Tango

by Mike Gonzalez

  Today, Buenos Aires has rediscovered tango as a language that connects it with a wider world. It is the source of a good part of its tourist income. In 2010, it was recognized by UNESCO as part of ‘the intangible cultural heritage of humankind’. In late 2011, a demonstration at the Retiro Station demanded that the government devote more resources to its preservation. In China, it has become a form of protest against government repression.

  Tango’s extraordinary resilience tells a story beyond survival; it is a demonstration that its music and poetry respond to a deep sensual desire in all of us.

  TANGO IN THE WORLD

  In fact, tango had led a double life for many years. The ups and downs of its acceptance in Argentina were matched, but not exactly paralleled by its fate elsewhere – and sometimes in places that would seem to have very little in common with the society that gave the tango birth.

  Tango was brought to Finland by a Danish couple who danced it at the Börs Hotel in Helsinki in 1913. Odeon Records (founded in Berlin in 1903) was aggressively exporting its catalogue across Europe as well as to the United States and it continued to do so until 1936 when the Nazi government appointed a new, politically reliable director who substituted acceptable ‘Aryan’ recordings for the broad range of ethnic musics offered by Odeon. When the Argentine operation became independent during and after the First World War, under Max Glücksmann, his new Discos Nacional label produced a much more authentic tango sound than its parent company whose recordings tended towards march rhythms in slower time. Finland took its lead from the German interpretation, and through the 1920s and 1930s Finnish tango echoed the heavier tread of the German version. With the Second World War, however, the ties were severed and a new Finnish tango emerged, now described as a ‘national tango’, whose references and language owed more to rural traditions than to the urban scene. Its rhythms are more languid than the Argentine tango; its lyrics express the same yearning for love and nostalgia for a better time as its Argentine equivalent. But the most famous of them all, Unto Mononen’s ‘Satumaa’ (written in 1947, but most commercially successful in the 1960s in Reijo Tapale’s recording) creates an imaginary place outside time, a paradise, where ‘the concerns of tomorrow can be forgotten’ and love waits patiently.5

  Mononen’s iconic ‘Satumaa’ sits more comfortably within the tradition of a romantic ballad, and was sung for the slower and more formal dances in Finland’s outdoor summer pavilions. But just as foreign music became the vogue for youth in the early 1960s, tango had its own revival. The star tango singer Reijo Tapale’s recording of ‘Satumaa’ was at the top of the record charts in November 1961 and the same singer’s ‘Takdet meren ylla’ (Takdet by the sea) competed with the Beatles’ ‘All My Loving’ for number one in 1964. Popular among an older generation, tango had a second rebirth in the late 1980s, when the Seinajoki tango festival attracted crowds for the election of the Tango King and Queen which exceeded 100,000 every year by the end of the Nineties.

  Equally surprising, perhaps, is the enormous enthusiasm for tango in Japan. It was first introduced by an aristocrat, Baron Megata, who learned tango in Paris while convalescing from an illness and opened a tango academy on his return to Tokyo in 1926. The first tango orchestra to visit Japan, however, was Juan Canaro’s in 1954. A year earlier, Argentina was surprised to hear the recordings of the singer Ranko Fujisawa, who had learnt her tangos phonetically. Francisco Canaro followed in 1961, but it was in the 1970s – during tango’s lean years at home – that many of Argentina’s finest musicians visited Japan. It was, furthermore, a two-way traffic, with Japanese exponents of the ‘new Japanese tango’ visiting the salons of Buenos Aires. It was generally the dance that attracted the vast number of Japanese followers, and it was relatively late when bandoneon player Ryota Kamatsu was able to win appreciation for the Piazzolla style. In 2009, Hiroshi and Kyoko Yamao won the tango salon category at tango’s world championship in Buenos Aires, El Mundial.6

  Modern tango dancers.

  By the 1990s, tango was danced everywhere – 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 ‘Buena 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 ‘yes’ 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 – 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.

  JOSÉ’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 – 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 – 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 – 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 ‘dominated by maladjustment, nostalgia, sadness, frustration, dramatic experiences, discontent, resentment and other problems’.8 The conclusion would seem to be, as Archetti suggests, that ‘the 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.

  Decí, 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 decidís.

  Se va la vida . . .

  se va y no vuelve,

  escuchá este consejo;

  si un bacán te promete acomodar,

  entrá derecho viejo.

  Pasan los días,

  pasan los años,

  es fugaz la alegría,

  no pensés en dolor ni en virtud,

  viví 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.

  (‘Se va la vida’, Life passes you by – María 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.

  1806–7

  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.

&nb
sp; 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.

  1829–3

  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.

  1838–40

  French blockade of the River Plate.

  1839

  Rosas made Supreme Leader of the Argentine Confederation.

  1845–9

  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

  Buenos Aires rejoins the federation and Bartolome Mitre is elected the first president of a unified country.

  1864–70

  War of the Triple Alliance.

  1865

  Constitución railway station opened.

  1867

  Cholera epidemic in Buenos Aires.

  1868

  Birth of Angel Villoldo (he dies in 1919). Rosendo Mendizábal born (he dies in 1913).