Tango Buenos Aires: The Spirit of Argentina

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Tango Buenos Aires has become one of Argentina’s great cultural exports, known throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia as the most authentic and uncompromising representatives of the tango. The music and dance troupe was created in the 1980s by renowned composer and tango director Osvaldo Requena for the Jazmines festival at the famous Buenos Aires cabaret Michelangelo.

In August 1986, the company traveled to the United States to represent Argentina at the Festival Latino in New York, held at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. This event was followed by an extensive tour throughout the United States, along with trips to Mexico, Puerto Rico, and El Salvador, followed by a return to the United States via Miami and San Francisco. In December 1986, the group appeared on NHK television in Tokyo and gave sixty-two performances throughout Japan, as well as recording an album for Sony entitled Quejas de Bandoneón.

In 1987, the company undertook a lengthy tour of the principal cities of Argentina, performing at the Spring Festival in Bariloche, at the Galli Auditorium in Mendoza, at the Municipal Theatre in Rosario, in Santa Rosa in La Pampa, as well as in Río Negro Province, in addition to various appearances on television for the Argentine Society of Authors and Composers (SADAIC) series and in the series sponsored by Argentina’s Ministry of Culture, before ending the season at the Teatro Auditorium in Mar del Plata, Province of Buenos Aires.

After the company toured the globe extensively in the 1990s, renowned pianist Cristian Zárate succeeded Requena as music director, and Pablo Mainetti, the world’s greatest bandoneón player, joined the orchestra in 1999. In 2005, Julián Vat, Argentina’s most prolific composer and leading musician, assumed the title of music director. Due to the success of previous international tours, Tango Buenos Aires is undertaking another coast-to-coast tour of the United States and Canada from September through December 2017, with a brand-new program called “The Spirit of Argentina.”

Repeatedly crafted swirling, fast-paced tapestries of movement, laced with proud postures and sensual couplings.

—Washington Post

Fast and furious, the dancers’ feet and legs flashed and wove in and around each other, or paused to move slowly and seductively, stretching the tension within the dance.

—Lincoln Journal Star