El Tango ..... in time and place

Some notes about the history of tango, the dance, from conversations with Rubén Terbalca

by Barbara Garvey, edited by Rubén Terbalca

Tango began as a way of dancing, not as a separate music or choreography. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the port cities of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay, were subject to two powerful population influxes. The first was from the surrounding countryside, where cattle-raising was the staple of the economy. As in the western United States, cowboys, called in Argentina gauchos, cared for the herds while they were fattening up on the range, or pampas, and then led the cattle to market in big cities such as St. Louis, Kansas City, and Buenos Aires. However during the last several decades of the 1800’s, privatization of land, the building of fences to define property lines, and a series of civil wars largely ended the tough free outdoor life of the gauchos. The Argentine gauchos were, in overwhelming numbers, single men. They drifted toward the city, away from their beloved pampas and the way of life that defined them. Some went to work in the slaughterhouses and others remained outsiders, displaced persons. The **city version of the proud gaucho was called a compadre, hard-working and hard-fighting, personifying masculine courage, ready to defend his family, friends and ideals with the knife. But country-bred concepts of personal honor and valor soon proved anachronistic within the urban environment.** The shortage of meaningful work and feelings of isolation in the new society caused deep disillusionment followed by a breakdown of traditional values, creating the compadrito. A degeneration of the gaucho / compadre ideal, the compadrito was a street-wise swaggerer, a punk looking for an easy buck, a good time, and any excuse to fight.**

During these same years and for decades afterward, European immigrants, also in large part single men, were arriving, looking for work, for land, for opportunity, and also finding frustration, rejection, economic hardship and above all, loneliness. This was the environment that gave birth to tango, which we should perhaps think of as tango rioplatense, for the River Plate, or tango porteño, instead of tango Argentino. Rather than being the creation of the country called Argentina, its beginnings were specific to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the two port cities on either side of the Rio de la Plata, whose citizens are called porteños.

These men, emigrants and immigrants alike, were searching for social and emotional solace from the bitter reality that they encountered, far from their homes and not yet assimilated into the society whose fringes they now inhabited. A third population group, ethnic Africans recently freed from slavery, had achieved a more supportive community, forming mutual-aid societies largely financed by street processions and gatherings, called tangos. (The word tango with this meaning was documented in Montevideo as early as 1806.)

The music, drumming and dancing at these functions attracted onlookers, the compadritos and foreign newcomers looking for amusement, mischief, escape from humdrum necessity. They borrowed the uninhibited movements and insistent rhythms to add to their own contemporary dances, the milonga, mazurka, and waltz, adding a close upper-body embrace and simulating drums with staccato footbeats on the dirt floors of their patios and taverns.

The rapid tango movements, cortes (the introduction of figures to interrupt the forward walk of the dance) and quebradas (bending or breaking the line of the spine) transformed the traditional dances and eventually became a separate one, referred to as tango canyengue. Men held women very close and the couple danced lifting their feet off the ground. An elaborate system of codes was invented to reinforce masculine self-respect and to defend women and territory. Knife fights and brawls were the usual means of resolving any resulting disputes.

The scarcity of women in Buenos Aires during the late 19th century and lasting through the early decades of the 20th encouraged the establishment of brothels, which became social and cultural centers as well as commercial ventures. There were brothels at all levels of the economic scale, offering money-making opportunities not only for women but for the men who ‘protected’ them, and the musicians who entertained the clients.

A man’s prowess at dancing tango was counted as a determining factor in his popularity, a measure of his machismo, and finally, as a way to entice young women to his custody. Musicians adapted their milongas, mazurkas, habaneras to the new style of dancing. Now that tango was directly associated with the venues where single, and not-so-single men met available women, it also became known to gentlemen from the more respectable neighborhoods, husbands and fathers looking for a diversion, niños bien (wealthy playboys) sowing their wild oats.

Several decades passed before a distinct music evolved, sometime between 1880 and 1895, to accompany the already-popular dance style. Played on violin, guitar and flute, with the addition of piano in the more prosperous bordellos and dancehalls, tango also took to the streets, interpreted on barrel organs and accordions, and even in brass bands. It was happy music, as in El Entrerriano, the first known sheet music and the first recorded tangos such as El Porteñito and Don Juan.

Before 1900 a new instrument, another European immigrant, the bandoneon, was added to the mix, completing the first orquestas tipicas. Similar in appearance to a concertina or accordion, the bandoneon produces different sounds on the in and out strokes, which can be heavily rhythmic or eerily mournful. A new style of dancing, with less upper body movement, developed after the turn of the century. Done in a straight but aggressive posture, combining walking steps with dramatic creative figures to show off the skill of the dancers, it was named tango orillero, for the marginal inhabitants of the poorer outlying neighborhoods (orillas) where it blossomed.

Tango was still considered too vulgar; its embrace, cortes and quebradas unsuited to ladies of decent society, but this prohibition didn’t apply to respectable men, who, towards the end of the first decade of this century, introduced tango as a home-grown novelty to their friends in Europe’s capitals. (About ten years earlier, some enterprising compadritos had begun to use the allure of the dance to entrap less fortunate young European women ).

