A tango in the rain
Ballroom dance community performs on city streets during the summer months
On a rainy summer night, lit by a palette of yellow street lights and blue low-beams from passing cars, a young couple danced on the corner of Bloor St. W. and Queen’s Park like an animated watercolour.
The pair was protected overhead by a single black umbrella as they held each other close. Tango music crooned over a speaker tucked under cover of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Onlookers stood quietly to the side, watching.
The pair aren’t lovers. But they are part of something bigger — a tango community in Toronto that began just before the First World War.
“This is the third renaissance,” Igor El Espejero, who acted as DJ, told the Star. After tango was born in lowerclass regions of Buenos Aires in the mid to late 1800s, the intimate dance made its way to Toronto. Booms in tango popularity hit during the First and Second World Wars, he said, then again in the mid-90s.
“We come to a very safe environment, where you can just hold someone,” he said. “You share your personal space with someone else for 10, 12 minutes, and then it’s just ‘thank you very much.’ ”
El Espejero and the pair beneath the umbrella, Desmond Chan and Junko Mita Bodie, are a part of the group that dances on city streets in the summer months. At times, they’ll dance outside for five hours straight.
El Espejero called the practice “milonga” — simultaneously meaning the place where they dance, a particular musical genre and one of three styles in a tango repertoire.
Ruoyu Yan, who also braved the rain Wednesday night, said the intimacy of the dance made her nervous at first. “It took me three to four months to have my first close embrace,” she admitted.
Yan first began dancing the tango as part of a club at the University of Toronto, before finding the larger Toronto tango scene and outdoor milonga.
“During a 12-minute tanda, we embrace another person, allowing us to be vulnerable,” she explained.
To her, tango is about connecting with another human being — but it also forces a dancer to be vulnerable.
It’s easy to become so preoccupied in everyday tasks and career demands. “We forget about simply being spontaneous,” she said. “Tango offers us the beauty of pause.”
On a typical night of milonga, which takes place every other Wednesday in the summer, El Espejero and Yan say there can be up to 50 dancers locked in rhythmic embraces.
But this time, the rain kept most of them at home.
“Only a few brave souls came,” El Espejero said. Yan smiled, adding that Chan and Bodie dancing beneath their umbrella was romantic. For Chan, it means much more. As an immigrant to Canada from Hong Kong seven years ago, he said finding the tango community was like finding “a hidden heaven.”