TangoMujer
This article was orginally published in Very magazine in 1998.

Some of us wanted to dance the tango barefoot. Some of us wanted to make tango dances to jazz music, or to tango with the hands, instead of the feet. Some wanted to create a tango for three, or for one. All of us wanted to tell new stories with tango.

All of us in 1996 defined ourselves as tango dancers, though each had begun with Modern or Classical training. Among us we count influences from Body-Mind Centering, from ballet, flamenco, ballroom, and Contact Improvisation, as well as from the strange poetry of what we've witnessed of Dance Theatre. We all passed through various disciplines before devouring and being devoured by the tigress, the Argentine tango.

Years passed in which each of us journeyed to Buenos Aires, soaked up the intensity of its nocturnal tango haunts, came home to Berlin or Rosario or New York and practiced the man's part for hours, taught classes to beginners, thought about and lived with tango. We each felt the tremendous creative potential of tango, a language which lends itself to expressions of the most sublte emotion, or complex relationship.

The word "mujer" means "woman" in Spanish, but we do not choose to dance together in order to exclude men. We were attracted to working with each other before the company's formation, two of us in Berlin and three in New York. We danced together to practice, to play, to invent, and sometimes to perform at the tango clubs in those cities. Some exhibitions were rehearsed choreographies, many were improvised on the spur of the moment.

With the formation of a company of five, two years ago, we began the evolution of a more complex, more theatrical show. In its two-act form, our tango shifts its shape through sweetness, playfulness, irony, solitude, longing, aggression, abandonment, fulfillment. Our dancers flirt with images of femme, of macho, of androgeny. Although many scenes are close to traditional images, others are our own fantasies, representations of what tango evokes in our interior spaces.