El tango es mi vida: the stars of the hit Tango X 2 have returned to tour the U.S. this fall.

Tango fever is sweeping the world. In the United States, especially since the show Tango Argentino visited in 1985, the number of stage presentations as well as the ranks of tango enthusiasts have been swelling [see Teacher Talk]. Newsletters detail tango events from all over. In Argentina, where the tango rose from popular roots to become a national passion and then fell on hard times during the pop-dominated sixties and seventies, the dance has had a dramatic resurgence.

Contributing to that resurgence with its special eloquence and taste has been Milena Plebs and Miguel Angel Zotto's Tango X 2, which took over Manhattan's City Center last fall and garnered dream reviews, sold-out audiences, and standing ovations. (For worldwide tours it is called Tango Para Dos or Perfumes de Tango.) During intermissions, elegant American and Argentinean cognoscenti and casual theatergoers alike could be seen in animated discussion, sketching out moves.

The return of Plebs and Zotto this fall for a coast-to-coast U.S. tour, from Los Angeles in September to City Center in November, features their yet-grander-scaled Una Noche de Tango, originally commissioned by the prestigious Lyon Biennale de la Danse.

In 1991 the pair became the first tango dancers to win the highest prize for all dance in Argentina, the Prima Maria Ruanova. At about the same time they choreographed Houston Opera Theatre's tango opera, Maria de Buenos Aires, in which Zotto also played one of the roles.

Tango seems very up-to-date; this passionate dialogue of bodies with its frank but stylized eroticism, its virtuosity, and its spice of physical and emotional danger is a challenge to dance and a pleasure to watch. For a woman to follow a man's lead no longer seems politically incorrect but an art in itself. And the action and reaction, the thrust and counterthrust of the tango, afford the woman her own responses.

No question, the tango has sprung loose from the glitzy cliche image frozen in international competition dancing and Hollywood films: haughty, rigid poses, snaps of the head, and exaggerated slinking. Instead, as danced by masters to authentic, haunting music of sophisticated rhythms and textures, tango reveals itself as a wonderfully supple instrument of expression.

For example, at one extreme of Plebs and Zotto's versatile talents, their first dance on last season's Tango X 2 program featured their lightning, switchblade legs that interweave even as they duel. The footwork was precise, no matter how fast. The two were like equal poles generating an electric current between them. Above the maelstrom of legs floated their upper bodies in close embrace, Zotto's right hand extended across Plebs's back to rest under her right arm. Their concentrated gaze focused inward, downward, until suddenly at the end of the dance, the embrace opened like a flower, releasing their energy outward to the audience. The spectators reciprocated with their own vociferous flood of emotion.

In another facet of Zotto and Plebs's personae, they danced a slow and--yes--smoldering, but supremely elegant tango, in which Plebs slowly rubbed her leg down Zotto's. This woman was no victim, but an equal partner expressing her own desires. Their every glide, tap, and caress of the floor seemed to whisper secrets. Each step that penetrated the partner's space intimated the intimate, while nose to nose they gazed into each other's eyes. Nothing happened that you couldn't take a child to watch--nothing, and everything. The ultimate in movement as metaphor, re-created afresh.

During their New York City season, Plebs and Zotto sat down long enough to talk. Who are these mysterious figures of the night? Relaxing offstage by daylight, their hair no longer smoothed to an art deco shine, they become young people whose softened features make them look even younger than their thirty-some years. Their passion for the tango animates their faces, and their joy in their heady New York success spills out in infectious laughter. The history of their onstage romance is bound up with their offstage one. It's a good story.

Miguel Angel Zotto began dancing in Buenos Aires in the comparsas, or street dances, that his family regularly organized during Carnival. He also, like other Argentineans of his generation, danced to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But he knew tango music from his family and liked to sing it, and at seventeen he visited a tango club, became fascinated with the dancing, and began learning it from family and friends. (Later, he and Plebs studied with such greats as Juan Carlos Copes of Tango Argentino fame.) While working as a mason, Zotto recounts, "when we would stop for lunch, we would practice the tango. We were crazy for the tango." He became a regular at the clubs.

There he was seen by Argentinean modern dance choreographer Anna Maria Steckelmann. She persuaded him to teach her to tango, and eventually they choreographed a show for the two of them called Jazmines ("Jasmines"), which they presented at Michelangelo, a sophisticated supper-theater in Buenos Aires's principal tango district.

