Authors: Mike Gonzalez
Modern tango dancers.
By the 1990s, tango was danced everywhere â split skirts and high-heeled dancing shows had made a triumphant return and men in many countries were learning once again to hold their partners firmly and press their bodies into a sensual embrace. Tango show followed tango show, and tango dancers have become noticeably younger and more confidently experimental.
Significantly, given tango's origins, women have become more and more central to tango, as musicians, orchestra leaders and singers. Susana Rinaldi is just one among many of the accomplished singers of a new generation. Tango has also had its equivalent of the âBuena Vista Social Club'.
Café de los Maestros
(Walter Salles, 2009) chronicles the concert given by the finest singers and players of tango's Golden Age at Buenos Aires Teatro Colón, from which tango had so long been excluded.
TANGO STORIES: PARTNERS
NORMA'S STORY
I was always fascinated by tango, and always intended to learn, but for different reasons I never got round to it. I went to Buenos Aires at a difficult moment in my life, and I went to a show that moved me so deeply that I decided to go to a class. I was lucky enough to find an excellent teacher here in Salta, where I live. I attended a weekly class but I was so absorbed that the wait between classes felt like an eternity; I couldn't wait for those two hours every Saturday.
Dance was always central to my life; I started ballet when I was very young and kept at it for a long time. My dream was to be a ballerina, but it just wasn't to be. I started tango five years ago and I haven't stopped dancing since then; it's my life, it entraps you. After a while, the teacher asked me to dance with him in a tango show. I couldn't believe it. Of course, I said âyes' immediately, though inside I was very scared. I had spent so long doing other very different things that I wasn't sure I could do it. But luckily the body has its own memory, and little by little the things I had learned in all those years of classical dance came back to me. It was as if life had given me a second chance to do what I most wanted to do in life. Since then, tango has become more and more central to my life, it is my passion. It's as if there had been something missing â expressing myself with my body.
I think things changed very much with the tango festivals and championships. What began as a way of attracting tourism has become a worldwide phenomenon, with schools opening everywhere. New styles have emerged too, which have caught the interest of the young who are getting to know the history and the codes of tango. The world championships are attracting more and more people, and the city is completely full while they are on. People are so keen to
see tango that there are open-air tango shows going on. And now tango has been declared a world heritage too.
We met dancing tango. He was my only teacher at first, and he still is my teacher and dance partner. But we began to realize that something else was going on. For a year now, he has been my life companion too. I would say that we came to this relationship through sharing a passion for tango, which always moves things within you, even love.
The connection of two bodies in the embrace and the perfect connection in the dance is attractive and pleasurable; tango is full of seduction.
The way you dress is important, especially when you're dancing for an audience. If you're doing a show, you have to wear attractive clothes that allow you to shine, but they have to be comfortable enough to dance in too. The split skirt is elegant and sensual and lets you move freely. And you need to be well made-up and wear the high heels that add to this elegance. I think every woman who really feels like a woman likes to be feminine and dress adds to that feeling of our own attraction.
The feminine and the masculine are both very marked in the tango; it represents the relationship between men and women. So the way you dress underlines the seduction and the desire to attract your partner.
JOSÃ'S STORY
For me, tango is life itself; from the moment I began, at nineteen, it has marked my life. I already liked the music, and I played some instruments, and then one Saturday night I saw tango on
TV
and I haven't stopped dancing since. I began to dance, using my body and my feet as musical instruments. Within the year, I was teaching, and I grew together with tango.
Meeting your partner means two different things. On the dance floor you nod your head to invite the woman to dance; if she accepts you, you come together in an embrace that unites two bodies with a special energy accompanied by the music, until you achieve that union of bodies that produces dreams and moments of passion. Then there is the meeting in life, where the tango is an accomplice to love, because you fall in love not just with tango but with the person who enjoys the dancing. Romance begins in tango rhythm, turning it into something necessary and sublime for continuing our life as a couple.
Tango moves so many things within you that you often abandon everything else, sometimes even giving up on other important aspects of your life, like having children or spending time on other enjoyable activities. You feel so seductive when you're dancing tango, not because you're trying to but because it's part of the tango itself. It's something you never give up on â I'm a teacher and it's my vocation to make it known across the world. And when I watch people dance, I'm proud to have added my grain of sand to the happiness of others.
When I hear the first note, I feel a warmth, an emotion course through my body, an energy is released that I share with my partner. Because the ideal partner is one you share your life with.
I've been teaching for 27 years and dancing in shows and events; my years with tango have brought me great happiness. I've shared my passion with Argentines and foreigners, which has confirmed that tango is universal and everyone can feel it.
The tango boom today begins with the rediscovery of the dance and its recognition as a couple dance. It improves your self-esteem and puts you in touch with strong feelings towards the dance and your partner. And in addition, studies have shown that tango is good for the heart. And once you start you can't stop, which means it's important to discover it at the right moment of your life.
A CYCLE OF REBIRTH
One question remains. What is it about Argentine tango that appeals to and excites such passion? Dance is surrender of the self to the body.
At times with a new partner I have felt fear during our first dance. Can we really be this close, hearts beating together, smelling each other, sweat mingling, moving as one?
