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CHAPTER 1 The History of Tango.

Excerpt....."First I want to say that, although the history of tango is fascinating in its own way, it contributes only a little, in a practical sense, to the dance you are about to learn. You could leave this whole chapter out completely and still tango satisfactorily. That would be a great shame, however, because it is fun to incorporate some of the flavour of tango’s earlier days in our dancing today. I believe that tango is as much a language as speech. In the same way as many of us love the poetry of Shakespeare even though we don’t communicate with each other in Tudor English, we are perfectly able to grasp the subtleties of tango without necessarily copying those who danced it in the past.

I dare to go one step further. I am eager to dispel the myth that there is some sort of ‘authentic’ tango that can and must be copied and is set in concrete for all time. I know a number of people who choose to believe this, and that’s fine for them, though I wonder what they get out of that feeling. I just worry that, if we focus too much on the past, we may lose the joy of the present and – worse still – discover that there is no one to tango with in the future.

No one actually owns tango or can forbid anyone from connecting with it for any reason. It is a genuine, basically earthy dance of the proletariat; a dance created by the people, for the people. Tango did not evolve because people wanted to do only that which had been done before. It was new and fresh and dangerous. It pushed at the boundaries of human contact and was not subservient to form. I read somewhere that one lover of tango thought that, when Osvaldo Pugliese, a great bandleader, died in 1995, so did tango. That is exactly the attitude I feel we must fight against. While, at the moment of writing, there is no doubt a strong rise in the popularity of tango – both the music and the dance – it still needs all the friends it can get....".............

.."...........As I understand it, from 1875 to 1900 Argentina opened its doors to floods of immigrants, mostly from Europe. By the turn of the 20th century those immigrants outnumbered the original population by 40 to 1, and it is interesting to realise that in Buenos Aires in 1900 there were daily newspapers in English, German, Yiddish and Italian but only a weekly one in Spanish, the local language. Remember too that the local culture was also Spanish, with stiff rules of courtship. Often, at a social gathering, men outnumbered women by as much as 100 to 1. The gross discrepancy between the desire for women’s company and the supply thereof must have led to a great deal of rivalry, tension and violence, and it is little surprise that the culture of ‘machismo’ was then at its peak.

Some of the women that accompanied the immigrants were – shall we say – not the most ladylike, and many worked in bordellos near to the docklands. As the male population rose so the need for brothels grew, but the supply of suitable woman to service them remained extremely limited. At this time only half the male population could have a wife and there was no chance of casual relationships with normal women. Men, being what they are, looked to prostitutes for female company. A man could buy various services from these women, including a chat. You could buy a dance with a woman, who would make sure you wanted to keep on buying by flirting and teasing and seeking to arouse you. She would pay more attention to the more affluent customer and to the one who gave her a good time. She might even see herself able to marry such a man and become respectable before old age and/or disease put a stop to her trade. Incidentally, this brothel culture was not just found in Buenos Aires by any means, as anyone who remembers the song ‘Hey, Big Spender!’ from the show and film Sweet Charity, set in New York, will realise.

Many of the movements we still use in tango today have echoes of those days of sexual frustration, teasing and flirtation. I have friends who find close embrace slightly too arousing to attempt. The leads for sacadas in close embrace involve quite close pelvic contact, and all leg intrusions between the legs of our partners are suggestive, to say the least.

In those early days, if the man practised hard and became a good dancer he had more chance of a free dance – and maybe more. Men who wanted to be good dancers practised their skills with each other. They had to, because you would have to pay a prostitute and there was no way that any other woman would dance with you. So men – rip-roaringly, heterosexual, macho men – danced with men, and this is still a part of the tango culture today. It was common for the younger boys to be used as followers to assist the older men to practise new moves. I have danced with men on many occasions in lessons both as a leader and as a follower. This has helped me immensely, and this should not surprise us since, if we accept that the best leaders are those who are most acutely aware of their follower’s needs, the more you understand the follower’s problems the better a leader you become. It is interesting to realise that, despite all the evidence available, some dispute still exists as to whether, in those early days, men danced with men or not. Some seem to feel that even to suggest that men danced with each other is an affront to the macho image of the early Argentinian, or even implies that the men were gay. I find this difficult to accept, since it is a fact that the population of Buenos Aires rose from some 210,000 in 1880 to 1,200,000 by 1910; most were immigrants from Europe, where there is a long and honourable tradition of men dancing with each other.

So, to begin with (the story goes), tango arose within the bordellos of Buenos Aires, particularly in those dockland areas by the River Plate, such as San Telmo. Well, not really, some would say. They point to sources that say that no musicians worked in brothels. That makes a good deal of sense to me. What would be the point of it? ‘Music while you work’? We know for sure that establishments referred to as ‘academies’ became popular places where a man might drink, listen to music, flirt with the waitresses and dance as well. It would seem very likely that some of these places – dance halls – developed an unsavoury reputation for all sorts of criminal activities indulged in by their clientele. Perhaps the confusion lies in wanting to label these ‘academies’ as dance halls or brothels when their function was not so narrow. Furthermore, it seems very likely that the sort of venue providing music, dance, alcohol and whatever else you might seek would more likely to be found in the provinces than in Buenos Aires, where demand for prostitutes was high and so were rents. Whatever the truth is, tango has not exactly suffered from the slightly raffish image that surrounds it. "

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