Suki Schorer, Milonguera

When Suki Schorer—since 1998, the occupant of the School of American Ballet (SAB)’s Brown Foundation Senior Faculty Chair—approaches the barre to show a movement detail to a student, or strides to the side of the stage during a rehearsal to get a better perspective on a passage of choreography, she is taking steps on behalf of others: the dancer or dancers she is addressing; the dancers looking on; the spirits of George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, co-founders of SAB; the teachers who came before her at the School; her own teachers in California, where Schorer was first trained; and the teachers of all these teachers—and their teachers, going back, ad infinitum, to (as Jean-Georges Noverre put it, referring to famous pantomime dancers of ancient Rome) the “likes of Bathyllus and Pylades.” She is acting on behalf of ballet’s existence, literal and imaginative, as she, her colleagues present and passed, and their students, uphold it as a reality coursing through time.

Suki Schorer and Isaac Mercado. Photographs by Rosalie O'Connor

However, when Suki double-flutters slightly above the floor with the high heel of her tango shoe in preparation for an Argentine tango and then lifts her instep and ambulates backward in concert with her partner’s advance, her mission is far more personal: In taking a simple step, she is making a deep dive into the dance they are about to develop together right that moment. It will be a dance with one of Argentine tango’s three essential identities: the ruminative walk that is tango proper, the lilting triplets of the tango waltz (Tango Vals), or the bubbling, polka-like flirtations of the folk-derived dance called milonga. Unless she has already arranged for a partner to meet her, she will have followed tango protocol and directly met the inquiring glance of a prospective partner, thereby indicating that she has agreed to accept the person as a partner for at least one set—the length of three songs—or looked away, indicating “No.” (This silent encounter of glances is known as cabeceo.) Maria Valentina—a DJ I spoke with at Mariela’s, one of the Manhattan places where Suki dances—explained that when she puts together musical numbers for sets, she pays close attention to the lyrics of the songs and “makes little stories” in her arrangement of the titles. Most tango recordings are from tango’s “Golden Age”—the 1930s and ‘40s—although Valentina will occasionally admit a number or two by Astor Piazzolla, “before he went rogue.”

One afternoon in July, I watched Suki play out the protocol of cabeceo with strangers while she waited to dance with her longstanding teacher and good friend, Isaac Mercado, in the Práctica Barrilito, hosted by Carlos Andrés Dueñas at Ripley Grier Studios. Outside the dancing space, Isaac and Suki lead separate lives, a situation quite common among regular partnerships in nontheatrical tango culture worldwide and contributing to that culture’s mystique. Isaac is working when he dances with Suki; she pays him to help her improve her tango dancing through focused instruction and practice, as my mom paid my piano teacher who came to the house to take me through Chopin waltzes on our Bechstein upright. Although Isaac’s tutorials sometimes take place in Suki’s apartment, more typical is that, twice weekly, their classroom is a public dancing situation, a práctica. A public dancing salon is called (like the dance) the milonga when it is set up only to dance formal sets. When it is being used as a place of teaching and performance, on the other hand, it is called the práctica. Since Suki and Isaac are usually in a teaching situation, they rarely dance in milongas. “I hire people who know how to lead well and can play with the music and teach me a few things,” Suki said during a long interview. “No matter where I dance with Isaac, I always have a good time, too. We laugh and enjoy each other’s company.”

Some things that cannot be taught to Suki are the elements of her physical personality that make her gracefulness riveting. The touch of Suki’s feet on the floor in tango is distinctive to her: Lightly, meticulously, she places each foot with authority and respect for the dancing surface. She never looks rushed, regardless of whether the distance between that surface and her foot sole feels low, dense, and controlled or like a sweeping expanse from the sudden takeoff of her leg flashing toward the height of her shoulder. However, even when she’s perched for an instant on merely one leg, her dancing body never floats free from the musical pulse. Her torso responds to the leader and to the music, quietly, fluently, as her high heels trace ornamental figure eights (ochos) and other embellishments that address her partner’s lower legs and feet—circling, caressing, kissing them. The proud, calm carriage of her spine and the elegance of the way the angle of her head relates to the openness of her shoulders are incomparable when considered against the postures of dancers around her, including others with considerable background in all kinds of dance. She seems to be taking a special kind of stroll: her Balanchinean posture is unfailingly alive. When Suki is dancing Argentine tango, she looks neither fancy nor artificial. She looks as if she is in a zone the coinage of whose name is sometimes attributed to Martha Graham: divine normal. As Steven Melendez, the now-fulltime tangoist and former artistic director of the New York Theatre Ballet, put it during a moment between sets, “I can’t separate from her tango dancing that Suki is a remarkable ballet dancer—her musicality.”