7
Tango, then, is intimacy made doubly dramatic by the absence of words, of explanation, that precedes the invitation to the dance, and the complete absorption with the music, which inhibits talk of any kind during the three-minute encounter. Yet there is safety too â the security of an ending, the knowledge that there are unspoken rules and rituals that set out invisible frontiers. The movement of several couples around the floor is in a single direction â and there are elaborate measures to avoid collision. The basis of the meeting is trust; the woman is willing to surrender to this unnamed partner, this stranger. Why this should work as it does is still a mystery, unless it is the same impulse that allows us to assume risk and danger as the threshold of pleasure. Because for both partners that risk is present, even if the history of the dance, its origins and gestures, emerge from a world of dominant males, the tango tells us in a hundred stories that his confidence too is fragile and evidence not only of control, but also of the lack of it in a wider world.
In a post-feminist world, these relationships are not what they seem. The ritual is maintained, though women can and do now propose as well as receive.
Yet, in many ways, the tango's past is always present. The tango, even the more romantic and dramatic tango-salon, is about sex, not love; a rehearsal of sexual passion in the brushing of legs and the swaying of the body. And yet, for the Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato, it expresses a kind of nostalgia for love and tenderness
that cannot be found in casual sexual encounters, though machismo demands that the sadness is buried in a challenging masculinity. For him, it is the reflection of a national history âdominated by maladjustment, nostalgia, sadness, frustration, dramatic experiences, discontent, resentment and other problems'.
8
The conclusion would seem to be, as Archetti suggests, that âthe tango can be seen as a discourse on human suffering and the negation of real and sincere happiness for both man and woman'.
9
One of the few tangos written by a woman (using a pseudonym, of course) seems to agree.
Se va la vida . . .
se va y no vuelve
.
Escuchá este consejo;
si un bacán te promete acomodar
,
entrá derecho viejo
.
Se va, pebeta
,
quién la detiene
si ni Dios la sujeta
,
lo mejor es gozarla y largar
las penas a rodar
.
Yo quiero
,
muchacha
,
que al fin mostrés la hilacha
y al mishio
recuerdo
le des un golpe de hacha
.
DecÃ, pa qué queres
llorar un amor
y morir, tal vez
,
de desesperanza
.
No rogués la flor
de un sueño infeliz
porque, a lo mejor
,
la suerte te alcanza
si te decidÃs
.
Se va la vida . . .
se va y no vuelve
,
escuchá este consejo;
si un bacán te promete acomodar
,
entrá derecho viejo
.
Pasan los dÃas
,
pasan los años
,
es fugaz la alegrÃa
,
no pensés en dolor ni en virtud
,
vivà tu juventud
.
Life fades away / and never returns / Here's my advice / if a rich man promises to look after you / get in there. / Life passes, girl / no stopping it / not even God can stop it / so the best thing to do is enjoy it and send / sorrows on their way
.
Girl / I want you / to show some backbone / and kick the memory of poverty / into the ditch. / Tell me / why cry over a lover / and die maybe / of despair? / Don't chase / an unhappy dream / because fate might / catch up with you / if you make a decision. Life fades away / and never returns / Here's my advice / if a rich man promises to look after you / get in there. / The days pass / years pass / happiness is fleeting / don't think of pain or virtue / live your youth while you have it
.
(âSe va la vida', Life passes you by â MarÃa Luisa Carnelli, 1929)
Yet the repeated resurgence of tango across the world suggests a different reading. The boom of recent decades is above all a dance boom, though the settings of the theatrical representations
insistently return to the demi-monde of prostitutes, pimps and red-light districts. Some have described this as a new variety of
nostalgie de la boue
, a fascination with the transgressive, the forbidden world of sexual experiment and perversion. Like the
milonguera
, the tango dancers of the present enter the three-minute contract willingly, abandoning the complex negotiations that govern the physical encounters between genders of which feminism has taught us to be constantly aware. Life, after all, soon passes.
CHRONOLOGY
1536
First settlement at Buenos Aires established by Pedro de Mendoza.
1541
Buenos Aires abandoned after Indian attacks.
1580
A second settlement of Buenos Aires established by Juan de Garay.
1609
Jesuit Missions founded in the Upper Paraná.
1620
Buenos Aires becomes capital of the province of the same name.
1767
Jesuits expelled from all Spanish territories.
1776
Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata established as a separate region and the port of Buenos Aires begins to flourish with the export of goods like leather.
1806â7
British attempts to occupy Buenos Aires.
1810
The May revolution deposes the Spanish viceroy, and the process of Argentine independence begins. These events are a response to the Napoleonic invasion of Spain.
1816
The Argentine Declaration of Independence issued by the Congress of Tucuman.
1820
The Battle of Cepeda is the first military confrontation between Federalists and Centralists.
1826
Bernardino Rivadavia named first President of Argentina, but the provinces refuse to accept his nomination and he resigns.
1828
Independence of Uruguay.
1829â3
The first rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas (the model for Sarmiento's
Facundo
).
1833
British forces re-occupy the Falkland Islands/Malvinas.
1835
Rosas's second period of rule begins.
1838â40
French blockade of the River Plate.
1839
Rosas made Supreme Leader of the Argentine Confederation.
1845â9
French and British blockade the River Plate.
1845
Sarmiento's
Facundo
is published.
Rosas overthrown by Urquiza. Yellow fever epidemic in Buenos Aires.
1853
Constitution of Argentina passed under the presidency of Urquiza. Buenos Aires refuses to accept it and secedes to become the State of Buenos Aires.
1857
Teatro Colón opens.
1858
Café Tortoni opens for business. New yellow fever epidemic in Buenos Aires
1859
Unitarian forces under Bartolome Mitre are defeated at the second Battle of Cepeda by Urquiza's federal forces.
1862