History of Tango

Tango is a dance, music and poetry that originated in Buenos Aires at the turn of the century, developing in the melting pot of cultures that was Buenos Aires. Immigrants from Europe – Italy, Spain, Britain, Poland, Russia, Germany and every other European country mixed with earlier generation of settlers of all races from other South American countries. They brought their native music and dances with them, and continued to assimilate new innovations from abroad.

Traditional polkas, waltzes and mazurkas were mixed with the popular Habanera from Cuba, to form a new dance and music, the milonga, which was popular in the 1870s . This was known as the “poor man’s Habanera”. Central to the emergence of the milonga is was the culture of the black population, with their dances such as the candombe, a mix of many different African traditions.

Buenos Aires was very poor city, with almost penniless immigrants coming to make their fortunes on the plains of Argentina or Uruguay, failing and ending up in the cities. In the early years of the 1900, 2 million immigrants arrived in Buenos Aires from Europe, 1/2 from Italy, 1/3 from Spain. Many were single men, hoping to earn enough to return to Europe, or bring their family or buy a bride from Europe. A poor, desperate, male population bred crime, brothels, gangsters, and the tango.

The generally accepted history has the tango dance originating from the minor toughs, the compadritos, with nothing to their name except macho pride, imitating the dances of the African population, as they danced on the street. Thus, possibly, the much wilder candombe was mixed with the milonga to form the early Tango.

Men learned together from a young age- there were few women, and certainly none to practice with. Tango inevitably moved to where they could be found – in the brothels, and dubious legend has it that the women could chose their clients by their dancing skill. The man had three dances to prove himself. In the mysterious way that popular culture develops, this dance and music was both popularized, and moved up the social scale, where it met more refined cousins coming down, and was picked up by the sons of the rich who preferred to spend their time in the less salubrious parts of their city.

All sources stress the influence of the African communities and their rhythms, while the instruments and techniques brought in by European immigrants played a major role in its final definition, relating it to the Salon music styles to which Tango would contribute back at a later stage, when it became fashionable in early 20th century Paris. In Argentina, the word Tango seems to have first been used in the 1890s. In 1902 the Teatro Opera started to include tango in their balls.

By 1910 the rich sons of Argentina were making their way to Paris, centre of the cultural and entertainment world. They introduced the tango into a society eager for innovation, and not entirely averse to the risqué nature of this import.

In 1913 the Tango had spread from St Petersburg to New York, not without controversy, and had become an international phenomena, even if its heart was still on the Rio de la Plata and the cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The Argentine upper classes who had shunned the tango were now forced into accepting it, because it was fashionable in Paris.

Hollywood glamorized the tango to a mass audience, with Valentino as the most famous if completely inauthentic tangoing gaucho. At this point a long conflict started between tango as the expression of the soul and experience of the Buenos Aires resident- the Porteño, and this being inaccessible to anyone else, and a universally practiced and meaningful music and dance.

The First World War was a hiatus to the development, but during this time the first films were made, the tango lyric and music developed and recordings made. After the War the tango was again taken up again and became the dominant music and dance of the fun seeking and culturally anarchic 20s. The development of tango in this period reflects its emergence from the small venues, where sex and machismo were the everyday, to become a mass entertainment, danced by thousands of respectable citizens in the cabarets of prospering cities: Argentina was now one of the richest countries in the world.

The dance was refined to the slick and elegant ‘salon’ style, the lyrics of the songs slowly moved from lamenting the poverty and loneliness of the immigrant men, to more generic love songs for the mass market. Many lyrics played on nostalgia for the “good old days” before the neighbourhoods were cleaned up, the slang of the working class barrios was still used, emphasizing this. Stars were made, singers, notably Carlos Gardel, and many other musicians, dancers, lyricists and composers. They were not only famous in Argentina and Uruguay, but travelled the world, and becoming film stars.

By 1930 Tango was out of fashion in Europe, a military coup in Argentina suppressed and censored it for 10 years, and Gardel died in a plane crash in 1935. But out of this developed the Golden Age of Tango, with a flourishing in music, poetry and culture, and the tango came to be a fundamental expression of Argentine culture.

Tango changed with political and economic conditions, and we can hear this in the music. In poorer times, orchestras were smaller, and as political repression developed, lyrics become political too, until they started to be banned as subversive.

The dance style changed, as large salons closed , and dancers were once again forced into small venues with less space. At the end of the 1950s Tango eventually went out of fashion, crushed like many other dances, by the arrival of America swing and rock and roll, and was repressed by post-Peronist nationalist government . From the 1960s to the 1980s it was only danced and played by a few of the older generation and enthusiasts

The current revival dates from the early 1980s, when a stage show Tango Argentino, starring dancers such as Juan Carlos Copes and other future stars of tango, toured the world creating a dazzling version of the tango and a romantic view of the early and golden ages of tango.

The period since 1990 is again a time of renewal, of tension between the international and the Argentine, between a desire to recreate the Golden Age, and another to evolve it in the light of modern culture and values. There is an explosion of interest around the world with places to dance in many cities and towns, and a growing circuit of Argentine and international festivals.

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