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SCMP Reporter

TANGO, anyone? Anne Decortis certainly hopes so. For the head of the Hong Kong office of Medicins Sans Frontieres, a tango fanatic, has had no one to dance with since she moved to the territory two years ago.

  Now Belgian-born Ms Decortis has arranged for two Argentinian dancers to come to Hong Kong this month to perform at the Portico restaurant at Citibank Plaza and to teach 20 couples to tango at Hong Kong Cultural Centre.

  From these classes, she hopes, will evolve a group of aficionados, who will gather twice a month to practise the sensual dance born more than a century ago in the slums and brothels of Buenos Aires.

  By the 1920s, screen legend Rudolph Valentino was sashaying his co-stars around in a toned-down version of the tango, which soon became the craze in fashionable Europe.

  Although 'tamed', the tango remains one of the few social dances built blatantly on the rituals of seduction.

  'It's just a nice game between men and women,' Ms Decortis said. 'At the same time, it's a nice way of communicating with someone without talking. To me, dancing is two people dancing together.'   Her boyfriend, also Belgian, does not dance - which explains her efforts to find a partner.

  Ms Decortis' love affair with the tango began with lessons three years ago in Brussels.

  'I liked it from the first day,' she said.

  After more lessons, she won a tango contest and a trip to Buenos Aires, where she spent a month dancing at a different tango club nearly every night.

  Since then, there has been little tango in her life, except on rare trips back to Brussels. She even checked with Argentinian consular officials when she first arrived in Hong Kong, but they could only encourage her to organise her own group since theirs had scattered.

  Ms Decortis hopes to do that by importing her former teachers, Gladys Fernandez and Pablo Inza, from Brussels.

  Despite all the work she has done to bring the tango to Hong Kong, Ms Decortis has no simple answer to why she finds it so compelling.

  It was the intensely melancholic music that first attracted her, but she also likes the grit and verve of the dance, which still contains undertones of the nostalgia its immigrant creators felt for their abandoned homelands.

  But the dance is a passion that cannot be indulged alone. Hence her appeal to any closet tango fanciers in Hong Kong.



Will samba-dy dance with me because it takes two to tango?