Women, Solo Technique and the Ballet Barre in Argentine Tango
This autumn I started teaching Tango Barre for the first time. But what is Tango Barre, and where does it come from?
At its most basic, Tango Barre is a solo tango technique class that uses the ballet barre as a support. In developing this class, I wanted to bring together my background as a certified barre instructor with my experience in Argentine tango and GYROKINESIS®. Ultimately, however, the purpose is quite simple: to create a space in which we can focus on our individual tango technique—a solo technique class for followers, using the ballet barre as one of its tools.
Although solo technique lessons are today an important part of learning Argentine tango, their emergence as a distinct form of training during the 1990s was connected to several broader developments: a growing interest in understanding and analysing tango movement more consciously; the influence of systematic approaches to movement brought by professionally trained dancers; and, perhaps most fundamentally, the emergence of women who began to teach, investigate and articulate their own role independently in a tango world that had historically been largely male dominated.
Today, a wide range of tools and practices can support the individual development of a tango dancer beyond the work of connecting with a partner: from technical elements such as the ballet barre to practices influenced by contact improvisation, yoga, Pilates or GYROKINESIS®. They offer different possibilities for dancers who want, for a moment, to shift the focus away from the connection with another person and towards something more fundamental: the connection with one’s own body.
This kind of training, however, has not always been an established part of tango pedagogy. For decades, tango knowledge was transmitted largely relationally and bodily: through observation, social dancing, repetition and, above all, through the physical experience of dancing with someone who already embodied that knowledge.
One of the key figures in the development of a more systematic approach to individual technique was Graciela González, known as La Negra or La Leona. González is widely recognised as a pioneer of seminars specifically devoted to women’s tango technique. Her first seminar began in Buenos Aires on 8 January 1994, following an earlier women-only práctica that she had organised together with Martha Antón and Verónica Alvarenga. (ResearchGate)
Importantly, Graciela’s technique did not emerge from a background in ballet. Her knowledge had been acquired primarily through tango itself, particularly by dancing with figures from an older generation of Buenos Aires milongueros, including Pupi Castello, Gerardo Portalea, Lampazo, Petróleo and Juan Bruno. Graciela remembers these encounters as an extraordinary form of bodily transmission: sometimes the older dancers attempted to explain what they were doing and she could not intellectually understand them, yet through dancing with them she was receiving an enormous amount of physical information. (ResearchGate)
Her teaching developed partly from the attempt to make that experience more conscious and communicable. Women increasingly approached her asking for advice, and she noticed that the observations and exercises she offered them were useful. Eventually, there were enough women seeking this kind of guidance that she brought them together into a dedicated technique seminar. González describes these ideas as emerging from her own investigation into how movement could be understood and improved. (ResearchGate)
This formed part of an important shift in tango pedagogy. Knowledge that had traditionally been transmitted without a highly systematised teaching method—through repetition, observation, social dancing and the experience of embracing and interacting with another body—began increasingly to be isolated, examined and practised independently. Balance, axis, weight transfer, walking, pivots and the articulation of the feet could become objects of study in themselves.
This change did not have a single cause. Rather, several developments coincided during the late 1980s and 1990s and contributed to a broader transformation in tango. Graciela González argues that her generation began to explain and rationalise movements that earlier generations had often performed without needing to verbalise them. As tango expanded internationally, and increasing numbers of people began learning it through formal lessons rather than through years of immersion in Buenos Aires social dancing, a different kind of pedagogy became increasingly necessary. (ResearchGate)
Women teaching women
The emergence of women’s technique was also connected to another important change: women beginning to teach tango independently of a male partner.
In an interview about the origins of her work, Graciela González recalls that in 1992–93 she started la práctica de las chicas together with Martha Antón and Verónica Alvarenga. A práctica organised by women for women may not sound unusual today, but Graciela remembers that at the time the initiative provoked criticism precisely because women were beginning to teach on their own. At the same time, the práctica received support from respected older milongueros such as Pupi Castello, Teté Rusconi, Mingo Pugliese and Juan Bruno. (https://blog.iodonna.it/tango/2016/05/26/graciela-gonzalez)
This context makes the development of women’s technique particularly significant. It was not simply a new collection of exercises for followers. It also created a space in which women could begin to investigate, articulate and transmit knowledge about their own role without that knowledge necessarily passing through a male teacher or a teaching couple.
