Why Tango?
Social dance forms arise out of a profound physical need to create a language in which people can speak to each other without words. But since the sixties, most social dancing in Western culture has been essentially a solo activity. People did their own thing, unencumbered by the needs of another body, unencumbered by rules and conventions. But during the last decade, there has been a huge revival of interest in ballroom dancing: the waltz, the quickstep, the Latin dances such as the salsa and rumba, and various forms of jive.
But the Argentinean tango holds a unique place in couple dancing. The body is closer, more intimate than in any other dance form. And yet the 2 legs move faster and with more deadly accuracy than in any other comparable dance. It is this combination of sensual, meditative, relaxed contact in the upper body and swift, almost martial arts-like repartee in the lower body that gives the tango its unique identity.
Add to this vibrant mix the music - melancholy, ecstatic, growling, predatory, soaring, seeking, heartbreakingly beautiful (especially compared to the insipid kitsch that most ballroom dancing music has become) - and you have the ingredients for something more than a craze. You have a genuine participatory art form, which can express the most profound and complex longings that people can have about their lives, about each other, about the nature of existence itself.
"The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration. " - Jorge Luis Borges.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the tango. However, most researchers agree that the earliest tangos were danced in the streets, bars and brothels of Buenos Aires around the 1800s. The vocabulary of the dance and rhythms of the music that accompanied it echoed the ethnic origins of its proponents. In fact, one of the earliest meanings of the word "tango" is "a place where black people gather to dance."
African slaves in Argentina had brought with them the rhythmic patterns of the candombe and later black Cubans brought the habanera to Buenos Aires. A new dance evolved based on the steps of the candombe, the habanera, together with the polka and the mazurka and became known at the time as a milonga. (Milonga is now a term used to describe both a variant of the tango and also, somewhat confusingly, a dance hall.)
Before long, this new dance had been taken up by the new European immigrants, and the tango, as we now know it, was born. If you add kicks and flicks of the legs (that resemble some of the footwork of African dance) to the simple walks and turns of European folk dance and a close embrace that may have originated in the brothels, you have the basic vocabulary of the tango. Small improvising bands, usually guitar, violin and flute, accompanied the early tangos. Around 1910, the bandoneon (a larger, more expressive version of the accordion, probably brought to Argentina by the earliest immigrants from Germany) became the key instrument and identifiable sound of the tango.
At the turn of the century it was common for the sons of wealthy European immigrants to frequent the bars and brothels of the barrios (districts) of Buenos Aires. Here, they learned to dance. Their wealth enabled them to travel outside Argentina, and they took the tango with them, introducing this dance to "polite" society in Europe and America. After its initial scandalous reception in about 1913 the first wave of tango fever swept the world.
In the twenties, in Buenos Aires, classically trained musicians, such as Julio de Caro, who formed one of the earliest tango sextets, started to take the tango into new areas of subtlety and complexity. The improvising abilities of individual musicians were now held within a more formal musical framework. Meanwhile the tango cancion (song) started to become a subculture of the tango world in its own right. Carlos Gardel, arguably the greatest singer of them all, became the beloved voice and adored icon of the people.
In the thirties (in effect, the "swing era" of tango) came the first big band sounds. Juan D'Arienzo (the "King of Rhythm") and Anibal Troilo created full orchestrated versions of such tunes as "La Cumparsita" that became internationally recognizable tangos.
In the aftermath of World War II, under the Peronist government, Argentina started to become politically isolated from the rest of the world. Several decades followed in which the tango developed under a series of political crises. Osvaldo Pugliese, one of the great bandleaders of this period, was one of many who were blacklisted or imprisoned for their beliefs.
By the sixties, rock 'n' roll had eclipsed all other popular music worldwide, and then Argentina fell to a military dictatorship. But despite laws forbidding groups of more than three to gather together, the tango did not die. And by the eighties (partly under the influence of the great dance teachers, Antonio Todaro and Pepito Avellaneda), the tango had been revived as a form for the stage. Audiences around the world (through such shows as "Tango Argentino") started to become familiar with the musical vocabulary of the tango, and with a theatricalised version of the dance. To dance tango on stage the couple moved further apart, and the moves became more athletic, balletic, and spectacular. A split developed between the stage style (imitated, poorly, around the world by tango novices) and the milonguero close-hold style danced in the clubs and dance halls of Buenos Aires by people for whom tango was a way of life.
A healthy debate began to rage in the tango world about what was the "real" tango. Meanwhile, a parallel argument about what constituted "real" tango music had been sparked by the emergence of "modern" tango, spearheaded by Astor Piazzola, whose tango compositions were reaching concert hall audiences around the world.
As a new millennium approaches, the tango is evidently, once again, a living art form, with Buenos Aires the epicenter of a cultural phenomenon. The tango remains essentially a popular musical form, rooted in the visceral sense of its dance; combining melodic, lyrical beauty with its unmistakable rhythmic drive. Heady and passionate, sensual and meditative, melancholic and joyful, it is identifiably Argentinean and yet, clearly, is universally accessible. The tango is as complex as its own roots and as simple as the primal impulse for two human beings to move as one.
"The soul is not really united unless all the bodily energies, all the limbs of the body, are united. " - Martin Buber.
Sally Potter
SALLY POTTER is the creator of "THE TANGO LESSON", a joint British-French-Argentine production, which was awarded the best film of the year award at the 1997 Mar Del Plata (Argentina) International Film Festival.
Click here to see a clip from the movie - The Tango Lesson.Sally Potter started making films when she was a teenager. After training as a dancer and choreographer in the 1970s and making several short films, Sally went on to become an award-winning performance artist and theatre director with a reputation for work that managed to be both challenging and entertaining, with shows such as "Mounting, Death and the Maiden", and "Berlin" (with Rose English). In addition, she worked as a lyricist and singer, performing widely in various improvised music bands and collaborating with composer Lindsay Cooper on the song cycle "Oh Moscow".
Sally's short film "Thriller"(1979), based on Puccini's opera "La Boheme", was a cult hit on the international festival circuit. This was followed by her first feature film, "The Gold Diggers" (1983), starring Julie Christie; then "The London Story" (1986); a documentary series for Channel 4, "Tears, Laughter, Fears and Rage" (1986); and a film on women in Soviet cinema, "I Am an Ox, I Am a Horse, I Am a Man, I Am a Woman" (1988).
Sally then wrote and directed the internationally acclaimed "Orlando" (1992), based on Virginia Woolf's classic novel and starring Tilda Swinton. Sally co-composed the score for "Orlando" with David Motion. In addition to two Academy Award nominations, "Orlando" has won more than 25 international awards, including the " Felix" awarded by the European Film Academy for the best Young European Film.