Meanwhile, Milena Plebs's story was converging with Zotto's. She grew up in a European family, she says, knowing little about the tango. She studied ballet for ten years and became a modern dancer with Steckelmann's company, where choreographers chose her for tango-style pieces "because I had a body more like a woman, not like a modern dancer," Plebs says, playfully sucking in her cheeks. Zotto nods and mimes a woman's shape. "And also, I felt something very deep in myself with that music," she adds.

She went to see Jazmines out of admiration for Steckelmann but, she recounts with relish, "I went back six times, and my attention shifted. I said, `Ah, who is this man?'" Zotto began teaching at that time, so Plebs took her first tango lessons from him. "I started as a hobby," she says, "but when you start dancing the tango you get absolutely obsessed.

"Seven months later, the directors of Tango Argentino called Miguel to join the company on a United States tour. By then we were also--como se dice?--a couple in life, so when he said to me, `Do you want to come with me? Because I'm going anyway,' I went!" And they both laugh.

"It was hard for me to change from modern," Plebs continues. "When you are performing the tango onstage, you rehearse and do the same every night. But when you dance it socially, the woman has to follow, so the sensation of the body is absolutely different. My body must be very alert, with attack, because you have to react very fast. But finally when you get used to it, it's really fun."

In their Tango X 2 program, they originally performed all the dances themselves. Later they expanded the show to four couples. Their new Una Noche de Tango has seven couples, ranging in age, they are pleased to note, from sixteen to seventy-five. The first act is set in a milonga--a tango club--and the second in an elegant cabaret of the thirties. In addition to the Lyon Biennale, they have performed Una Noche de Tango for many months in Buenos Aires. Dancers there are now influenced by them, they say.

Do they still like to dance the tango socially in clubs? Burst of laughter. "We mainly like to dance in clubs because it's fun," Plebs explains. "Onstage, you are working. When we go dancing, I dance with all the men, the milongueros, and he's dancing with all the women. It is good not to lose the improvisation, because it's very creative to improvise with different people. Onstage we improvise only in the encores."

Even so, they admit to having many bruises. "It's normal," they say.

What does the tango mean to them personally? "El tango es mi vida--tango is my life," says Zotto. "Maybe I'll stop dancing onstage [eventually], but I'll dance in the milongas to dance tango every night. The tango is like an arm or a leg."

"For me," Plebs observes, "the tango has to do with feelings, with a change in my life. It has to do with love, in the moment that I studied. When you see a couple dancing, you see a man and a woman. It's very clear. Sometimes they say that the tango is machista--that the man uses the woman. But I think it's not. I think it's not! It's very pleasant to be led by a man and also to experience this with different men. It's associated with sensuality, sexuality, but it's not only that: It's joy, it's fun. So tango is a very important part of my life."

Plebs and Zotto have the versatility to show a wide range of tango, but they are also interested in reemphasizing certain historic aspects of style. For example, they especially like to do slow tango, feeling that it is the most traditional and elegant.

The close contact with the floor is also important to them, they say, because tango started in the streets, which were of earth, and the dance was close to the ground, becoming lighter only when it entered the salons. The close embrace, they also say, "is something we tried to recover from the popular dance. When you go to the milongas, you see people dancing very close. In the sixties and seventies, the few couples who performed professionally danced separated; it is a stylization of the tango, less traditional."

Would they offer some hints to dancers? "Anyone can dance the tango," Zotto responds. "If you feel it, you can learn it. Nationality doesn't matter. The important thing is the sentimiento, the feeling. And understanding the codes."

"Usually people learn two steps, and then they want to do all these tricky steps," Plebs adds. "Try to start from the basics--slow--the walking. And listen to the music. Then when you are very used to that, you can start trying a little bit more complicated steps."

"For the man," says Zotto, "the embrace is very important. In the tango, the woman dances inside the man's arms." Plebs: "You feel that embrace. The man lifts the woman with the whole body and his whole energy. It's a very intimate dance. It all comes from inside you."

That feeling from inside Milena Plebs and Miguel Angel Zotto is evident in their every performance.

Dance Magazine senior editor Marilyn Hunt divides her time between New York City and Santa Fe.