In a pretty little plaza next to a railway track, there is proof that not even a pandemic can keep us apart. Five couples lean in, cheek to cheek, marking steps that mirror the circuitous route of life. If there is a map, it rises out of a portable speaker, and the melancholic poetry of a tango. “The saying goes, nobody wrote a tango eating yoghurt,” mused Juan Carlos González, 64. “To write a tango, you have to have suffered, to have lived through a lot of things that were very hard.” And it has been a very hard pandemic year for Argentina. With 4.4 million cases, and a death toll that is approaching 100,000, the country of 45 million has struggled with some of the worst levels of contagion in the world. Its health system has been hanging by a thread, swamped by an average number of daily deaths per million that has been the third highest in the world for the last seven days. Against this backdrop of devastation there are also less tangible losses to lament. The era of social distancing has made tango an embodiment of all that is forbidden – the heat of another, closeness among strangers, touch. Those who find vitality and sustenance in the Argentinian dance are now living out that sense of longing that is captured in song. Halls that drew crowds to weekly dances – called milongas – are still closed. Dancers are teaching online, or reinventing themselves to survive. Others, like the couples who gathered in the little Buenos Aires plaza attend clandestine milongas in parks. They have also mourned one of their own, Juan Carlos Copes, a legend of dance and choreography who died at 89 after complications related to Covid. “For us, it was like they clipped our wings, our feet, everything,” said Valeria Buono, a violinist and one of the organisers of the outdoor Villa Lugano milonga. “Not to be able to get together with our friends, sit with them and talk, listen to music. All of that. It’s so Argentinian. We have this affection that is very much a part of our culture,” said Buono, 46. “The fist bump as a way of saying hello is sort of ridiculous for us. I still can’t do it. I need to embrace, kiss, touch.” Now popular around the world, tango originated along the Río de la Plata basin, in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where European immigrants, descendants of enslaved African and indigenous peoples mixed into a cauldron of diversity that created a unique cultural identity. It’s now a huge industry in Argentina that includes dancers, musicians, choreographers and composers, and has a place on Unesco’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. But the vast majority of its workers in Argentina are informal, with no safety net to fall back on. As it has done in countless other spheres around the world, the pandemic quickly exposed the precarious conditions in which tango workers live. For many, just one month without work puts them in a difficult financial position, said Gaby Mataloni, a dancer and teacher. She’s part of the association of Trabajadores del Tango Danza (Tango Dance Workers), or TTD, which has been handing out bags of food since May 2020 to people working on the tango circuit, thanks to local and international donations. In all these months of the pandemic, the government of the city of Buenos Aires “did not give one peso to support culture workers”, said Mataloni, who helped form the TTD four years ago after a famous Buenos Aires tango dancer went public with his informal working conditions. “People have started to understand that if we don’t find each other to make these demands, the conditions are not going to improve,” says Mataloni, who was a pharmacist before she became a tango dancer that tours the world. The forced abstinence has not been easy for her. She has been able to teach online, but had to move back home with her parents because of the financial hit. “I had never been without work,” said Inés Muzzopappa, her friend and another tango dancer who migrated online. “I never imagined tango in the virtual world,” she said. But Muzzopappa came to realise that people were craving at least some kind of connection during the loneliest moments of the pandemic. The tango community recognised early on the risk inherent in their close proximity, and shut down venues before the government lockdown in 2020. But as the months dragged on, a split emerged, with some pushing to hold events, while others preferred to wait. Meanwhile, the TTD has organised new methods to highlight local talent, such as an online showcase and virtual classes. Like any art form, tango is a living thing that evolves with the times. And just as feminist and queer artists have reimagined its patriarchal foundations, Mataloni thinks the dance will continue to transform, whatever the post-pandemic reality looks like. “What we found is people’s need to keep on enjoying life, despite what is happening to us,” said Buono, as she scrolled through her playlist of tangos in Villa Lugano. “The embrace is therapeutic for us. It’s healing. It maintains the desire to live.” Indeed, romances formed in those park encounters. “Things happened,” she said with a grin. She recalled the first pandemic milonga she organised in September with González, in a large park in the south of the city. It was just the two of them. The worst that could happen, they reasoned, was that the police would tell them to leave. They didn’t. So they’ve held outdoor milongas every week since, mostly between couples who know each other. They haven’t had trouble until about a month ago, when the police arrived to enforce social distancing rules and separate older couples who were dancing. But they’re back, and won’t be going anywhere if René Serrudo has anything to say about it. The 65-year-old mechanic travelled nearly two hours, from his home in Berazategui, to the Villa Lugano milonga. “In the capital, you can dance,” he said. “In the province, they shut it down.” He chose the tango 14 years ago, but in some sense, the tango chose him: at the time, he was struggling with the heartache of a separation and went to dances to lift his spirits. A woman told him one day, “You dance very well, but the tango is waiting for you.” He took lessons, and found his salvation. “I used to go to church, and all of that, but once I found this, I never let it go,” he said.