luna beller-tadiar

I am a (queer) tango dancer and researcher. 

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In 2018 I received a Robert C. Bates Postgraduate Fellowship to fund my proposed independent experimental dance-ethnographic 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).

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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 Maite 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.