For me, Tango is not a sequence of steps; it is a discipline of presence. Coming from an Italian background with a deep respect for tradition and movement, my journey in tango has always been about understanding the human element behind the embrace. Before standardizing a movement, I care about standardizing connection—how two people can share three minutes of absolute truth on a crowded floor without saying a single word. On Social Dancing: Social tango is my anchor. In the milongas, there is no stage, no spotlight, and no act. It’s an act of deep humility and listening. You surrender your ego to the orchestra and to your partner. My goal on the dance floor is simple: to make my partner feel completely safe, fully heard, and entirely present in the music. On Teaching: I don’t teach people how to copy my tango; I teach them how to find their own. Technical precision, posture, and musical alignment are essential tools, but they are just the vocabulary. My role as a teacher is to give students the confidence to write their own poetry with that vocabulary. I focus heavily on body awareness, organic movement, and genuine connection—because when the technique becomes second nature, the real emotion can finally surface. On Performing: Stage tango should never lose the heart of the milonga. Even in a performance with complex dynamics, I seek the quiet intensity of an authentic embrace. It’s not about just showing off speed or trickery; it’s also about sharing an honest story with the audience. What I want to bring to Hong Kong: Asian tango communities have a remarkable dedication to precision, elegance, and respect for the art form. What I want to share with you is the warmth of the embrace, the freedom to play within the structure, and the courage to dance with your true self. I invite you not just to dance tango, but to let tango reveal who you are. Demetrio first developed his tango in Southern Italy alongside today’s world-“hottest” tango star, Gianpiero Galdi (GP), in the same study group where Lorena Tarantino also began her tango journey. GP has never hidden his pride in his fellow countryman: “Demetrio Scafaria has this power of reminding people how much fun tango can be, how intense the social experience and communication can be, how abundant emotions in tango can be, and how crucial feelings are! So many good dancers who danced with him were totally spellbound by the subtlety and musicality of Demetrio’s interpretation!” Below, three performances he picked himself, and why: These clips and images capture the essence of what I value most in tango: the clarity of the connection, the musicality, and the quiet intensity of the embrace. They aren't just about technical precision; they reflect the genuine moments where the dance feels alive and honest.

I have always been fascinated by movement—both as a dancer and as a biologist. My academic background is in evolutionary ecology, so I naturally observe how living systems adapt, communicate and respond to their environment. I believe this way of seeing the world has deeply influenced my tango. A dance is never fixed: it evolves from one embrace to another, shaped by two bodies, the music, the space and the particular moment they share. My identity has also been formed between different cultures. I was born in Germany, grew up with Turkish roots, built my adult life in Berlin and developed an intimate relationship with Argentine culture through tango and my time in Buenos Aires. Perhaps this is why I have never experienced tango as something belonging to only one place or one type of person. For me, tango is a living language—one that carries its history while continuing to change through every person who speaks it. What first drew me to tango was not the vocabulary of steps, but the possibility of communicating without words. Connection, attention and responsiveness remain at the centre of everything I do. I am interested in what happens when technique becomes so integrated that it no longer restricts us, but gives us freedom: the freedom to listen, to react, to take risks and to express something genuinely personal. As a social dancer, I value comfort, clarity and generosity. I want the person in my embrace to feel that we are creating the dance together. I do not believe that one person produces the idea while the other simply follows it. Both dancers are continuously proposing, interpreting and influencing the movement. The roles may have different responsibilities, but the dance itself belongs to both people. In my teaching, I work in a detailed and analytical way because understanding the body matters to me. I am interested in biomechanics, balance, axis, coordination and the organization of movement—but technique is never the final destination. It is a tool that allows dancers to become more available to one another and more independent at the same time. I want my students to understand not only what they are doing, but why it works and how they can adapt it to their own bodies. I also care deeply about creating an encouraging learning environment. Tango can make people feel vulnerable: we are asked to be close, to improvise and sometimes to fail in front of another person. I want students to feel safe enough to be curious. Rather than producing copies of myself, I want to help them discover their own movement, musicality and personality. Performing brings another dimension to my tango. I do not want a performance to be only an exhibition of difficulty or physical ability. Technique is important, but what moves me is the humanity inside the dance: tension, tenderness, humour, silence, resistance and trust. I want a performance to feel alive—to contain something that is genuinely happening between two people at that exact moment. I dance both roles, and this has changed my understanding of partnership profoundly. Experiencing tango from different perspectives has made me more aware of how much responsibility, sensitivity and creativity exist on both sides of the embrace. It has also strengthened my belief that tango becomes richer when we move beyond rigid ideas of what a leader or follower should look like. If I were to “recommend” my tango to an Asian audience, I would not describe it as a particular style or collection of figures. I would say: come if you are curious about the intelligence of the body, the honesty of the embrace and the freedom that can emerge from a strong technical foundation. My tango is detailed but not rigid, expressive but not disconnected from tradition, and deeply interested in the conversation between two individual human beings. This will be my first journey to Hong Kong, and I am especially excited about the encounter itself. I do not want simply to bring something already finished and present it to the community. I want to meet the dancers there, understand their questions, feel their energy and allow that exchange to influence what we create together. Below, four dances she picked herself, in her own words.