The daughter of distinguished literary scholar and critic Mark Schorer and of erstwhile dancer (ballet, modern, vaudeville), student of library science, and pseudonymous New Yorker contributor in fiction Ruth Page Schorer, Suki’s extreme physical energy was remarkable from her early childhood. She didn’t speak until she was three and a-half, and dyslexia made learning to read difficult; but she was fearless, walking on window ledges in her nightgown, a flesh-and-blood sonnambula. Ballet proved an excellent outlet for her. At 16, she was already a member of the San Francisco Ballet. George Balanchine invited her, at 21, to join the New York City Ballet, in 1959. She immediately became entranced by his teaching. “It was hypnotic,” she said. “He never sat down. He had valuable, interesting things to say about each step, to make it alive: ‘Move your leg like the elephant’s trunk.’ ‘Explode out of fifth [position].’ There was so much enthusiasm in his way of teaching. And he was totally involved in how we did the movements. I was hooked on every word. He would say in class sometimes, after a correction, ‘If you don’t understand this, ask Suki or Jacques [d’Amboise].’”

Shortly after Suki entered NYCB, Balanchine put her to work as a teacher, including, sometimes, of company class. A devoted student of his own famous company classes (whose concepts and characteristics she has most readably recorded, with co-author Russell Lee, in the award-winning Suki Schorer on Balanchine Technique), she was made a principal in 1968; and, when she retired from NYCB, in 1972, Balanchine arranged that she would teach a special advanced girls’ class at SAB, where she still teaches seven or eight classes a week. During her performing years, she danced prominent roles throughout the Balanchine repertory. Among the parts he choreographed for her were the strange yet enchanting Pas de Deux Mauresque in “Don Quixote” (with John Prinz), a challenging solo in “Raymonda Variations,” and the sparkling part of Butterfly—a forest-mate of Oberon’s—in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The first time I saw Suki Schorer perform was as Butterfly, in 1962, at City Center. She was tiny (she is 5’ tall today)—not much taller than some of the children who, impersonating the realm of insects, introduce the ballet—but she danced expansively, and, in memory, her needling pointe work and exacting petit allégro invoke the image overlay of a butterfly on a dragonfly.

In the years since, her energy has continued to amaze, both in its unending expenditure on behalf of her students and—as a mother of one child (Nicole) and an actively helping grandmother of two (Samir and Kenzi)—on behalf of her family. A decade or so ago, when Suki’s mother would visit from California, Suki would have days when she would run around catering to three generations, including herself (and, sometimes, ailing friends as well) before scampering from her apartment to SAB to teach, stage, and/or rehearse the classes of aspiring ballerinas for whose daily progress she felt—and still feels—responsible. The energy well has not yet run dry. As photographer Rosalie O’Connor—a former student of Suki’s at SAB and, for a decade, a dancer with American Ballet Theatre—mentioned while this story was in preparation, Suki and Isaac tangoed during one shoot for two solid hours so that the photographer could get a variety of views.

Suki became acquainted with tango in the mid-1980s as many other New Yorkers did: through seeing the stunning stage revue “Tango Argentino,” choreographed by Juan Carlos Copes with his then-partner offstage and on, Maria Nieves. (Organized as a history of the dance, its versions, and its cultural protocols in Buenos Aires, “Tango Argentino” was the first of three late-twentieth-century smash-hit dance revues, focused on popular dance traditions, that were put together on Broadway by Hector Orezzoli and Claudio Segovia; the other two were “Flamenco Puro” and, for tap, “Black and Blue.”) “The first time I saw the show, I said to myself, ‘One day, when I have time, I’ll learn the dance in a month,’ Suki recalled. “And here I am, so many years later, still working to improve this dance. It’s just like ballet: So many layers, and always more to learn.”

Meanwhile, her friend and co-author, Russell Lee, introduced her to ballroom dance (Foxtrot, Waltz and Viennese Waltz, Swing, the English Quickstep, competition Latin dances). In 1995, she started to learn tango with the instructors Danel and Maria, basic steps (such as “how to walk to the cross,” that is, to the moment when one leg crosses another). Lead-and-follow is hard to learn and do. Suki: “A couple of milongueros who passed through from the various tango shows would teach 30-second combinations that had to be memorized, but that’s all.” However, true lead-and-follow tango involves the memorization not of fixed routines but rather of an array of movement options that can serve to meet and/or advance the steady stream of improvisations each dance consists of, along with the use of extremely subtle physical codes between leader and follower to inaugurate each new, improvised phrase, using breath and rotation of the spine, a kind of living chess game.

