Ollantay Rojas is curating tango programming at Casa de la Cultura during the period surrounding the Tango BA Festival y Mundial, while also organising a tribute at the Buenos Aires Legislature to Claudio Segovia, who created, with Héctor Orezzoli, the production Tango Argentino. The official machinery is busy honoring the past. Rojas, meanwhile, is arguing that preserving tango means questioning it, not embalming it for display.
Who Gets to Define the Dance
"When you have a heritage, you can discuss it," Rojas said during an interview at Casa de la Cultura. He also said, "I think that we are running a crisis of tango as a performative activity." That crisis, he said, sits inside a commercial system that has narrowed the dance’s reach and turned it inward. Ten or 15 years ago, he recalled, there were "10, 12 companies, big companies, travelling all around the world for many, many years."
Rojas began dancing at 14 and later taught, performed and travelled internationally with companies. He studied law alongside his artistic career, then turned toward contemporary dance. "I started studying contemporary dance," he recalled. "I love theatre, and in one moment, I said, ‘Okay, I have to mix these two backgrounds’ and produce my own artistic expression."
That decision led to Grupo Noestango, founded in 2017 by Rojas, Lisandro Eberle and Milagros Rolandelli. The company’s stage and audiovisual productions grew out of two years of research and collaboration with artists across theatre, dance and music. Its artistic statement says, "This is not just another homage, this is not a ‘tango show,’" and adds, "It is an open question."
What the Manifesto Rejects
In Noestango, five dancers work with five musicians using the music of Astor Piazzolla. Rojas said, "They walk between the dancers." The company’s 10-point manifesto says, "We will not wear high heels, or wear clothes from the ’40s, or pay tribute to yesterday’s glories." It also says, "We will not shake women around like rag dolls," and, "We will challenge it relentlessly."
Those lines land like a refusal aimed straight at the inherited choreography of authority, nostalgia and gendered control. The company is not presenting tango as a museum piece. It is treating it as something alive, contested and still open to argument.
Rojas said tango has become increasingly concentrated within its own commercial ecosystem and has lost ground in broader theatre, music, folk-dance and contemporary-art festival circuits. Noestango emerged from a 2021 artistic residency at Centro Cultural San Martín and later took part in FIBA 2023. The group has performed at Usina del Arte, Timbre 4, Centro Cultural Borges and Teatro Metropolitan, as well as Festival Identidades in Antofagasta, Chile.
Competition, Heritage and the Gatekeepers
During the Tango BA Festival y Mundial, Rojas said, "For me, it’s social, cultural or it’s art. Competition is another thing." He said competition can be important, but it should not be confused with the whole art form. He also said Buenos Aires should remain a place where tango’s future is being made.
That matters because the city’s institutions are still staging the dance through festivals, legislatures and cultural centers, while artists like Rojas are trying to keep it from hardening into official doctrine. The tension is plain. One side packages heritage. The other side keeps asking what heritage is for.
Rojas said Tango Argentino, created by Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli, premiered in Paris in 1983 and later became a sensation on Broadway. He said, "It was really, really important." He described the complexity surrounding Segovia’s archive and the efforts under way among family members and artists who worked with him to protect and reconsider that legacy.
He is already looking ahead to 2029. "For me, in 2029, my artistic approach, personal, is to make a new version of Tango Argentino," he said. He added, "What’s happening now?" and, "How to give life again to this legend, to this myth?" In 2029, tango will mark 20 years since its inscription on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The state and its cultural institutions can hand out tributes, festivals and plaques. They can’t settle the argument over who owns the future of the dance. That fight is still happening, in rehearsal rooms, on stages and in the spaces where artists refuse to let a heritage become a cage.