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 himself member of a superior class, the elite of dancers.

He taught dancing to many people, even to some professional dancers whom he polished and gave instructions concerning choreography.

As for the orchestras, he had very definite preferences and aversions. He listened to them through his heart and his feet: besides the idols of his youth, in his latter years he preferred Osvaldo Pugliese and rejected Piazzolla because, he thought, he had spoiled danceable tango. He never understood that an orchestra would play music only to be listened to and that, at a time when Piazzolla's influence was great, dancing was against the ring ropes.

In 1960 El Rusito was encouraged to become a professional: the orchestra led by Mario Canaro, Francisco's brother, suggested him to form a dancing duo for a show in a tour of Latin America. The tour would start in Lima, Peru. It was the first time that Elías was to travel by plane. Everybody in his neighborhood was proud of it. But his fate was not to be a professional dancer: on the day appointed for their debut the whole company were seriously intoxicated so that they all went to a hospital, El Rusito was not the exception, and then they had to go back to Buenos Aires.

In his latter years he lived fearing that tango would disappear because he experienced the bad times when it was excluded from the circuits of the cultural industry and the communication media.

He was a typical milonguero, one of so many unknown tango creators in the thirties and the forties, those that developed the basic elements of today dancing, the art of its teaching and the foundations of its professionalization up to an extraordinary level of complexity. He was never filmed. His teachings and the discoveries of others like him that were not backed by the cultural industry, with a cinema and a television not interested in the dance of tango, only remained as a legacy that, inevitably without conscience and without memory, the present milongueros, instructors and professionals received as heritage.

Today there are neither documents, nor films, nor living witnesses of those epic years, the late thirties and the early forties when El Rusito stood out in the milongas (dancehalls). Petróleo, one of the great milongueros that came to know him personally at that time, still remembered him and his brother Simón fifty years later - according to what he told Mingo Pugliese just before his death.

El Rusito Elías died in Madrid in 1986 and he never knew that those bottles thrown into the sea, by means of his patient teaching to so many students, had been picked up by many ones years later, that tango was beginning a revival and that its dance was to be chosen by many people not only in Buenos Aires but also in Europe, the United States and other places just like in the years of glory.