Tango in the Time of Covid-19, Part 2

Andrea Monti, San Jose, California: owner, founder and director of ‘Argentine Tango USA’ the official Argentine Tango USA Championship & Festival

Andrea Monti announced a fundraiser with the seemingly outrageous goal of $45,000. Oh my, I thought. She was trying to recover her advance expenses for ‘Argentine Tango USA’ (ATUSA), currently the biggest tango event in the United States. I closed my eyes and made the call, worried about what I would find out. 

I have known Andrea personally since I interviewed her for one of my first tango-blog stories back in 2015. At the time she was in the midst of a promotional tour for ATUSA, a four-day event with hundreds of competitors and over a thousand spectators which she had started in 2010. I remembered how she told me how much time, effort, and money she had put into this festival every year. I got to know her as a hardworking and passionate organizer; as someone who would follow up on every single detail. She had gathered a team around her that would loyally work for months to make the event happen every April. Tensions would often run high, but each year turned out to be more successful than the previous one, especially when a few years back her new husband and partner, Adrian Durso, joined her organizational team. Andrea had successfully received official approval by the City of Buenos Aires for ATUSA as a branch of the annual ‘Mundial Del Tango’, the tango world-championship in Buenos Aires, where as many as seven hundred international tango couples compete. Now ATUSA was about to celebrate its tenth anniversary; even bigger than previous ones.

“We did a huge campaign for this year’s event,” Andrea told me over the phone. They had the entire website professionally revamped, invested for months in promo ads in social media, tango magazines and other publications, sent out fifteen thousand postcards and hundreds of posters. Then they hired two tango orchestras, a singer, ten maestros, DJs, and judges, some of them from as far away as Buenos Aires. Not only would they have to be paid for their work at ATUSA, but their expenses had to be covered. This included airfares and accommodations at the San Francisco Airport Marriott Hotel in San Mateo County where the event is held. Altogether she had hired twenty-five people for the event.

“We also invited previous champions to perform together,” Andrea continued. The ‘Champions’ Gala’ was supposed to be one of the highlights, and she had hired a choreographer specifically for this. It was easy to see how quickly $45,000 in advance expenses had accumulated, a sum which represented only about half of the total cost. This year two hundred dancers had registered to compete in different categories from ‘Tango Salon’ to ‘Stage Tango.’

“It’s very disappointing,” she said sadly. “Adrian and I worked so hard for an entire year.”

She had begun with the design for this year’s event at the end of May 2019, and only paused briefly during the month of August when she was busy taking her champions from ATUSA to the ‘Mundial del Tango’ in Buenos Aires. Last September she began the registration process and the campaign. In early March she saw how the situation was becoming worse. She held on to her plan, not wanting to cancel. “I’m in the middle between the competitors and the audience,” she explained. “I have a responsibility to the community.”

So she sent out messages on social media, assuring everyone that the event was going to happen in early April. With the competitors in mind she said: “I didn’t want to cancel one year of work, training, time, expenses.” She knew about the hardships every competitor goes through in preparation for a competition. Her husband, on the other hand, who acts as Artistic Director, saw where this was going and tried to prepare her.

Then in early March, the county issued a recommendation to cancel events with more than two hundred participants, then one hundred, then ten. Nonetheless there were many competitors who wanted to compete anyway. Some suggested competing without a live audience. On March 15, California announced the shelter-in-place order. Now Andrea had no choice but to cancel the much anticipated ATUSA 2020.

After that she spent the next two weeks crying a lot.

On top of her own huge disappointment she then had to deal with the financial loss. Most of the advance payments had come out of her own pocket. The biggest chunk went to the event venue: the San Francisco Airport Marriott Hotel. When I asked if she had recouped her down-payment, she said it took weeks of negotiating. “They were hostile at first,” she said. “They kept saying: ‘Oh, so you’re canceling,’ and they treated it just as any other kind of cancellation.” She insisted that this virus was an Act-of-God and that she had no choice but to cancel. They finally agreed to refund part of her advance payment.

Then there were the expenses for the teachers and the judges, plus the competitors’ registration fees. Fortunately, and to her big surprise, many of the competitors donated their money for next year’s competition.

I asked what she envisioned when she started ATUSA ten years ago. She said she had wanted to do something different from other tango festivals; she wanted a festival where the tango community could participate more. “I was a judge in the big Buenos Aires championship first,” she says, “and from there I got the idea to bring this to the United States. Everybody thought I was crazy!” It was a huge undertaking both on a practical as well as a financial level, and she didn’t have much support in the tango community back in Argentina where the traditionalists were opposed to her plan to take an event abroad which identifies Argentine culture. She said she didn’t have the funding at first, but after receiving some limited support she was able to organize the first official tango championship in San Francisco. She knew she needed a festival to pay for the expenses of the championship.

What did she set out for when she started this? “My goal was to promote Argentine culture and tango,” she explained. She saw the competition as an opportunity for the community to participate in ways other than taking lessons and watching shows. “This is also important,” she said, “but I thought there should be more.”

Now what does she think about the future of tango; how is this crisis going to affect tango? She replied: “You have to consider that the majority of people in tango — at least in this country — is older, and the virus affects older people.” She is sure that it’s going to take a long time until tango comes back, but she has a positive outlook and thinks that at some later point we will go back to tango. “Maybe we’re going to wear masks. Maybe it will be possible that one teacher works with one couple, but can’t touch the students. We can’t have direct contact until we have a vaccine. Tango is so popular all over the world. We’ll be fine. If not, we’ll see.”

In the meantime she and her husband are back to training and practicing. They began offering two online-classes a week and producing online-videos. “It’s a lot of work,” she said, “it takes about ten hours for a thirty-minute video. I’m very busy.”