Hello, we’re Bruno V. Abeele and Paula Duarte! We are really excited to share with you our passion for tango and we’ll do our utmost to make you shine on the dance floor. If you’re anything like us, you’ll fall in love with tango in no time.

Who we are

We are happy to meet you and share our passion for tango! Tango is, in our opinion (call us biaised) the most delicate, beautiful, sophisticated and simply mind blowing dance there is.

Why? Because it’s much more than a dance. It is a music style, it is a profound and fascinated culture, and at the most intrinsic level, it is a connection between two people, who might know each other well, or who might have just met mere minutes ago. It is, as we say, a connection of hearts, as much as it is a language – a wordless language that uses the body to communicate.

The team at Tanguito is managed by Bruno V. Abeele, and consists of Bruno who started Tanguito in 2011; and of Paula, and occasional invited maestros (teachers). We are all professionally trained, and will do everything in our power for you to learn to dance tango, regardless of prior experience. Are you a beginner? Perfect, we can show you how tango works from the beginning, as we are known to focus on technique, our forte – your best ally when learning tango. Are you an experienced dancer? We would love to meet you and help you further improve your dancing, from style to musicality, technique to embrace, we will adapt our teaching to you.

We have taught tango for a long time (over two decades of combined teaching), danced it a LOT (25 years+ each), participated in tango shows, and made tango not only our passion but something we profoundly want to share.

We are looking forward to meeting you and passing to you that amazing south American inner fire that is taking the world by storm.

Bruno, Paula and team

Our tango journey

BRUNO V. ABEELE

Originally a computer engineer, Bruno started Argentine tango in 1999, at first for fun in Japan with maestros from Buenos Aires, then for his wedding first dance. What kept him going back for more was the sheer enjoyment of the classes and because he liked socialising with tango friends.

After his first trip to Buenos Aires, he carried on tango out of addiction: to the music, to the embrace, to the fascinating tango culture, to the beauty of the dance and the emphasis on the ‘here and now’. He trained in Buenos Aires with truly generous teachers such as the 2008 tango world champions Daniel Nacucchio and Cristina Sosa, Lorena Ermocida, triple champion Fernando Carrasco and old school milongeros like Chiche, amongst others.

Bruno designed Tanguito’s yearly curriculum and teaching methodology, changing the way tango is taught by shifting from teaching steps to using what he called Dimension, a much more powerful tool to make the transformation from ‘doing steps’ to ‘dancing’ much quicker. As such, you will learn how, from one simple step, you can start designing your own, playing with its energy, displacement, musicality, and much more.

Bruno taught in Buenos Aires, in multiple tango academies in London, Reading, Leeds, Sheffield and more; as well as in Tokyo, Paris, amongt places worldwide and took part in Tango festivals. He also regularly DJs for pretigious milongas in Buenos Aires, for the Argentine Embassy in the UK (and the UK Embassy in Buenos Aires), and milongas in Japan, France, and more.

Bruno regularly performs with Paula, and, twice a week, after classes, demonstrates how to use what was taught.

PAULA DUARTE

Paula is a world-class professional dancer, teacher and choreographer of the Argentine tango. Following her studies in contemporary dance (Master’s degree in Dance Performance 2004), Paula’s passion for the Argentine tango developed consistently into a full-time career.

Based in London, UK, she is regularly invited to work with national and international Tango communities with different dance partners. She is a resident teacher at Tanguito. She is also touring the UK and abroad on a regular basis. Her website is here.

Innovation is not limited to high tech – it happens in tango too!

We grew together as dancers, having been lucky enough to learn from amazing maestros. After one trip to Buenos Aires, we started thinking of using outside influences and bringing new ideas to tango instruction. This is how we came up with our teaching methodology:

  • We organise our classes around nine Tango Dimensions™, a framework we developed to make concepts easy to understand and help you find your own style of dancing. We plan each class carefully so that you develop the skills necessary to become a great dancer and enjoy social dancing: build your repertoire of steps, strengthen your technique and develop your musicality. In class, and on our blog, we also talk a lot about tango culture and history.

  • Long step sequences are fine in class but are hard to use in a milonga – especially if you want to listen to the music and play it nice on the dance floor. This led us to breaking sequences into individual steps and focusing our classes on certain concepts or energies rather than on sequences. We’ve observed it was easier for students to learn and remember them so that they could then create their own sequences.

  • A class is but once a week (more if you’re addicted of course), but it’s easy to forget between one class and the next. This is why we thought about class notes and videos – they make students’ life easier and they’re a good step by step reference.

  • Tango movements just do not feel natural at first and they take time to perfect, also tango is so deep that there’s always something new to learn. For this reason, it can be easy to loose track of what has been achieved. We thought a self assessment card would help keep track of student’s progress. It’s always nice to be patted on the back or to pat oneself on the back!

  • Continuous effort is always better than one off attempts, so we incorporated ‘continuous learning’ which really is homework but complete voluntary. If only that had been the case with maths at school!