On the second floor of the Watertown Community Center, a couple in their seventies glides across scuffed linoleum to a 1940s recording of Aníbal Troilo's orchestra. Twenty feet away, three twenty-somethings rehearse a choreographed sequence set to a DJ mix of bandoneón samples and downtempo electronic beats. No one here treats this as a contradiction. Both are tango in Watertown.
This is the headquarters of the Watertown Tango Collective, a homegrown scene that has grown from a dozen dancers in 2019 to roughly 80 people at its weekly milongas, with regulars now driving from Lowell, Somerville, and beyond. What started as a small group's passion project has become one of the most unusual tango communities in Greater Boston—one defined less by orthodoxy than by experimentation.
"We Didn't Want a Museum Piece"
The Collective formed in 2019 when Maria Gomez, a physical therapist and tango dancer, posted a flyer at the Watertown Public Library asking if anyone wanted to practice together. Seven people showed up to the first meeting. Today, the group runs weekly social dances, monthly live-music events, and workshops that deliberately blur tango with other movement forms.
"Tango is more than steps and music; it's a conversation without words, a connection that transcends language," Gomez says. "But conversations evolve. We didn't want a museum piece."
That evolution is visible in the Collective's programming. Monthly "Milonga Mashup" nights pair traditional orquestas with local jazz quartets and electronic musicians. Workshops teach what the group calls "tango yoga"—using contact improvisation principles to explore the tango embrace—and another series incorporates hip-hop footwork into tango's characteristic walk. The result is not a fixed "Watertown style" but an ongoing argument about what tango can absorb without losing its center.
"It took me a while to stop feeling like I was betraying something sacred," says David Chen, 34, a software developer who joined in 2021 and now helps organize the Mashup nights. "But tango was always street music. It was always stealing from whatever was around it. We're just doing what the form has always done."
Who Shows Up
The crowd at a recent Friday milonga included a retired physicist from Belmont, a pair of college students from Tufts, a married couple who discovered tango during pandemic Zoom classes, and a professional dancer from Argentina now living in Cambridge who drives to Watertown specifically for what she calls "the looseness."
"The technique isn't always perfect here," says Lucía Ferraro, 29, who trained in Buenos Aires. "But the embrace is real. People actually listen to each other on the floor. In some bigger cities, tango can feel like a performance exam. Here it still feels like a social dance."
That social element extends beyond the community center. The Collective runs outreach programs at two Watertown elementary schools and the local senior center, where Gomez and volunteers teach simplified tango walks as a balance and social-connection exercise. The senior class has a waitlist.
The Tension of Growth
Not everyone in the broader Boston tango community is convinced. Some traditionalists argue that the Collective's fusion programming dilutes a form that already struggles to preserve its history outside Argentina. Gomez has heard the criticism and largely welcomes it.
"If no one is arguing about what you're doing, you're probably not doing anything interesting," she says.
The numbers suggest the argument is winning over audiences. The Collective's annual outdoor festival, launched in 2022, drew an estimated 400 people last summer. Plans are now underway for a two-day event in 2025 featuring both a traditional orquesta típica and a lineup of experimental musicians from Montreal and Brooklyn.
How to Go
The Watertown Tango Collective hosts its weekly milonga every Friday at the Watertown Community Center, 124 Mount Auburn Street. Beginner lessons start at 7 p.m.; the social dance runs from 8 p.m. to midnight. The next Milonga Mashup, with live music from local tango-jazz group El Sur, is scheduled for June 14. Admission is $15, or $10 for students and seniors.
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Date: May 11, 2024
