Tango

by Mike Gonzalez

  We might suspect that the choreography was adapted to Parisian taste, to the ‘dances brunes’ (brown dances), the Apaches and the bals musette. Given people’s boredom with the waltz and the quadrille, a kind of convulsive and sensual new waltz was invented which evoked a fantasy Buenos Aires, a mix of Shanghai and Chicago.9

  The impression was probably encouraged by the 4,000 or so Argentines living in Paris who introduced tango to Paris in this first decade of the century. But there were also growing numbers of tango musicians, dancers and singers there, many of whom were first or (by now) second generation immigrants. There is disagreement over when and where the tango was first danced in Paris. What is certainly true is that it was popular on both sides of the Atlantic by 1906 or 1907, and that by 1913 it had taken Paris, London and New York by storm. Argentine musicians were arriving in Paris in numbers now, partly because of tango’s popularity and partly to make the first recordings, since Buenos Aires had no recording facilities as yet. The majority of visiting Argentines, however, were the young scions of the wealthy urban classes for whom a stay in Paris was an obligatory part of their social education. They had already paid clandestine visits to the brothels and cafés of La Boca and the working-class districts before they left – and in Paris they could practise their new-found techniques in a far more open way. The Apache dances that they witnessed in the boîtes of Paris seemed very like the tango – and their European fellows seemed thirsty for any physical expression that smacked of primitive places and forbidden desires.

  If it was sailors who brought the sheet music to Paris, and the musicians of the bordellos who first took their instruments to play there, it was the Argentine aristocracy and its Parisian confrères who took up the tango with the greatest enthusiasm. Ricardo Güiraldes, a writer from an Argentine landowning family, who was in Paris in 1910, attended all the parties in the palaces of the aristocracy: he demonstrated the daring new dance at a ball held by Madame de Reszke and the Princess Murat. ‘Do we dance this standing up?’, the Princess asked. The tango’s dramatic sensuality clearly excited the wealthy friends of Güiraldes and his friend Jorge Newbery, son of another of Argentina’s wealthiest families and, like Güiraldes, a good dancer. Güiraldes’s poem ‘Tango’ was written in that year:10

  Creator of silhouettes that glide by silently

  as if hypnotized by a blood-filled dream,

  hats tilted over sardonic sneers.

  The all-absorbing love of a tyrant,

  jealously guarding his dominion

  over women who have surrendered submissively,

  like obedient beasts . . .

  Sad, severe tango . . .

  Dance of love and death . . .

  Güiraldes’s famous novel, Don Segundo Sombra (1926),11 was a romantic recreation of gaucho life which established for his own class and their European friends the myth of a mysterious and primitive Argentina.

  Tango bands were already playing in the clubs of Paris and London, though in Paris local rules obliged them to dress in national costume, in the uniform of the rural gaucho, which, in the context of Paris, served only to emphasize its exoticism. These orquestas típicas played in nightclubs and at the afternoon thés dansants where the ladies of the middle and upper classes could dance with their chauffeurs and hairdressers. Casimiro Aín had been dancing since 1904 and gave classes to men and women, among them the young Rudolph Valentino, who would later become Hollywood’s favourite tango dancer and archetypal Latin seducer.

  It was Josephine Baker’s pastiche of African dance and her spectacular erotic shows that summarized the era. But Jean Cocteau described the atmosphere with a more jaundiced eye:

  It was 1913. Soto and his cousin Manolo Martínez had brought Argentine tango on a gramophone. They lived in a little hotel in Montmorency. You could see old ladies who had never left home before and young rebellious women from the upper classes. Old and young danced pressed against Soto and Martinez. . . . The whole city was dancing the tango, whose steps at that time were very complicated. Fat men walked with grave expressions, marking the rhythm, stopping on one leg and lifting the other like a dog about to urinate, showing the soles of their shiny patent shoes. They pasted down their hair with Argentine ‘gomina’. Age didn’t matter. Everyone tangoed.12

  This was 1912. By the following year, the craze for tango had engulfed everything – much to the distress of the Archbishop of Paris who said ‘We condemn the dance imported from abroad known by the name of tango which, by its nature, is indecent and offensive to morals . . .’.