One of the first New Yorkers to teach lead-and-follow Argentine tango was Daniel Trenner, at DanceSport, in 1991. Later that year, he developed a partnership with Rebecca Shulman (Shulman had been a ballet student of Suki’s once briefly during a weekend on Balanchine in Saratoga). Suki caught up with them also in 1991, at the Sandra Cameron Dance Center, where she started studying lead-and-follow procedures with them. She also studied with other Argentine teachers, such as the 16-year-old prodigy Pablo Pugliese and his famous dancer mother, Esther—visiting New York from Buenos Aires. (Esther’s husband and Pablo’s father is the renown tangoist Mingo Pugliese, who hadn’t made the trip that time.) Lamentably, Russell Lee had trouble with the Argentine tango step patterns and bowed out of following Suki into that dancing world, although, now and then, he and she continued to travel for ballroom events around the U.S. and Europe. So, at the age of 57, Suki became a steady student again, practicing Argentine tango regularly in group classes. When she turned 70, she began to treat herself to private lessons. “If I hire a teacher, he might give me five or six corrections during our session,” Suki said. After her class, if she is free, she may dance a set or two with strangers who see her unique style and want to test their own in its company.

During a práctica run by Mariela Franganillo, an internationally admired practitioner of Argentine tango, who conducts her sessions in the mirrored ballroom with a shining plank floor owned by Emmanuel Pierre-Antoine, I watched Suki and Isaac dance separately with other partners, then together. While briefly off the clock, Isaac, in demand as a teacher, spoke with me about how he plans lessons with Suki, given her predilections for moving; his dance background (which includes Salsa, Swing, and Hustle, six years of Shaolin kung fu, and some twenty years as part of the tango community); and his thoughts on aspects of tango technique. At one time, he worked in TV sports; however, he began teaching tango in 2018, in various studios and, privately, in people’s homes. At 5’11”, Isaac has to make a few adjustments in his posture to partner Suki effectively in close embrace, the partnering “frame” that effects skin-to-skin contact in a pair’s uppermost bodies while spacing them gradually from the torso down in order to accommodate their steps, interlacings of the lower legs, occasional high legs, jumps (and even lifts), as well as the follower’s embellishments—that is, the playful circlings, displacements, and investigative crossing gestures by the follower’s feet vis-á-vis the leader’s footing. “The embrace and connection is the most integral part of tango,” Isaac said. “We don’t embrace to dance. We dance to embrace. Without the embrace, we don’t have tango.” He added, “I pause a lot. Suki and I have been discussing it. She’s an up personality; I can be more down. When I pause, she wants to play [that is, explore the follower’s footed embellishments]. Fran Chesleigh [a longstanding NYC teacher of Argentine tango and mambo, who died this past June] used to say that it’s the pauses that make tango different from any other dance form.”

In my experience as an observer, the pauses in Argentine tango are what one might call its soul. For, when Argentine tangoists pause in place, the dance does not; it continues, like a live electrical current, through the dancers’ bodies. It’s clear to an onlooker that the pause has a function, and inevitably a couple will look as if they’re thinking something through, but separately. That meditative aspect conveys privacy, sometimes a quality of secrecy—a look of deliberate mentality specific to this dance practice. Nevertheless, the song does not pause, and regardless of where the next movement takes everything in space, that momentum in the music metaphysically, fatefully, urges the dance and the dancers forward into the future.

For both leader and follower, their tango shoes are more than aspects of costume: They are crucial instruments of perception and construction. Every part of the shoe matters for comfort and how it facilitates action, as well as for how it seems to lengthen the dancer’s leg and, in the case of women’s high heels, to dramatize steps and embellishments. They both make it possible, say, to discern which of the six varieties of sacada (the leader’s action of batting the follower’s leg out of the way) is taking place and to make the displacement happen seamlessly and discreetly. Isaac discussed with me the construction of a man’s tango oxford (and the more recently developed tango sneaker), pointing out the difference in materials between the upper and the sole and explaining why the material for the sole is especially important as it contributes to the speed or friction of the shoe in motion.

