After 40 years in tango, Milena Plebs is still looking firmly toward its future.
When the Tango BA Festival and World Championship honoured the dancer, choreographer, director, producer, teacher and researcher at Usina del Arte recently, the occasion could have been framed as a retrospective on four remarkable decades. Plebs saw it differently. “For me, it is also important as a seed for the future, not just to acknowledge past milestones,” she said.
That distinction may be the key to understanding Plebs’ career. Her story is inseparable from tango’s history, yet she has spent much of the past four decades asking what tango can become next.
Recognition at the Tango Mundial highlighted the many roles she has inhabited since the beginning of her tango career. “For me, it means bringing visibility to the different stages and, above all, the various activities within tango that I engage in: dancing, choreographing, directing, producing, teaching and researching,” Plebs said.
Her journey has always moved between two seemingly opposing forces: preservation and reinvention.
Plebs came to tango with six years of experience as a dancer at Buenos Aires’ Teatro San Martín and a background in contemporary dance. She immersed herself deeply in the traditions of the art, studying the milongueros, dancing with them, observing them and analysing the movement and culture from within.
For the first 13 years of her tango career, that exploration unfolded alongside dancer and choreographer Miguel Ángel Zotto, a man whom Plebs describes simply as “walking tango.”
Together, they were part of Tango Argentino, the landmark production created by theatre directors Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli that took Argentine tango onto international stages and contributed to its global revival.
But Plebs does not believe honouring tango requires freezing it in time.
Her contemporary dance background gave her another vocabulary. She brought knowledge from academic dance training and from the choreographers with whom she had worked – including what she learned in workshops with German choreographer Pina Bausch – into conversation with tango’s traditional foundations.
That dialogue became central to the productions she created with Zotto through the Tango X2 dance company, and later in her own work Tramatango, which explored the fusion of tango and contemporary dance.
The result has been a career lived in the space between inheritance and invention. “There is a common thread running throughout my career,” Plebs said: understanding tradition deeply while bringing tango “a fresh, novel perspective with a renewed and contemporary aesthetic.”
Forty years later, Plebs is still moving between those poles. When dancing, Plebs says she finds herself increasingly drawn towards something solid, simple and minimalist. “I feel that is the origin of all dance – a simple dance, a tango de salón,” she said. “It is where everything stems from.”
Stage tango and its many stylistic evolutions may grow outward from that foundation, but Plebs remains fascinated by returning to the source. As a choreographer, she continues to explore the intersection between tango and contemporary dance – an oscillation, she says, “between new proposals and tradition.”
That philosophy was embodied in the celebration of her career. Rather than simply recreating moments from her past, Plebs chose two dancers who represented different aspects of her own journey: Juan Malizia and Javier Rodríguez.
She had never danced with Malizia before. Although known as a stage dancer, Plebs was drawn to what she recognised beneath his performance vocabulary: a strong foundation in traditional tango, shaped through study with milonguero masters and women dancers deeply rooted in milonguera culture.
“For me, it was a small challenge to dance with someone new,” Plebs said, “partly thinking about having an eye toward the future, not just the past.”
Rodríguez represented another kind of connection. Plebs has known him for years, working and dancing together, and she long admired his distinctive style. For the celebration, she wanted to dance a milonga with him. “He has a very, very, very personal style,” she said.
There was also a less philosophical reason for her choices: “Honestly, I chose them because I wanted to have fun!”
With Malizia, Plebs wanted the audience to witness a partnership they had never seen before. With Rodríguez, she wanted the festive energy and playfulness of a milonga.
Both choices reflected something central to Plebs’ thinking: tango can respect its history without becoming imprisoned by it.
That idea extends to what she hopes younger dancers understand. Plebs does not advocate copying one teacher, one era or one style. She encourages dancers to study widely and deeply, then do the harder work of discovering themselves.
“Take classes with various teachers, and then create your own recipe with the different knowledge you have acquired,” she said, “adding your own touch and personality to create your unique personal style.”