  And the Kaiser forbade any member of the armed forces to dance to this scandalous rhythm while wearing their uniform. In the following year, President Poincaré banned the tango at the Élysée Palace. But it was all to no avail; none of the condemnations had the slightest effect. Tango had begun in the shadowy barrios of Buenos Aires, it had taken ship to Paris and from there spread at extraordinary speed across a world living through the fragile pre-war years in a kind of endless carpe diem – eating, drinking and making merry, for tomorrow we die.

  The craze had crossed the Channel and the Atlantic and had moved east through Europe. In February 1911, the New York Times announced: ‘Some steps of a new dance called the Tango Illustrated’.13 There were equal numbers of articles condemning tango for its overt and provocative sensuality, but the thés dansants had taken root there among the ladies of the middle class. In 1913, dance teacher Gladys Beattie Crozier wrote airily about the ‘Thé Dansant clubs which have sprung up all over the West End of London’, where one could enjoy ‘a most elaborate and delicious tea served within a moment of one’s arrival, while listening to an excellent string band playing delicious, haunting Tango airs, with an occasional waltz or lively rag-time melody . . .’.14 In Fulham, tango could be danced with accompanying fish and chips!15

  In the United States, formal dance was dominated by the elegant brother and sister team Vernon and Irene Castle. They had become hugely wealthy by exploiting the dance craze, opening dance centres and academies, giving exhibitions and publishing dance instruction manuals. The popularity of dance and the frantic search for novelty had produced a list of new forms in the first decade of the twentieth century. The older dances, like the schottische or the waltz, were supplanted by other more vigorous, wilder forms like the maxixe, the cakewalk and later variants like the turkey-trot and other animal imitations. The tango, of course, was less athletic and more sexual – but the twisting of bodies and the obvious erotic references, which did not seem to disturb the French at all, proved too much for the transatlantic public. And the tango in any case was changing – perhaps in preparation for its triumphant return home.

  In Paris, the tango was at the heart of an exploration of sensuality and eroticism, albeit restrained by middle-class mores. But its stars were as sensual as the two dominant figures of the cabarets – Mistinguett and Josephine Baker. Cabaret was a spectacle, a theatrical drama that on a smaller scale could be re-enacted on the dance floor with a greater or lesser degree of physical contact and erotic simulation. In a sense, as it developed, tango moved between the rufianesco – the pimp’s enactment of sexual pleasure and the battle between men for the attention of the prostitute – and romántico, in which those initial gyrations had been stylized and dramatized.16 In these early years of the twentieth century, as it travelled the world, tango moved between these two expressions.

  In the French capital, the memory of the Apache dance conserved that feeling of the underworld and a struggle for power between men and women. Among the early pupils there was the young Rudolph Valentino, whose tango in the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse not only launched him into the realms of superstardom but also created an iconic image of the dance itself. As described by Marta Savigliano, Valentino’s version is closer to the Apache dance or the valse chaloupé that Mistinguett presented before her public. The scene is ‘the famous Boca quarter of Buenos Aires’. Valentino, dressed as a gaucho, complete with riding crop, watches Beatrice Domíng
uez dancing with a man she clearly does not like. He pushes him away and Valentino and Domínguez enter the frame.

  After some individual gyrations, their hands join and they move around the dance floor performing smooth glides, controlled dips and slow sensuous swayings. Finally they embrace too closely and she breaks into contortions attempting to avoid a kiss that he insistently seeks. Unable to satisfy his desire, Valentino pushes her away with violence. She lands on the floor and drags herself to his feet in an ambivalent gesture of hatred and rapture. In the end he resorts to his secret weapon, his boleadoras, . . . and lassoes her.

  It is the perfect machista ritual.