The sensual mystery of tango as presented by dashing rich Argentines sparked an instant vogue among the denizens of high society. 1913 was declared the Year of Tango, with tango teas, tango luncheons, tango gowns and hats, even a tango color (orange!). In the salons and ballrooms of Paris, tango’s exoticism was modulated. The high polish of a hardwood, parquet or marble floor seduced elegantly clad feet, which now caressed its surface. Meanwhile in Buenos Aires, around the turn of the century a subtler style was emerging, with skillfully detailed footwork instead of elaborate figures, and requiring less body contact: tango liso or tango de salón .

Tango was still considered sensuous and daring, with the suspense of momentary dynamic pauses emphasizing emotions stirred by the music. The approval of the European elite gradually made an impression on respectable porteños who finally, after 1910, acknowledged the dance that was born in their backyard. Tango de salón entered the mainstream of Argentine culture now legalized by the middle and upper classes. Still more immigrants were coming, mostly Italians, who counted many talented musicians in their ranks. Far from home, they infused their music with melancholy, transforming tango into ‘a sad thought that can be danced’.

In 1917 the first tango lyrics in this new genre were recorded by an up-and-coming young singer, Carlos Gardel. Mi Noche Triste (My Sad Night) was an overnight sensation, the precursor of the mournful tango song. In the center of the city, in the more liberal ‘twenties, both men and women went, looking for love, to crowded tango clubs, cafes, and confiterías, where they again danced very close, the woman’s head over her partner’s right shoulder, so he could whisper erotic temptations in her ear, and, on a practical level, she could help navigate by signaling impending collisions. This frame was called apilado (piled up), referring to the position of a jockey in a dead heat leaning with all his weight on his horse’s neck. Under these conditions dance steps are necessarily shorter, turns and ochos curtailed, and the rhythm rigidly marked.

Tango was danced in all these forms until sometime in the ‘30s when, with the upgrading of dance surfaces from dirt floors to polished wood or smooth linoleum, the original canyengue lost its relevance. During the época de oro, from the mid-thirties to the early ‘fifties, hundreds of orchestras, large and small, and many thousands of dancers thronged dancehalls, soccer clubs and cordoned-off streets nightly in Buenos Aires.

This golden age came to an abrupt end in the late ‘fifties. Tango, as a social dance, almost disappeared for three decades, victim of a peculiarly Argentine tendency to devalue or repudiate their national culture. Even in the face of post-war U.S. cultural dominance, other Latin American countries, such as Cuba and Brazil, managed not only to hold on to their native music and dance, but, with mambo and samba, to enter it boldly into the world consciousness. However Argentina, having, with the end of World War II, lost the affluence enjoyed as the world’s breadbasket and cattle baron, lost its confidence as well.

Tango was not performed as preconceived choreography on the stage until the mid 1950s, when Juan Carlos Copes and Maria Nieves invented tango de escenario. Performance tango has since added techniques and conventions from other forms of exhibition dance, such as lifts, dips, twirls and acrobatics.

The irony of this is that tango, to be truly tango, is always improvised, never confined to a routine. After all, it was conceived and cherished as an escape from the routine of daily life, grounded and spontaneous, not ethereal and rehearsed. Nevertheless, it was the astounding popularity of a stage review, Tango Argentino , which triggered the current renaissance of tango. Opening in Paris in 1983 and on Broadway two years later, the show traveled Europe, the United States and Japan for nearly ten years before eventually closing, in November 1992, on Calle Corrientes, the ‘Street that never sleeps’, in the center of Buenos Aires. Although, having been conceived as tango for export, an introduction of tango to foreigners, Tango Argentino was not successful at home, it had thoroughly captured imaginations abroad, generating sudden intense interest in both exhibition and social tango. In fact before long, hundreds of aspiring foreign students began arriving in Buenos Aires eager to learn at the source. Older milongueros (dancers who frequent the milongas, or tango dance clubs), many of whom had never given up their dance, as well as young professionals, trained in folk, ballet or modern idioms and seeking teaching or performing careers, are answering this unforeseen demand.

Those milongas that had survived the dark years of tango have been augmented by new dance spots opening weekly, now populated not only with porteños, but with Germans, North Americans, Belgians, Italians, Brazilians, and more; tango schools and practices are springing up in all the barrios, and there is talk of teaching tango in the primary grades.

Visitors from the northern hemisphere find plenty of teachers, and are even influencing the dance through their own interpretations and preferences. Since, as tourists, they tend to congregate in the city center, their observations are frequently restricted to the downtown apilado style, which they have renamed milonguero style, calling it after the local habituées they admire, often unaware that in residential areas of Buenos Aires thousands of other milongueros dance quite differently.

Now dozens of enterprising maestros travel the circuit from Atlanta to Seattle and from Rome to Amsterdam, teaching salón, milonguero, orillero, fantasía (exhibition style, with showy figures) and even, occasionally, canyengue. New tango shows, such as Forever Tango and Tango Pasíon tour Miami, San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and points in-between. At least one, Tango x 2, cannot be dismissed by purists as merely tango for export; its quality is remarkable even by Buenos Aires standards.

And once again in the center of town young people go to tango clubs looking for love, apilado-style, while their grandparents still elegantly walk their beloved tango de salon in suburban recreation halls. Another century of tango is beginning.

Rubin Terbalca is a historian of tango dance who works only from original documentation. He lectures, teaches and performs tango in Buenos Aires, Europe and the U.S..