What is Argentine tango?
Argentine tango is a dance, music, and poetry that originated in Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the late 1800s. It is a beloved cultural treasure, a way of life, and a worldwide phenomenon whose clichéd image of passion belies a deeper mystery, intricacy, and elusive heart. As dance, tango is a social, improvised, partner form. Because its essence is simple—hugging someone and walking—tango is accessible to people of all ages and doesn’t require specialized physical training. Indeed, tango communities around the world are remarkably intergenerational. At the same time, tango’s improvisational nature invites complexity through endless permutations, and its simple essence invites lifelong refinement at the level of finesse, subtlety, and artistry. This combination of simplicity and complexity is central to tango’s allure. Many dancers spend a lifetime perfecting their walk, searching for new and different ways of putting steps together with a partner, and attuning themselves to respond to their partner, the music, and the flow of the larger room, all at once. Tango dancers learn and share a movement vocabulary, but the dance requires openness to the moment; in lieu of pre-planned choreography, tango is always new, always at the edge of comprehension and in the present of experience.
TANGO’S HISTORY
Argentine tango emerged from the coming together of displaced populations—immigrants, formerly enslaved persons, and internal migrants—and their unique cultural traditions in the close quarters of the Rio de la Plata’s largely impoverished, working-class enclaves. Stigmatized for its connection to marginalized groups, tango eventually won favor after it was exported abroad and embraced by global ‘elites’ in dance salons and academies of cities including Paris and London. Primed for acceptance at home, tango ultimately flourished in Buenos Aires, where it experienced a “Golden Era” from the 1920s-1950s. During this period, dance halls and cabarets spread throughout the city, neighborhood clubs hosted giant tango parties, citizens of all social classes learned to dance, orchestras abounded, and the most enduring musical recordings were made. Following a roughly 30-year decline from the mid-1950s, tango entered a period of rebirth in Buenos Aires from the mid-1980’s, and a global renaissance with the internationally-touring stage show Tango Argentino, which inspired the birth of social tango communities around the world.