  The journey to London, and from there to New York, softened and modified the element of erotic confrontation. The dance craze in Britain was tied to a notion of ‘social dancing’, with its emphasis on etiquette, refined social conduct and a properly prepared environment – as set out in Gladys Beattie Crozier’s manual The Tango and How to Do It (1913). By 1913, the instruction manuals were proliferating and exhibition dancing on both sides of the Atlantic became a profitable pursuit. And the influence of tango was not limited to the dance itself. Fashion acknowledged the demand for freer movement for women, boned corsets were replaced by more flexible basques, and lightweight fabrics were introduced which both permitted ease of movement and emphasized the sensuality and fluidity of the dancer. Orange, the colour of tango, became dominant and new dishes claimed their origins in tango.17

  ‘La Rumba’ poster.

  The dance that had celebrated its origins in the sexual underworld and the primitive rural world, exemplified in dress and gesture, was giving way to the romantic version on the one hand, and on the other to dance as a sport. The sensual movements of the original became athletic actions instead, and the embrace gradually returned to the formal distance between the partners that had been closed in the body contact that had so taken aback the Scottish writer Robert Cunninghame Grahame.

  As they walked through the passages, men pressed close up to women and murmured in their ears, telling them anecdotes that made them flush and giggle, as they protested in an unprotesting style. Those were the days of the first advent of the Tango Argentino, the dance that has since circled the whole world, as it were, in a movement of the hips. Ladies pronounced it charming as they half closed their eyes and let a little shiver run across their lips. Men said that it was the only dance worth dancing. It was so Spanish, so unconventional, and combined all the aesthetic movements of the figures on an Etruscan vase with the strange grace of Hungarian gypsies . . . it was, one may say, so . . . as you may say . . . you know.18

  It was under this conservative Anglo-Saxon influence that tango became a social dance, and increasingly a kind of sport where athleticism prevailed over sensual expression. There were international competitions, and – after a struggle – the dance was redefined. It was now no longer ‘Latin’, with all the exotic implications of the word, but ‘modern’, incorporated into the world of contemporary ballroom dancing, with its rapidly accumulating rules and regulations. The interweaving of limbs should now occur only symbolically and at a distance – as the dance manuals of Vernon and Irene Castle made very clear.

  The music was changing too, in response to the twin impact of tango’s globalization and the expansion of its clientele into the bourgeois centres of the world’s great cities. The fast milonga had given way to the slower more dramatic expression encouraged by the bandoneon. In Paris, the ‘Orquesta típica’ dressed in national dress to play for the dancers. By 1913, however, the ensembles were growing, adding extra bandoneons and strings, and their dress was changing too. Dinner jackets reflected the tango’s entry into the elegant world of the French bourgeoisie, but they in turn responded to the exoticism and excitement of the dance. At the same time, the dance was re-choreographed. While Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring still resonated with a self-conscious primitivism, Grossmith and Dare’s hit 1916 musical The Sunshine Girl featured a tango considerably less daring than its original.19

  Paris tango in 1913.

  The first generation of tango musicians, dancers and singers were often workers who played at night in the brothels and cafés. In Paris, they changed their mode of dress and became professionals. Few of these early musicians had musical training – Rosendo Mendizábal was an important exception – but they began to commit their songs to paper as the new century opened, humming or whistling their tunes for others to set them down. Eduardo Arolas, a renowned bandoneon player, was among the first tango lyricists, as improvised words gave way to written lyrics. His tango ‘Una noche de garufa’ (1909), with words by Gabriel Clausi, vies for a place as the first tango with lyrics.

  En esta noche de garufa yo me quiero divertir

  con los amigos

  de bohemia en el viejo Armenonville.

  La vida es corta y se

  pianta muy pronto,

  en esta noche hay que vivir.

  En las nostálgicas veladas

  vuelve el tiempo del ayer

  con este tango que nos lleva

  como un sueño a su compás.

  Viejos recuerdos, paicas papusas,

  dulce momento del ayer.

  Cómo me emocionan tus notas

  en esta velada porteña,

  deja que la música embriague

  para hacer, del tango una fiesta.

