is name was Elías Borovsky. By mistake of an official at the time of issuing his document when he was eighteen, the r of the family name became an s. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1916. Son of immigrants, his father was Russian and his mother, a Pole.

He was raised in a tango environment. Since the early days of his adolescence he shared the long hours of practice that his elder brother, a good dancer, had with his friends. This older brother, Simón, later married Rosita, as well an expert dancer, and continued going to dancehalls for years after he married.

Elías was not born for the world of business, religion, formality, or the cult of money. His religion was tango, and he was a perfectionist.

He was a wall painter, a jack of all trades, as dexterous with his hands as he was gifted for dancing. But in fact no work interested him more than dancing. And this was in a full sense, as well concerning tango: he never performed as professional. Even though on many occasions he displayed his art at the most famous dancehalls of the period.

He was known as “El Rusito Elías”. He spent his life teaching groups, professional dancers, polishing or teaching choreographies to dancers that worked at theaters or on television. All this for free. He was quite exacting: he could neither stand bad dancing nor the theater or TV shows made by mediocre dancers.

Since he was a teen-ager he devoted himself to practicing, to polish steps and turns, to create figures... Time later, but before he was eighteen, he spent the nights at dancehalls.

He was eighteen or nineteen when he was painting a tango ballroom named “La Buenos Aires”. Then he left his parents’ house and began to sleep on a shelf of the saloon’s wardrobe, where he stayed after having shown his authority during the ball. By that time El tano Humberto Martucci came to know him, another great dancer who later would become his brother-in-law. When he saw Rusito dancing he became his friend, and also left his parents’ house to sleep on another shelf of the wardrobe. Time later these friends would become family, by marrying the sisters Felicia (“Nilda”) and Anita (“La Gallega”), the girls with whom they had danced and had made shows at the dancehalls.

In the late thirties and the early forties, El Rusito Elías, along with other great milongueros of his generation, succeeded in contributing an important development in the dancing technique with a very polished, elegant, precise style; the result of years of hard practice and study. His basic step was different to the one used today: he began with his left foot, next came other two steps, then he went ahead and closed with his right one. Within that apparently simple possible four-step sequence he used to intersperse all kinds of turns, figures, twists and untwisting actions.

He was constantly improvising. Even though he had a wide repertory of figures and expressive resources, his concept of dancing allowed him to adlib situations and figures from the change of axis in the turns and half turns. He had a perfect balance and when he danced he was respectful of elegance, the character of the steps, the precision and clarity of the figures and the musical flow.

He had a scorn for the “verduleros” of milonga (dance), those that accumulated “verduritas”, a rowdy excess of actions in the middle of a gross carelessness in quality and posture, like those who displayed swooping acrobatics on the dance floors, a tango-fantasy without a solid framework based in popular roots.

He always led a poor life because he was never interested in money. At that time it was not usual that a dancer managed to make a living out of tango or that he earned money with something that he considered his passion. He was very simple in his habits and in his relations with others, but he was proud of considering hi