When González took this work abroad, that independence itself appears to have been striking. Writing about González’s 1995 appearance at Stanford Tango Week, Valorie Hart remembers not only the famous women’s technique class at the ballet barre, but also the unusual fact that González was not part of a teaching couple: she taught alone. Hart describes her as demanding both respect for Argentine tango and a sense of self-respect from the women participating in her classes. (https://elfirulete.wordpress.com/tag/tango-barre)
Seen from this perspective, the rise of solo technique for followers was part of something larger. Taking the follower out of the couple temporarily also made her movement available for investigation on its own terms. Walking, balance, pivots, adornments and the organisation of the body no longer needed to be discussed only in relation to what a leader was asking her to do. They could become subjects of knowledge in themselves—and women could increasingly become the people producing and transmitting that knowledge.
This does not mean that solo technique replaced the relational nature of tango. The dance still happens between bodies, through the embrace, improvisation and mutual attention. But the possibility of stepping outside the couple created another space: one in which the follower could examine what she was doing, how her body was organised and what choices were available to her before returning to the encounter with another dancer.
The encounter with professional dance training
Another important ingredient in this transformation was the growing presence of dancers professionally trained in ballet and contemporary dance. The international tango revival of the 1980s and 1990s created a new professional environment around the dance: touring productions, international festivals, professional teaching and rapidly growing communities of students outside Argentina. At the same time, dancers coming from other disciplines brought with them a different relationship to training: daily practice, repetition, exercises, the isolation of individual movement components, anatomical and spatial analysis, the use of mirrors, choreographic study and deliberate attention to movement quality.
Graciela González herself identifies Milena Plebs, Vanina Bilous and Guillermina Quiroga as particularly significant figures in this process. When asked about the influence of classical ballet on tango in the early 1990s, she associates the change especially with Tango x 2 and describes these dancers as introducing a different aesthetic into tango: a combination of contemporary dance, ballet and tango. (ResearchGate)
Milena Plebs provides a particularly revealing example of this phenomenon. Before entering tango, Plebs had trained and worked professionally in contemporary dance. Yet this extensive dance background did not mean that tango came easily to her. She describes having to adapt her body to a very different movement language: the closed position of the legs, the relationship between the knees and ankles, the use of heels and the particular articulation demanded by tango. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326552771_Milena_Plebs_Tango_y_pensamiento_critico)
When practising with Miguel Ángel Zotto, Plebs brought with her the systematic working methods of contemporary dance. She recalls insisting that, while they were touring, they needed to find spaces in which to practise because she needed to learn this new dance. Their practice became a kind of exchange between two traditions. Plebs devised exercises around walking, stretching and articulating the foot, weight changes, coordination, clean movement, positions and lines. Afterwards, they would dance, and Zotto would transmit to her the specifically tango knowledge that he possessed. (ResearchGate)
This encounter is significant because it illustrates that the development of modern tango technique was not simply a matter of ballet being imported into tango. Rather, it was a meeting between different ways of knowing and training the body. The product of this exchange was the creation of Tango x2, in which Milena Plebs put into practice the acquired knowledge from her experience in Miguel Angel Zotto in Tango Argentino and combined it with her choreographic tools from her professional training. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326552771_Milena_Plebs_Tango_y_pensamiento_critico
Traditional tango contained an extraordinarily sophisticated embodied knowledge of the embrace, axis, musicality, improvisation and communication between two people. Professional dance training brought another set of tools: decomposition, repetition, individual exercises and systematic movement analysis. The tango pedagogy that developed during this period began, in different ways, to draw on both.
And where does the ballet barre enter the story?
One of the clearest early records comes from 1995, only a year after González began her women’s technique seminars. At Stanford Tango Week in California, González taught a women’s technique class attended by around one hundred dancers. Participant and tango teacher Valorie Hart later wrote a detailed recollection of the class. The women stood at a ballet barre, working intensively on the mechanics of the forward ocho. Hart remembers González breaking the movement down through the torso, the central axis and the articulation of the foot, and describes the participants remaining at the barre for more than three hours. (https://elfirulete.wordpress.com/tag/tango-barre)
The account becomes even more interesting when Hart describes encountering González’s women’s technique class again in 1998. This time, the barres were gone. González instead worked with breathing, posture, individual movement and exercises between women. (https://elfirulete.wordpress.com/tag/tango-barre)
This suggests that the barre is perhaps best understood not as a method in itself, but as one tool within the broader development of individual tango technique.
And this is perhaps where the history of what we now call Tango Barre becomes more interesting than the search for a single inventor. The important innovation was not necessarily placing a dancer’s hand on a barre. It was the gradual emergence of the idea that a tango dancer—particularly a follower—could step outside the couple, examine and develop her own movement independently, and then return to the embrace with a deeper understanding of her own body.
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