María Nieves

María Nieves Rego, born September 6, 1934, in the Saavedra district of Buenos Aires, Argentina, is an Argentine tango dancer and choreographer whose Broadway career spanned from 1962 to 1999. The daughter of Galician emigrants of modest means, she left school in the fourth grade following her father's death and worked as a maid in the La Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Her elder sister, known as La Ñata, introduced her to the tango. At fourteen, she became the dance partner of the seventeen-year-old Juan Carlos Copes, and the two subsequently became romantic partners as well.

Nieves and Copes built a career bringing tango and milonga to international audiences. By 1956 the pair had developed a dance set to music by Astor Piazzolla, and after touring Central America, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba, they met Piazzolla in Mexico City. In October 1959 they traveled to Puerto Rico, where they performed with "Compañia Argentina Tangolandia" at Club Flamboyan in San Juan, with Piazzolla serving as musical director. The tour extended to New York, Chicago, and Washington, and concluded with a joint television appearance on CBS's The Arthur Murray Party in April 1960. Nieves and Copes married in Las Vegas, though the marriage ended while their professional partnership continued for decades.

In the 1980s, Nieves and Copes created and starred in the musical Tango Argentino, which had originally been booked for only a week before its run was extended and the production moved to a second theater. The show ran in New York for a number of years with various dancers. Tango Argentino earned Nieves a Tony Award nomination for Best Choreography in 1986, the same year the production received additional Tony nominations for Best Musical and Best Director. A dance excerpt from the show was performed during the 40th Tony Awards ceremony. Nieves also appeared on Broadway in the musical New Faces of 1943.

In 1999, Nieves and Copes toured again with Tango Argentino. She subsequently appeared in Tanguera beginning in 2002, performing the production in Buenos Aires, New York, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo, with a West End run in 2010. In Tanguera, Nieves was cast in the role of the brothel keeper. The 2015 documentary Un tango más, directed by German Kral, examines the relationship between Nieves and Copes across their more than forty years as dance partners. Nieves has attributed her development as an artist in part to the tension between herself and Copes, and has noted that she never received a formal dancing lesson.