The woman stands up, approaches the man on the dance floor, and then they dance.

This process can be intimidating to novices.

Richard Miller, a 60-year-old Chicagoan, did not even dance during his first two-week trip to Buenos Aires in 2007, despite going to milongas every night. During his second trip, however, he came with a group of Americans who hired taxi dancers, and combined with his increased skill level, he was able to score a few dances.

He now just finished his fourth trip to Buenos Aires, and has come to appreciate the cabeceo.

“I think the cabaceo is an appropriate custom that we ought to do outside of Buenos Aires, that we ought to do in the U.S., because it protects women as well as men from embarrassment,” he said. “It helps people find their magical dance.”

Foreigners looking for taxi dancers usually contact agencies or individuals through the Internet, through ads published in tango magazines, or through word of mouth. Some agencies have the client and dancer meet beforehand and go together, some meet right outside the club, and other individual dancers will meet the client before but then enter the milonga separately, as if they do not know each other.

Diego Ramírez, who runs a company called Buenos Aires Tango Taxi Dancer, organises four taxi tango couples who often accompany groups of foreigners to milongas. He said the average client is 35 and older, majority women, and at an intermediate or below level.

“With each person or group of people it’s totally distinct,” Ramírez said.

But one thing most of his clients have in common is their curiosity about the codigos. “They ask a lot about the customs, the language of tango,” he said.

Sloan’s company uses a pool of about 30 dancers, renting them out individually or to groups based on clients’ preferences for age, skill level, and language. She said they purposely retain dancers of “all shapes and sizes”, from early 20s to late 50s.

“They work with us because they want to look after tourists,” said Eduardo Amarillo, a tango teacher who co-runs the company with Sloan. “They don’t need the money for their lives, it’s an extra job. It’s more for the pleasure of being with foreigners, and for tango, than for money.”

Ramírez said that it can be quite evident to other dancers at the milongas when travelers have hired taxi dancers.

“It’s really obvious when it’s a group of people and foreigners and they send a young couple of 25, and there are distinct age differences,” he said.

But Sloan said that most porteños accept the place of taxi dancers – who she said have been around since the 1920s – in the milongas. There are a few, however, who do not.

“Some people really don’t like it, but it’s the same with everything in life,” she said. “I think some people really make a living preying on foreign women, and this reduces the pool for them. Some people genuinely don’t like foreigners.”

There is also the “escort” stigma. Sloan said that they have had to make it explicit that the services they offer are strictly professional.

“We don’t like when people ring up and start asking how much the extras come up to,” she said. “People get things out of context….There was one woman who bit Eduardo’s ear and said ‘Eduardo, what’s happening with us?’

Ramírez has also experienced overly aggressive clients, but said that being straightforward can solve issues before they arise.

According to Miller, this behaviour often stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of tango.

“Uninformed or misinformed people want to call tango sexual,” he said. “But it’s not –  it’s sensual.”

Lead Image: Tango a San Telmo by Andrea Balducci