luna beller-tadiar

I am a (queer) tango dancer, artist, and researcher.

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I currently teach weekly classes at The Center for LGBT Life in NYC with Queer Partner Dance NYC (@qpdnyc, @queertangonyc). I also give conceptual-practical queer tango workshops, alone or with my friend and collaborator Maikel Dobarro, such as "Moving Together: Queer Tango and Bodily Listening," and"Queer Tango as Gender Laboratory."

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Further background:

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In 2018 I received a Robert C. Bates Postgraduate Fellowship to fund my proposed independent experimental research on queer tango in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I spent June through August 2018. Since then I have continued this research independently and collaboratively in Europe and the US. As a researcher, I am particularly interested in kinesthetic communication and the way social forces, including gender, sexuality, and colonially informed choreographies of respectability are negotiated at the corporeal level. My academic paper "Queer/Tango/Theory: Dancing the Binary (and Dancing On Out)" won the Selma Jeanne Cohen award for excellence in dance research from the Dance Studies Association (2022) and is forthcoming in the Dance Research Journal.

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As a dance artist-instructor I regularly helped out with local classes while living in Pau, France from 2018-2019. I assisted Maikel Dobarro in teaching a three day beginners’ intensive at the Berlin Queer Tango Festival in Berlin in 2019. In October 2019 I gave a tango-derived somatic-theoretical workshop titled “Weather in Common: Queer Tango and Bodily Ecosystems” with KP Parker and Itzayana Guiterrez for the conference “Transcontinental Queerness, Institutionality, and Activism Now” through McGill University. In 2023 I taught Introduction to Queer Tango at Duke University and American Dance Festival Studios (at Duke I was accompanied by co-instructor Emily Varner). I currently teach queer tango in NYC at The LGBTQ Center, the historic cultural center on 13th street.

 

I often do English-Spanish interpretation for the international Chamuyo queer community discussions, and recently co-facilitated discussion in the NYC Queer Tango Symposium, organized by Phi Lee Lam. 

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As an artist, I make visual, choreographic, and video work related to my dance practice and academic research. Among these works is the piece "Pensamientos acerca del tango," with Marisol Cerrini Madrid, an 8 part video work available here.