The Archive

In 1880 Buenos Aires became the federal capital, and the ships kept coming: Italians, Spaniards, Basques, Jews from Eastern Europe, most of them young men travelling alone. By 1914 the city had passed a million and a half people. On its edges, the arrabales and the riverside orillas, newcomers met the creole compadrito and an Afro-Argentine community whose candombe lent the new music its pulse.

Out of the habanera and the milonga came the tango, danced in academias, dance halls and the courtyards of the conventillos. Its first words were the corte, a sudden stop, and the quebrada, a break at the hips. With women scarce, men practised with men until they were good enough to be chosen. Polite Buenos Aires looked away.

Look forNo film survives from these years. The closest you can get is later canyengue: José Méndez in 1951, feet quick, knees soft, still cutting and breaking.

Around 1913 Paris caught tango fever: tango teas, a fashionable colour called tango, a warning from the Archbishop of Paris. Argentine dancers such as Casimiro Aín crossed the Atlantic to teach it, and Europe’s approval made the dance respectable back home.

The music moved on first. After 1917 Carlos Gardel’s tango-canción gave people songs to listen to, and from 1924 Julio De Caro’s sextet refined the orchestra. On the floor the older style held on: a stepped, playful, knees-bent tango, later called canyengue, danced close in crowded halls. El Cachafaz was its king. In 1933 he and Carmencita Calderón danced in ¡Tango!, one of Argentina’s first sound films, leaving the best-known early footage of how tango was danced.

Look forIn the 1933 footage, watch Cachafaz’s feet: small, fast, witty steps inside a short, close embrace. Nobody turns much yet.

In 1935 Juan D’Arienzo, with Rodolfo Biagi at the piano, gave tango back a hard, danceable beat, and the young returned to the floor by the thousands. Through the 1940s Troilo, Di Sarli, Pugliese, Canaro and dozens more played the clubs of every barrio. Men still learned at men-only prácticas, often for years, before they asked a woman to dance.

Around 1939–40 Petróleo and El Negro Lavandina reworked the turn into the giro, with the enrosque and a boleo the follower could be led into; the fuller orchestras asked more of the body. Each barrio kept its own accent, and Villa Urquiza’s long, elegant walk became the model for many. Almost none of these dancers were professionals: they had day jobs, and danced at night.

Look forIn Portalea’s or Finito’s footage: the long, unhurried walk, the pause that waits for the orchestra, and the turn as a whole-body event.

The milongas began to thin in the early 1950s, and the coup that ousted Perón in 1955 hastened it. Rock and roll and television drew the young away, the clubs booked fewer orquestas típicas, and many milongueros married, worked and stopped dancing for twenty or thirty years.

The dance survived in two places. On stage, Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves, winners of a contest at Luna Park in 1951, built a choreographed tango for theatres and television, as far as New York. In academies and a few loyal clubs, teachers such as Antonio Todaro and Raúl Bravo taught and named figures that would later travel the world. Under the dictatorship of 1976–83 people disappeared, and the milongas grew smaller still.

Look forCopes in 1963, to Troilo’s “Danzarín”: tango made to be seen from a seat, with figures that read from the back of a theatre.

On 11 November 1983, a month before Argentina returned to democracy, Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli opened Tango Argentino at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Its dancers were not young. Copes and Nieves led the cast, and Virulazo, called back at 57, danced with his wife Elvira.

The show reached Broadway in 1985 and drew three Tony nominations, and audiences who had never seen tango wanted to learn it. Teachers were scarce. Todaro’s pupils Miguel Ángel Zotto and Milena Plebs joined the touring cast, then founded their own company, Tango x 2. In Buenos Aires, free classes filled with hundreds, and milongueros who had stopped in the 1950s came back to the floor, this time as teachers.

Look forThe Zotto and Plebs duets: milonguero vocabulary, learned from Todaro and Petróleo, choreographed and lit for a theatre.

Through the 1990s the revival turned social. Milongas reopened, the Parakultural (1993) and La Viruta (1994) drew a younger crowd, and the milongueros of the 1940s and 50s became the most sought-after teachers in the world. Tete Rusconi and Susana Miller took close-embrace salón abroad and, with Cacho Dante, gave it a name: milonguero style.

At the same time a practice group around Gustavo Naveira and Fabián Salas, meeting at Cochabamba 444 in San Telmo, took the dance apart to learn how it worked: the axis, the cross, every possible turn and change of direction. What came out was called tango nuevo, and with it a way of teaching by principles rather than set steps. Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997) put many of these dancers on screen.

Look forTete’s vals with Silvia Ceriani: close embrace, plain steps, all music. Then any Salas class: the same dance, explained from the inside.

In 2003 Buenos Aires held the first Campeonato Mundial de Baile de Tango, with one category for salón and one for the stage, and couples entered from across the world. A year later Osvaldo and Coca Cartery, a milonguero couple from Lanús, won the salón title, and from 2005 to 2010 couples taught by Carlos Pérez and Rosa Forte at Club Sunderland won it six times running.

Video changed how the dance travels: a step once seen in person, once, can now be watched a hundred times. Festivals spread from Istanbul to Los Angeles, and a single dancer such as Chicho Frúmboli has thousands of filmed dances. From 2011 Pepa Palazón recorded the elders in their own words. Most of what you will watch on TangoTube was filmed in this chapter.

Look forPut a Mundial salón final next to a Chicho exhibition: one tradition, two ideas of freedom.