For us, tango is a conversation between two people who don't know what the next sentence will be. We love the playfulness of it, the musicality, the improvisation, the humour, and above everything else, the embrace. We think of a tango as a small door into a ten-minute journey of honesty, vulnerability, joy and affection. You meet someone, often a complete stranger, and for those few minutes you share something incredibly intimate without needing to say a single word. You touch another human being and use all your senses to "listen". For us, the embrace is where everything begins. It can be tight and soft at the same time. It can give complete freedom while offering complete security. It has so many colours, depths and possibilities, and we feel that sometimes dancers become so focused on steps, technique or shapes that they forget how much there is to discover simply by embracing another person. When we dance socially, our biggest wish is to make our partner feel completely free, yet completely safe. To feel that they don't need to worry about what comes next. They can simply listen, respond and be present in the embrace. Perhaps this is also where our personalities meet in our tango. Panagiotis brings playfulness while Maria brings depth. There is a natural contrast between us, but it is also what makes dancing together interesting. One brings curiosity and play, the other brings feeling and presence. Somewhere between the two, our dance happens. Maria also brings more than fifteen years of experience as a tango teacher. Throughout those years, she has taught and worked extensively from both sides of the embrace — leading and following — and she feels equally comfortable in both roles. That experience has given her something that goes beyond knowing how to teach technique. After so many years, she has developed a very strong sense of what works, what doesn't, and, perhaps most importantly, what a particular dancer actually needs at the point where they are in their tango journey. Her teaching is therefore very structured, but never generic. Over the years she has developed, tested, adapted and perfected a system of exercises designed to address specific aspects of dancing and help each student understand them through their own body. She doesn't believe that everyone needs to learn the same thing in the same way. A beginner, an intermediate dancer and an experienced dancer can be struggling with completely different things, even when they appear to be doing the same movement. For her, teaching is about seeing that difference.

Being an engineer, Panagiotis naturally looks for mechanisms, structures and the reasons behind things. He approaches tango in much the same way. He likes to understand what is actually happening between two bodies in an embrace — how intention travels, how balance changes, how movement is initiated and received, and why something feels effortless when it works well. In a way, he tries to "decode" tango: to take something that can initially feel mysterious or intuitive and understand its underlying mechanisms well enough that it makes sense. Not in order to turn tango into a formula, but because understanding how something works gives him more freedom to play with it. The more he understands the structure underneath the movement, the more possibilities he sees for improvisation, playfulness and connection. In that sense, our approaches complement each other. Maria has spent years observing people and understanding how different bodies and minds learn. Panagiotis is constantly trying to understand the mechanisms underneath the movement. Together, we are interested not only in what happens in tango, but why it happens and how we can help another person discover it for themselves. But the mechanism is never the point. The point is still the human being in the embrace. And perhaps one of the things we value most about tango is the strange beauty of coincidence. Every person we dance with has travelled through an entirely different life to arrive at that particular moment. Maybe we will never meet again. Maybe we don't even know each other's language. Yet, for ten minutes, our lives become one. That is what we want our tango to be. Not a demonstration of what we know. Not a collection of movements. Just two people listening to each other, being playful, being honest, and being completely present in the moment. If we had to describe what we want our partner to feel, the answer is surprisingly simple: Panagiotis wants them to feel love and care. Maria wants them to feel love and care. Panos found Argentine tango in Thessaloniki while studying electrical engineering, and the engineer never left the dance. He reads tango through biomechanics, physics and movement analysis, looking for the most efficient way a body can move, and then puts all of that analysis in the service of something simpler: a clear conversation between two people. Followers describe