I stood onstage in front of a black curtain in a pair of shiny gold heels. A wash of red light made the sequins on my purple flared dress glimmer.
Then the music hit and I was dancing in my first tango show in Istanbul, 10 months after setting out to learn this exacting and passionate dance. A week later, I would share a byline on a New York Times story about the city’s unlikely status as a capital of tango. I had been living this story — now I was also covering it as a journalist.
Although I had been part of the tango scene in Istanbul since last year, I did not think of it as a news subject until this spring, when Ben Hubbard, The Times’s Istanbul bureau chief, approached me with a question. A dancer friend had told him that Istanbul had become a global destination for tango, a dance most often associated with Argentina. Was that right? We set out to tell the story.
We attended local milongas, or tango parties, and interviewed more than a dozen Turkish and international tango dancers and teachers. The photographer Laura Boushnak accompanied us to capture the Turkish tango world with her visuals. Over three days last month, we also followed the Turkey preliminaries for the World Tango Championship, which kicks off in Argentina in August.
The quality of tango training in the city is so good, we were told, that seasoned dancers can sometimes identify Turks by how they danced.
The stories we heard during our reporting corresponded with my own experience as a dancer and a Turk.
We “have a natural susceptibility to the emotional side of the music,” said Utku Kuley, who owns my tango school. “We love that melodrama, those deep emotions.”
Tango is a folk dance of Argentina, and Turkey has a deep folk culture.
Children learn folk dances in school, and many Turks compete in dance competitions in high school, including me.
I grew up in Bursa, an industrial city south of Istanbul, in the 1980s, when the Turkish economy was opening up to the world. Tango was in the movies and on TV. I saw Al Pacino as a blind, grumpy soldier dance tango in “Scent of a Woman.”
I remember my father telling my brother and me about tango, perhaps after we heard the tango classic “La Cumparsita” at a Turkish wedding. Looking back, he had no idea about the moves.
I moved to Istanbul for college and forgot about tango. I did theater. I got a job in journalism, eventually joining The Times’s Istanbul bureau, where, since 2015, I have reported on catastrophic earthquakes, nail-biter elections and political crackdowns. Journalism is a demanding job, so I quit acting. Then I had a child.
It wasn’t until I turned 43 and my relationship with my husband ended that I found my way back to tango.
I am not unique in taking up the dance after a profound loss. Many people, I discovered, started tango after life-changing events: deaths, divorces, separations.
There is something in the dance that regulates you, allowing you to express your feelings as you move. You can find anger and love, joy and grief, the novel and the mundane, all in one song.
I have always been dazzled by the way tango dancers move, perfectly synchronized, their torsos solid like mountains while their legs turn, step and kick.
Tango erases social differences. One of my best friends from tango school spray-paints cars for a living. Another fixes air-conditioners. One of our classmates is an animation artist. Another runs a pharmacy.
On the dance floor, we communicate in a different way. Tango requires you to listen so well that you stop needing words and talk with your body. It’s a language you can speak all over the world.
Tango brings self-awareness. It repairs you, makes missing pieces of your internal puzzle fall into place.
One day, I was pondering how to fix my hunched-up shoulders, which looked bad when I danced. Then I realized that my shoulders were stiff because I was afraid to make mistakes. I relaxed, and in the next class, my partner noticed my softer embrace.
“It is so beautiful to watch how tango fixes things in your day-to-day life,” said my teacher, Nida Inceoglu Boy, who won the European Tango Cup in 2023.
The rehearsals for my first show were stressful. My teacher and I fought, laughed and almost cried. My dress was ready only at the last minute. I almost decided not to take the stage.
Then something shifted. I remembered my love of the dance. When our performance began, the red light turned to yellow, the music sped up and my teacher and I launched into a mischievous number, to a fast, cheerful tango song. By the time our dance was over, I was ready to start training for my next show.