  On this night of pleasure I will take it where I can / With my Bohemian friends in the old Armenonville. / Life is short and ends all too soon / So this night is for living. / In those nostalgic parties / Yesterday returns / With the tango that carries us / into a dream with its rhythm / Old memories, beautiful women we loved / Sweet moments in the past. / The music moves me so in this Buenos Aires night / Let the music intoxicate you / And let the tango / turn the night into a celebration.

  (‘Una noche de garufa’, A night of pleasure – Eduardo Arolas, 1909)

  Arolas went to Paris in 1919, and died there in mysterious circumstances in 1924. He was 32 years old. His story was repeated among the young men and women who pursued the dream of Paris. Nearly all the musicians and performers emerged from urban poverty in Argentina; most died in very similar circumstances. In 1913, it was reported that over 100 Argentine, musicians, singers and dancers flocked to Paris; few made a living.

  The tango craze which they hoped to benefit from had two very different expressions. On stage and in revue, tango retained its powerful exotic charge and its sexuality. But in the dance salons, the tango followed new rules established by dance masters like the Castles in the U.S. or M. André de Fouquières in Paris.20

  The original choreography had been stylized into glamorous, almost balletic, postures (extended arms, stretched torsos and necks, light feet) and rough apache-like figures (deep dips, backward bends, dizzying sways) with matching walks in between . . . The basic continental tango was glamorised on the stages and tamed in the ballrooms . . . the music was especially composed so as to be exotically languid and retained only some of its rhythm.21

  For those Argentines who found themselves in Europe or the United States, there was little alternative but to act out Western fantasies of Argentine life. As Buenos Aires was rapidly becoming one of the world’s largest cities, its urban culture was being represented in gaucho costume and rural backdrops. In the U.S., tango had also changed in deference to the sensibilities of the middle classes. The Castles emphasized elegance and pattern in the dance, and held the partners in a safely distant embrace. When the wealthy Mrs Stuyvesant wanted a tango for her salon, but baulked at the sensuality of it, the Castles conceived the ‘Innovation’ whose distinguishing feature was that the partners did not touch! The Castles went to some lengths to tame and colonize, describing the tango in their influential Modern Dance of 1914 thus:

  The much-misunderstood Tango becomes an evolution of the eighteenth century Minuet . . . when the Tango degenerates into an acrobatic display or into salacious sensation it is the fault of the dancers and not of the dance. Th
e Castle tango is courtly and artistic.22

  The tango musicians and dancers who were seeking their fortune in Europe and the United States would have had considerable difficulty in accepting that. Indeed, despite the fact that the Victor label in the U.S. and Odeon in Europe were successfully recording some of these artists, in the United States the music was attenuated and adapted to the local morality, and the more popular lyrics were those written by local writers who often translated exoticism into the absurdity of the novelty song.

  When the great big Dip Dip Dip Dipper

  Did the Tango in the sky

  He told them all the merry news

  As he went rolling by.

  Then he called on Jupiter Pluvius

  For his orchestra to play

  And the Price of admission to this wonderful dance,

  Was a tiny silv’ry ray . . .23

  Rudolph Valentino.

  Storm Roberts notes, for example, that a very large proportion of the Latin music recorded in the 1910s and early 1920s seems to have been laid down by a group called the International Novelty Orchestra.24

  The Parisian Tango Malouze.

  Others did place the stress on the athleticism of the dance movements. Ted Shawn and Ruth St Denis were early exponents of tango as well as a range of other exotic dances that were heavily Americanized versions of dances from India and Africa; their own vision of tango included backdrops to match. Clearly the burgeoning film industry was a powerful influence on the interpretation of dance. And Valentino’s famous performance in the 1921 film Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a reflection of the already hugely popular thés dansants of New York. Valentino himself was a dancer for hire (or a gigolo) at Bustanoby’s Domino Room on 39th and 6th.

  But the rhythms of tango permeated the other emerging music of the era, from blues to jazz. And it was clearly the youthful grandparent of the Charleston and Black Bottom of the 1920s.