“Embrace the other and with the each other dance!
No role or gender stereotypes impacting choices"
Our starting point is everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity, enjoy the same possibilities and freedoms, even dancing tango.
If we break the hetero-normative code that traps people inside one role only and necessarily with the opposite sex, we open up to diversity, at the same time allowing fluidity, more open mindness and consequently suspending pre-judgments.
It is with these very ideas that we have created the first italian stable queer milonga, la Malquerida, where our aim is precisely that of giving space to the extraordinariness and to diversity without selting up a "protected place", but one where all the extraordinariness can be expressed without hindrance, while meeting and moving with each other.
Cristiano e Walter
I am Cristiano Bramani, the founder and president of Tango Queer Roma (asd), the first legally registered italian association working on queer tango. I am the creator of "La Malquerida", the first and only italian queer stable milonga.
At the end of January 2025 we are going to complet our twelfth year of operation, but my project dates back to long before: I am a former ballet dancer and later a Latin-American folklore dancer. My training in the tango takes place between Rome and Buenos Aires in a very eclectic way, studying with the most important masters of the moment and choosing the most representative figures of the different styles, because my curiosity leads me to a constant desire to know all forms of aesthetics, style and philosophy of tango, being interested in the purest philological tradition and, at the same time, in its most extreme evolution.
I have been 22 years in the "straight" tango. About 15 years ago I started teaching tango queer in a GLBT Roman association and after two years I could say that I did my "tango coming-out". So I began to organize events of queer tango in the most important Roman traditional milongas, teaching and performing with important and popular straight tango dancers. My intention was to bring out a reality that was not even considered, to make it known, to propose an idea, raise a doubt, claim a right, then cause like a little "short circuit".
After about a year I thought that must be a dedicated place, visible, where a flag of an idea could be always available to those who, in tango, want to have equal rights and opportunities and where anybody knows and should know that all judgments, cliches and gender stereotypes are suspended. So, six years ago, La Malquerida was born. The following year the meeting with Walter Venturini completed the project. During the last years I have been invited to various queer tango festivals around the world (Rome, Berlin, Stockholm and Buenos Aires) to teach and perform.
I am Walter Venturini, a tango dancer, teacher and dj: I am the vice president of Tango Queer Roma asd. I started to take my first steps of tango in 2002 in the first school of tango in Italy. I continued to perfect myself with the great maestro Osvaldo Zotto, and then later with Lorena Ermocida, Claudio Villagra and Romina Levin, Alejandra Mantiñan. I also took part in courses of theatricality of tango with the Argentine choreographer Silvia Vladimivsky. I fund often my work as a teacher and dancer with the one of DJ. In 2011 I was DJ at the Confiteria Ideal in Buenos Aires and later in various international festivals in Italy and abroad, including the 2014 edition of the International Queer Tango Festival of Berlin. I am tango dj throughout Italy and resident DJ of important milongas in Rome. I lectured regular tango corses in Rome, London, Naples, Chieti and Latina. Since 2013 in Rome, with my male dance partner Cristiano Bramani, founder of Tango Queer Roma, I teach stable queer tango courses and organize the Malquerida, the first queer milonga of Italy. Paired with Cristiano Bramani I took part as artist at 2013, 2014 and 2015 editions of Roma Tango Festival, 2014 edition of the International Queer Tango Festival of Berlin and 2016 edition of the International Queer Tango Festival of Buenos Aires. I lectured stable queer tango courses in Naples with Aoniken Quiroga. I dance in the company of "Tango Boheme", show staged for the first time at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, and on the bill in several Italian theaters for the season 2015-2016. Artistic director of the five shows of "Cabaret Tango", went on stage in 2015; choreographer and dancer of the show "Besame Mucho" and dancer of the shows "Efecto Tango" and "Otra Luna". I performed with world-renowned artists including Aoniken Quiroga, Leandro Palou, Pablo Garcia.
Currently, in addition to Cristiano Bramani, I dance together with Manuela D'Orazio.