Jo Baim - Tango: Creation of a Cultural Icon

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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2007 by Jo Baim
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baim, Jo.
Tango: creation of a cultural icon / Jo Baim.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34885-2 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21905-3 (pbk.)
1. Tango (Dance)Social aspectsHistory. I. Title.
GV1796.T3B34 2007
784.18885dc22
2006039032
1 2 3 4 5 12 11 10 09 08 07

To H.,
who teaches me
every day
the truest joy of
dancing
through
life.

To adequately thank everyone who helped with this project would require a second volume (properly documented in the Bibliography, of course). Friends and family, you know who you are, and each one of you has helped far more than you know. To my fellow Benedictines, both Oblates and Sisters, thank you for teaching me the holy value of work as prayermay this little book be worthy of the unwavering encouragement you have given me.

Thanks to the patient and helpful editors at Indiana University Pressyou were a joy to work with. Deepest appreciation goes to my friend and colleague Karin Pendle, Ph.D., for her enthusiastic support of tango as a dissertation topic and her steady good humor and belief in me ever since. Also, my thanks go to all the kind and helpful people in Buenos Aires, especially Ariel and Sandra.

One of the best things about researching historic ballroom dance is that you actually get to do the dances. Thanks to Richard Powers, Dr. Patri Pugliese, Joan Walton, and all the dance friends for some exquisite turns around the floor and many irreplaceable memories, as well as shared sources and ideas.

Many thanks to Lesley and Fay for the boxes of pencils, years of friendship, and endless cups of coffee, and to Steve, Bendetta, and Karri for taking such good care of You Know Who. And to Henryconstant, loyal, faithful companion of his dancing mom, even if he literally does have two left feet.

The history of the tango is a story of encounters between those who should never have met.

Marta E. Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion

If one asks very many people about the tango, certain common threads still appear quite often: the tango is a dance from Argentina; the music always has a habanera rhythm; all tangos are sad or dramatic or tragic in some way; and it originated among the criminal classes in Buenos Aires around the end of the nineteenth century. As is the case with most beloved cultural icons, the common image is based in truth, but, as is just as often the case, error creeps in when devotees know or remember only parts of the history. A number of limitations plague the preceding description. First, the texts of tango songs in Argentina had a cultural importance equal to that of the dance music. Second, not all tango texts are sad; many of the earliest ones are based on comic or satiric themes of urban life. Third, starting with the first young Argentine aristocrats to discover the tango, many have assumed that lower class means criminal class. This affixed an undeserved label to many of the originators of the tango, particularly women. This particular myth is perhaps the hardest one to shake, since modern social dancers enjoy recreating the roles of sultry seductress and steamy gangster, and those roles also provide theatre audiences with something instantly recognizable. Yet in an age when women wish to add their own stories to validated, recorded history, it is paradoxical that only their bad sides appear relevant to the history of the tango. Finally, though the habanera rhythm identifies the tango for many, it did not originate with the tango. Also, its appearance as the consistent rhythmic foundation of the bass line lasted for a relatively brief time, although, ornamented and distributed throughout the texture, it remains an integral part of tango music.

A completely different aspect of tango history emerges in the various answers to the question, Whose tango is it? Many Argentines smile politely when one discusses the European tango of the years before World War I, and suppress a laugh at the modern ballroom styles of Arthur Murray and others. Yet to a dance historian, all these are at least called tangos and must be considered parts of the whole picture. The problem then becomes one of finding the links of style, steps, and music between one geographical area or period and another, and tracing the paths of transmission.

The tangos complex history begins with seemingly unsolvable mysteries. Perhaps the earliest reference to the tango as a dance is in some proclamations of the municipal court of Montevideo, Uruguay, which prohibited performing the tangos de negros in public. anomalous description, primary source material on the tango is difficult to find until around 1910, and almost impossible to find in Argentina itself. Many European dance manuals after 1900 refer to Argentine style, and Argentine sources provide some sociological and stylistic information. What the latter lack, much to the regret of choreographers and historians, are specific descriptions or breakdowns of the actual steps. Without such mechanics it is nearly impossible to reconstruct the earliest tango dances with any accuracy, even though dancers can perhaps approximate the style.

Apart from its use for dancing, tango music is very important to Argentine culture. Today, many people who do not dance at all are actively involved in performing, preserving, and appreciating tango music. In fact, tango music and texts had cultural importance some twenty years before the dance was exported to Paris as a symbol of Argentina. The tango as song has documented the spirit, culture, and struggles of a nation of immigrants and displaced natives, savoring and enjoying the loneliness and isolation of being foreign in their own country and feeling deeply the political and economic strife that has characterized Argentine life particularly life in Buenos Airesthroughout the countrys history. The tango even has its own vocabulary, Lunfardo, which was originally a patois of the minor criminal class and became the expressive language of choice for writers of symbolic and metaphoric tango lyrics. For example, the Lunfardo word for the aforementioned pleasure of wallowing in ones own gloom is mufarse.

My visit to Buenos Aires in 1991 ended on the inaugural day of a University of Tangoa civic venture designed to encourage citizens and visitors alike to go deeper into the history, musical repertoire, and culture of the tango. There are also several smaller archives in Buenos Aires dedicated to tango music past and present and to the iconography treasured by the Argentine people. Each year, more people visit the grave of Carlos Gardel, Argentinas beloved tango singer of the 1930s, than the graves of Juan and Eva Peron. The few remaining street musicians who entertain with tango played on the