his embrace as immersive and surrounding, yet light, stable and free. Known for his musical interpretation, his precise leading and that distinctive embrace, he dances for clarity, comfort and deep connection, blending the analyst's understanding with the poetry of tango so that a dancer feels technical refinement and emotional expression at the same time. He teaches tango as a conversation rather than a sequence of movements. His classes work on the mechanics behind each movement; on balance, axis and body awareness; on clear, comfortable communication between partners; on technique as a tool for musical expression; and on improvisation born of listening. The engineering background lets him break complex movements into principles anyone can grasp, so dancers leave more aware of their own body and of their partner's. Dancing since 2012, Panos now teaches classes, workshops and private lessons to dancers of every level, and writes teaching material grounded in biomechanics, movement efficiency and the social principles of tango. Since 2023 he has been growing the tango scene of Kalamata, the town he calls home, through Tango Impro Kalamata: regular classes, prácticas and social events that link local dancers to the wider international community. He is also one of the people behind two of Greece's international tango gatherings. Since 2018 he has co-organised Los Higos Tango Marathon in Kalamata, shaping its artistic vision around high-quality social dancing and coordinating everything from guests and DJs to venues, accommodation and registration. Since 2017 he has co-founded and run Tango Nomads, a travelling gathering that lands in a different Greek destination each edition so visiting dancers and local communities can merge; in 2019 he also co-organised Stockholm's Epic Tango Marathon. From Stockholm to Warsaw, Vienna to Uppsala, he is a familiar face on the European marathon and festival circuit.

When we still used film cameras, every family kept photo albums at home. Ours had old black-and-white pictures of my father and mother when they were young. I looked at them many times as a child, and they never meant much. Then one day, much older, I opened the albums by chance and got stuck on one photo. It was my father, and judging by the date, he was much younger in it than I was now. My father, younger than me? A strange feeling. If he had been my age, maybe he would have liked to hang out with friends, go for a drink, sit in classes at university, just like me. What did he want to be when he grew up? It may have been the first time I saw my father as a person, not as my father. I don't know who took that photo. But a picture someone took can still carry meaning for me decades later. Neither that person nor I is a professional photographer. Still, I take many photos of people dancing, and some of them are good. One day, a long time from now, someone may look at one and think of their parents or grandparents as a person, the way I did. I would be happy if my photos gave someone a moment like that, even though I will never know it. Kappu Chino does not dance tango, but he has photographed it since 2012, first in Korea. After the Singapore and Hong Kong tango marathons in 2016 he became one of Asia's best-known tango photographers. Where he has shot: 2016 · Singapore Tango Marathon · Hong Kong Tango Marathon 2017 · Vietnam Tango Marathon · Thailand Tango Festival · J Tango Marathon (Taipei) · Busan Tango Marathon · Hong Kong Tango Marathon · Beijing Tango Marathon 2018 · Taiwan Tango Marathon · Vietnam Tango Marathon · Westlake Tango Weekend (Hangzhou) · Taipei Tango Weekend · Busan Tango Marathon · La Media Luna Tango Marathon (Tokyo) · Shanghai Tango Festival · Beijing Tango Marathon · Spicy Tango Weekend (Chongqing) · Hong Kong Tango Marathon 2019 · Taiwan Tango Marathon · Vietnam Tango Marathon · Shenzhen Tango Maracuentro · Beijing Tango Festival · Singapore Tango Marathon · Thailand Tango Festival · Busan Tango Marathon · Shanghai Tango Festival · Daegu Tango Marathon · Spicy Tango Weekend (Chongqing) · Tango Origin Celebration (Taipei) · Beijing Tango Marathon · Chengdu Tango Festival · Hong Kong Tango Marathon · Shanghai Tango Marathon · Tango in Paradise (Bali) 2020 · Bangkok Tango Marathon 2022 · Busan Tango Marathon · Indonesia Championship Preliminaries · Daegu Tango Marathon 2023 · Vietnam Tango Marathon · SYJ 2nd Anniversary Party (Beijing) · A Week of Tango in Bali · Shanghai International Tango Festival · Daegu Tango Marathon · Beijing Tango Marathon · Spicy Tango Weekend · Singapore Tango Festival · Quanzhou Tango Festival 2024 · Korea Tango Championship · Amelia & Matthew Workshop Grand Milonga (Beijing) · Vietnam Tango Marathon · Oriental Tango Congress & Championship (Beijing) · Daegu Tango Marathon · Pacific Tango Championship · Tango in Bali (Indonesian Championship Preliminary & Tango in Paradise) · Busan Tango Marathon · Hong Kong Tango Challenge ……