Tango in Buenos AiresIn Buenos Aires, tango is so ingrained in the culture that evens someone who doesn't like tango knows a lot about it. Many porteños (citizens of Buenos Aires) grow up with an inner sense of tango - hearing the music on a daily basis, knowing the rhythm of the music, and implicitly understanding that the essential elements of the dance are improvisation, moving to the music, engaging in rhythmic play, and developing a heart-to-heart connection with one's partner. Because porteños come to the tango with an implicit knowledge of its essential elements, learning the steps and figures can be sufficient for them to develop the ability to dance tango authentically. - by Stephen Brown In 1902, the Teatro Opera started organizing tango balls. In the 1920s, tango was adopted by the Parisian high society and then all over the world. The Buenos Aires style of tango music evolved into an elaborated genre. In its heyday, tango had many famous orchestras such as those led by Aníbal Troilo and Juan D'Arienzo, and singers such as Carlos Gardel and Edmundo Rivero. The History of TangoThe exact origins of tango-both the dance and the word itself-are lost in myth and an unrecorded history. The generally accepted theory is that in the mid-1800s, African slaves were brought to Argentina and began to influence the local culture. The word "tango" may be straightforwardly African in origin, meaning "closed place" or "reserved ground." Or it may derive from Portuguese (and from the Latin verb tanguere, to touch) and was picked up by Africans on the slave ships. Whatever its origin, the word "tango" acquired the standard meaning of the place where African slaves and free blacks gathered to dance. Argentina was undergoing a massive immigration during the later part of the 1800s and early 1900s. In 1869, Buenos Aires had a population of 180,000. By 1914, its population was 1.5 million. The intermixing of African, Spanish, Italian, British, Polish, Russian and native-born Argentines resulted in a melting pot of cultures, and each borrowed dance and music from one another. Traditional polkas, waltzes and mazurkas were mixed with the popular habanera from Cuba and the candombe rhythms from Africa. Most immigrants were single men hoping to earn their fortunes in this newly expanding country. They were typically poor and desperate, hoping to make enough money to return to Europe or bring their families to Argentina. The evolution of tango reflects their profound sense of loss and longing for the people and places they left behind. Most likely the tango was born in African-Argentine dance venues attended by compadritos, young men, mostly native born and poor, who liked to dress in slouch hats, loosely tied neckerchiefs and high-heeled boots with knives tucked casually into their belts. The compadritos took the tango back to the Corrales Viejos-the slaughter house district of Buenos Aires-and introduced it in various low-life establishments where dancing took place: bars, dance halls and brothels. It was here that the African rhythms met the Argentine milonga music (a fast-paced polka) and soon new steps were invented and took hold. Although high society looked down upon the activities in the barrios, well-heeled sons of the porteño oligarchy were not averse to slumming. Eventually, everyone found out about the tango and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the tango as both a dance and as an embryonic form of popular music had established a firm foothold in the fast-expanding city of its birth. It soon spread to provincial towns of Argentina and across the River Plate to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, where it became as much a part of the urban culture as in Buenos Aires. The worldwide spread of the tango came in the early 1900s when wealthy sons of Argentine society families made their way to Paris and introduced the tango into a society eager for innovation and not entirely averse to the risqué nature of the dance or dancing with young, wealthy Latin men. By 1913, the tango had become an international phenomenon in Paris, London and New York. There were tango teas, tango train excursions and even tango colors-most notably orange. The Argentine elite who had shunned the tango were now forced into accepting it with national pride. The tango spread worldwide throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The dance appeared in movies and tango singers traveled the world. By the 1930s, the Golden Age of Argentina was beginning. The country became one of the ten richest nations in the world and music, poetry and culture flourished. The tango came to be a fundamental expression of Argentine culture, and the Golden Age lasted through the 1940s and 1950s. Tango's fortunes have always been tied to economic conditions and this was very true in the 1950s. During this time, as political repression developed, lyrics reflected political feelings until they started to be banned as subversive. The dance and its music went underground as large dance venues were closed and large gatherings in general were prohibited. The tango survived in smaller, unpublicized venues and in the hearts of the people. The necessity of going underground combined with the eventual invasion of rock and roll sent the tango into decline until the mid-1980s when the stage show Tango Argentino opened in Paris. Once again Paris was ground zero for igniting tango excitement worldwide. The show toured the world and stimulated a revival in Europe, North America and Japan that we are part of today. Many of us who begin to dance Argentine tango have no experience with the culture and begin to learn the dance in a cultural environment that is alien to the dance. That places us at a disadvantage in learning to dance tango authentically-where authenticity might be defined by what would be accepted in Buenos Aires. To some extent searching for authenticity as prescribed by a group of distant people may seem to be a pursuit for small returns. How much better to ask, what qualities would make dancing tango a transcendent experience? As my own experience with the dance has grown, however, I have found that tango has developed as it has in Buenos Aires precisely because many people found this form of the dance takes them to the inner tango where they find a transcendent and sublime experience. The authentic forms of the dance consist of moving to the music, engaging in rhythmic play, developing a heart-to-heart connection with our partner, and spontaneously creating as the dance floor and our skills permit. By Stephen Brown. Click for a great resource website at: http://www.tejastango.com Argentine Tango DancingIn Buenos Aires and other parts of Argentina, tango is danced in a spectrum of individualistic or personal styles, and many tango dancers who are Argentine do not accept a categorization of their own dancing by any broad stylistic name. They simply say they are dancing tango, their own style, or the style of their neighborhood or city. A few confuse the issue further by identifying their own style by a name that other dancers associate with a different style. Consequently, parsing the commonalities and differences that can be found across the continuum of individual styles to clearly describe the characteristics of various styles is challenging, potentially controversial, and possibly misleading. Nonetheless, if we regard style to mean an approach to dancing that creates incompatibilities with other approaches and has a sufficient number of adherents who stick firmly to the listed elements, I think it is possible to create rough definitions for a number of distinguishable styles of Argentine tango: salon, milonguero, club, orillero, canyengue, nuevo and fantasia
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