Suki, who prefers a three-inch-high heel (tango heels can go up to 10 centimeters—nearly four inches high), owns some 30 pairs of exquisitely designed and colored tango shoes. These days, though, she only uses two pairs of a single design, both ordered through Yasuri Salamanca. Since one of those pairs was wearing out, she took me to visit Yasuri’s midtown Manhattan office. Yasuri is an erstwhile tango-and-salsa star and choreographer—and, now, wife and mother of two. She works as an event planner and, on the side, runs her own business as a tango-shoe middleman, taking measurements of tangoists’ feet to send to her chosen cobblers in South America, who build the shoes to specification, using high-quality leathers that Yasuri sources from Italy and Argentina. Yasuri showed us the innards of the model of the strappy shoe with a box at the heel that Suki prefers. The building of the shoe begins with a leather sole. On top of that is a layer of felt, and on top of that is a layer of foam rubber, covered in the same buttery material that the shoe is made of. If requested for more traction, an additional last layer of suede is added to the bottom.

I asked Yasuri why she thinks high heels are de rigueur in Argentine tango.

“Mostly, you wear them for stability,” she said, “for when you stand on one foot or are walking.” (Suki showed me how walking in the shoes is comparable to walking on demi-pointe in soft slippers or bare feet, although with the addition of the heel, which helps for balance.) Yasuri went on: “The music can be slow or fast, but you need a lot of stability. In tango, you’re embracing the other person, and your balance shifts forward. The high heel makes your body naturally move forward. The leather sole helps you because there’s less friction with leather. The high heel becomes part of the body.” Suki added later, “Suede [if on the sole] slows you down. Leather is a faster shoe.”

Suki ordered a pair in silver and white, size 6 1/2—the “Tanzania Blanco Plata” model. If the cobbler has a pair in stock in Suki’s size, it will cost $228. Made to order: $315. In each case, $100 of the price is owing to the tariffs of President Trump.

Suki has worn her hair relatively short for decades; however, this summer, her scalp has almost looked shaven. For her tango outings that I witnessed for this story, she wore a swinging patterned skirt with a sobering yet sexy black top trimmed in lacy openwork. And, tenderly embracing her head, she sported a pale headband with a fabric blossom on the side. She was coming off a series of difficult chemotherapy treatments, which compromised her immune system and caused her hair to fall out. In September of 2025, she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which had spread across her stomach and colon. “Nicole was there for me all the time,” Suki said, “but in the beginning, owing to the problems with immunity, my doctors said my immune system was too weak to spend time in crowds or class or even with my grandchildren, who were young and exposed to all kinds of germs in school. I was scared to see my grandchildren at first. Eventually, I missed them so much that the doctor said, ‘Put on a mask and see them.’ For the six chemos, beginning October 3rd of last year, the doctors made me stop teaching. I was allowed to have one or two visitors a day, wearing masks, and outside if possible.”

She went on: “Dancing the tango saved my life. I started dancing it on October 4th, with Isaac, in my apartment, both of us wearing masks. I was dancing to music, in a close embrace, twice a week. I also exercised daily—a mini ballet barre, a Pilates routine, and walks in the park.” Also, as a person who had always given support to others, she enjoyed an incredible amount of emotional support from friends and colleagues, as well as from family, during this pause in her life. “I had eight good friends who visited me often. Jenifer Ringer, the head of SAB, came weekly with cards and letters from students. The advanced students and a few members of the administration crocheted squares to make a blanket I could take to the hospital. Amy Bordy, also from SAB, came to every chemo with me and took pictures of me working out; she was a huge support through the entire cancer journey, and afterwards. My ex-son-in-law stayed over at my apartment for two nights after I visited the ER and was sent home. He would have carried me back to the hospital across Central Park if needed. The love that I felt, from my family and friends, from the School—from the students! And the tango community, where nobody’s as old as I am, welcomed me back with such a warm embrace.”

She paused, then went on to assess the dance practices she knows:

“Competitive ballroom is easier to learn than tango, but it’s highly stylized and artificial. Ballet is very pure, and in Balanchine’s training it’s not artificial. The movements we do are very painterly. Balanchine saw you as human, and he wanted to bring out the you of you. As for tango, each tango is different, the way each ballet performance on stage is different. There’s enough variety in the tango music to keep you interested for a whole evening; it’s not like a night of Salsa or Swing. When I did the ballroom dancing I really loved it, but tango is much more fulfilling. There are no set steps; you have to be alive and ready to respond.”

Have I mentioned that, at this writing, Suki Schorer is 87 years old? As for old age, she is putting that off for a while. When Yasuri Salamanca showed her a model of a high heel that seemed, to Suki, “lower and chunky,” she told Yasuri, “I don’t like the look of that heel. Maybe next time, when I’m 90.”

Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff is the author of Why Dance Matters and Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation and the textual editor of many books, including Dance in America: A Reader’s Anthology, In Balanchine’s Steps: How the George Balanchine Foundation Preserves His Genius, and Joseph Houseal’s Buddhist Dances: Movement & Mind.

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