Technique is indispensable, but it is not the destination. “Without technique there is no dance either,” Plebs said. “Technique gives you structure and organisation.”
The next step is to take the figures inherited from the masters and discover other possibilities within them. For Plebs, improvisation is fundamental to that process – something that itself has to be learned. “In every step, in every part of a tango sequence, there are different keys or doors that can open, leading you to different possibilities,” she said.
Curiosity, then, becomes part of preserving tango. “We must not lose [it] in order to keep enriching this dance [by] taking what our masters taught us, giving it our own personality, and truly making the dance our own.”
Yet even innovation has boundaries. Some things should not be sacrificed in the pursuit of something new. At the milonga, tango exists within what Plebs describes as a code of coexistence: respect for navigation on the floor, for one’s own technique, for one’s partner, for surrounding couples, for the music and for the environment itself. “What must never be lost is precisely that,” she said.
Social tango must remain danceable in a shared space, allowing couples to move harmoniously “without disrupting that somewhat magical coexistence that has always existed.”
At its centre remains the embrace. For Plebs, it is not simply a physical position but an exchange carrying responsibility. “There is an energetic exchange, a physical exchange, there are roles, there is contact, and we must approach that with profound respect,” she said.
That responsibility is becoming more nuanced as tango evolves. Plebs points to the increasing emphasis among teachers on dancers understanding both roles – leader and follower, proposal and response.
Rather than threatening tango’s foundations, she believes a deeper knowledge of both can strengthen dancers. “The strongest core remains the connection in the embrace, feeling one another, and the responsibility of understanding each role in depth,” she said.
That combination of deep roots, coupled with openness to evolution, may also explain tango’s extraordinary international endurance. Plebs describes a continual reciprocity between Argentina’s capital and the rest of the world. “Everything originates in Buenos Aires,” she said.
The city sends tango outward. Dancers, teachers and communities around the world absorb tango, develop it and enrich it. Many eventually travel to what Plebs calls “the cradle of tango” to experience its energy firsthand, before bringing what they have learned back to Buenos Aires. Tradition leaves home, changes through contact with the world and returns transformed.
It is another kind of tango, which is why Plebs is reluctant to treat 40 years as a conclusion. Her message to younger generations is emphatic: before attempting to reinvent tango, understand what is being reinvented. “Return to the basics, return to traditional tango, return to feeling each other’s bodies,” she advises.
Study not only the steps but the history. Know the people who created the language. Understand the culture from which it emerged. “Respect, responsibility to honour the tradition and those who came before us, informing oneself, and studying not only the dance, but also the history and key figures,” Plebs said. “To me, that is essential.”
The same rigour applies to creation. Before making a work, Plebs asks why it needs to exist. What is its central idea? What research is required? What does the artist need to understand before asking an audience to experience it?
Her advice is to go deeper: document, research, train and question the motivation behind the work until it has something meaningful to say. It is a demanding philosophy, but one that rejects the idea that tradition and experimentation are opposites: tradition gives an artist somewhere to depart from; technique provides the structure from which individuality can emerge; history gives reinvention meaning.
After four decades, Plebs is increasingly interested in tango not only as an art form, but as something vital to human life. “Dance and movement are linked to health, not just physical, but mental as well,” she said.
Tango adds another dimension because it requires another human being: proposal and response, bodies in dialogue, defined roles that continue to acquire new meanings. “It keeps the body moving and flexible, and creates relationships. It opens doors to communities, travel and people who otherwise might never meet,” she said.
For Plebs, those possibilities are not incidental to tango, but part of its power. “Dance, movement, and tango are vital things that help me live better,” she said.
Plebs has spent four decades going back to tango’s roots precisely so she can continue moving beyond them: studying the past without living inside it, mastering technique without becoming confined by it, and honouring tradition while insisting that every generation must ultimately find its own voice.
After 40 years of dancing, she is still researching, questioning and creating. Perhaps the greatest way to honour tango’s past is exactly that: to know it deeply enough to carry it somewhere it has not yet been.
