Andrea Missé

Andrea Missé was an Argentine tango dancer, teacher, and researcher, celebrated for reviving the traditional close-embrace tango style and earning the affectionate title “La Princesa del Tango” (The Princess of Tango).

Early Life and Training

Andrea Missé was born on 10 August 1976 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was the eldest of five siblings, raised in Villa Urquiza. She was part of a veritable clan of tango dancers, with her siblings Sebastian, Gabriel and Stella Missé all going on to become professional dancers well known on the international festival circuit.

From an early age she studied folk dance with Santiago Ayala (“El Chúcaro”) and Norma Viola, moving into tango around age eleven, when Carlos Rivarola came to her studio and she and her peers began taking classes with him out of curiosity. He later took them to the Sunderland club, where they watched a live performance and a milonga in a warm, familiar atmosphere that she loved. She began her professional career in the Argentine National Ballet in 1991, received a diploma in Argentine Folkdance and Tango in 1992, and earned a further diploma in dance and choreography from the Buenos Aires Theatre Academy in 1995.

She continued attending school by day while going to milongas with her mother in the evenings, refining her technique and eventually qualifying as a choreographer. Her training also included several years with Miguel Ángel Zotto, star of the show Tango por Dos, and significant work with Antonio Todaro, one of the greatest teachers of tango choreography. She also recalled the influence of Milena Plebs, El Turco José, Toto, and others. Beyond dance, she studied Italian culture at the Dante Alighieri Institute and translation at the Universidad de El Salvador (specifically simultaneous translation, alongside Italian language, history, literature and art history).

Career

In the late 1990s she founded the Tango Danza company with her partner Leandro Palou, joined by her brother Gabriel, and their shows earned rave reviews across the U.S. and Europe.

Andrea and Leandro moved to London in 2001, where, together, they founded the Tango in Action school. At the time the UK tango scene was still relatively small — Britain had missed the first European tour of the show Tango Passion due to the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, so tango fever arrived roughly a decade later there than in the rest of Europe. Their regular classes at The Factory gym and dance centre on Hornsey Road transformed the London tango scene, and the couple made a significant impact across Europe and wherever they toured, with demonstrations that drew rapturous applause. In her workshops, Andrea stressed the importance of frame and precisely explained the muscles involved in maintaining it. The Tango in Action school they founded continued operating for years afterward.

She later partnered with Javier Rodríguez, and together they championed traditional tango and the beauty of “walking” tango across Europe. Andrea emphasized the embrace, musical embellishment, and grace — qualities that earned her the enduring nickname “La Princesa del Tango.” With Rodríguez she achieved international renown, pioneering a revival of the classical Villa Urquiza style — the style typical of Buenos Aires’s Sunderland milonga, in which the two bodies remain continuously in contact, the embrace is never broken, and the axis is shared, projecting togetherness and unity with the music. This style had fallen out of fashion amid the rise of tango nuevo (associated with Astor Piazzolla) and the electronic tango popularized by groups like Gotan Project and Otros Aires, which favored open figures with a broken embrace. Andrea and Javier’s revival both preserved the roots of the dance and re-emphasized the music of the tango’s “golden age” and its identity as a “walking dance.”

She was also an author and researcher of tango dance, writing Nuevo Glosario de Tango Danza, La Pista del Abrazo, Tango FAQs, and Los Legionarios del Abrazo – Historia del tango danza 1800–1983.

Missé was known internationally as a teacher; a tango festival organization in Bucharest remembered her as their maestra since 2009, present at the first three editions of the Bucharest Tango Fantasia festival. In interviews, she spoke of teaching tango as a mission — not simply instruction in steps, but the transmission of the cultural meaning behind the movements, without which the embellishments become empty gestures. She also urged women to reclaim their traditional role and dignity within the dance, describing the woman as once “la diosa de la milonga” (the goddess of the milonga).
Anthony Howell, a former Royal Ballet dancer and tango student of hers in London, recalled her as slim, impeccably groomed, with exceptionally neat footwork, and hugely instructive without ever being belittling toward students, even beginners.

Personal Life and Death

Andrea Missé died in a car accident in La Pampa, Argentina, on 2 January 2012. Her husband, Diego Hernán Ginex, and their two-year-old daughter, Guadalupe, were also involved in the crash but survived.

Her death was mourned throughout the international tango community as the loss of one of the dance’s brightest and most influential proponents, remembered for reintroducing the traditional close embrace to dancers worldwide and for her fluidity, elegant adornments, and musicality.