It takes two to Tango

The first time I heard the word Argentina was while my father was watching a football match on our fourteen inch television, and I was sitting under his arm trying to do what men did. Watch the game I mean, not admire his armpits. They were running, all of them, in their striped white and blue shirts, but one curly haired man was running faster than all of them. And, my father, he was laughing because he would keep falling without a reason, and extracting a foul.

Argentina, for the longest amount of time meant Diego Maradona to me. It had a beautiful ring to it, Maradona. You are bound to be something, with a name like that.

Over the years, I grew and started to view life from outside that big man’s arm. Argentina, for reasons known and unknown, did not come much into my reading and the next time I paid attention to that country was while reading about a handsome fellow who started from his home in Argentina and travelled across the South American continent, full of beans and full of boyish youth, but in the end came out disturbed, educated, and as a man.  That journey would be the catalyst that would one day make him one of the most recognizable figures in the world – all over the world, in the small shops of Palakkad (Kerala), on the bandannas of bikers in Goa,  on the back of the buses in Thailand, this man’s face was plastered. Christened Ernesto by his mother, he became known to the world as Che Guevara. You are bound to be something with a name like that.

But this story is about neither men.  A month after I saw the Motorcycle Diaries (based on Che’s life), I was invited to a wedding, and was standing in a group that had a particularly attractive being in it. The conversation veered around movies and I launched into what I thought was a sufficiently intellectual discourse on Che and Argentina (I hoped there would be a wee bit of charm I had managed to mix in this potion). Unfortunately, the attractive being did not really think so, and was soon called by a diplodocus to the stage. Not the extinct breed of dinosaur, we are referring to a suitor here. And all of a sudden, they launched into a fantastically sensual dance, treating the floor as if they held it in contempt, and yet moving across it like lithe beings, flowing into each other’s arms and bodies. The rest of us, we just all stood there transfixed, in silent admiration.  “Tango,” someone exclaimed. Later, when I was having dinner, she came up to me and whispered “I hoped you liked that. It is Argentine too.”  I would have choked on my food had I not taught myself, over several years,  to not choke in the presence of prettiness.

There are very few good things that came out of slavery, and the Tango was one of them.  In the 1800s, Africans were shipped as slaves to Europe and the Americas, and Argentina was no exception. How the name came about is not definite but it could have its origin in a similar African word that means “close space” or “reserved ground”. Another theory is that the word is Portugese (coming from ‘Tanguere’ that translates into “to touch”) and the slaves probably picked it on a ship while being transported.  The dances popular in Argentina at that time were the Polka and the Cuban Habanera. Along came the African Candombe, and as a result, the dance that emerged from their mix was the Tango.

Earlier couple dances did not really have much body contact, and were mostly restricted to holding hands. The Viennese Waltz (in 1830) was the first dance in which the lead held one hand of the follow, and put his second around her back, and it became a craze in Europe. Ten years later, the Polka became the second dance to use such a hold.

In 1853, Argentina banned slavery, and blacks and Africans looked forward to resurrect their lives.  Sad and dejected, these compadritos (young men) in slouch hats, loosely tied handkerchiefs, boots and knives tucked casually in their belts, frequented the ghettos outside Buenos Aires, and tried to lose their dejection and despair in the music, the lights, the revolving dance, and in the bodies of their partners in these modest halls, bars and brothels.  It was thus first in such establishments where the African rhythms were introduced to the Argentine Milonga music, and this dance in Argentina became known as the poor man’s dance, a dance of the streets.  It was voluptuous, it was raw, it was passionate, cheeks touched close, teeth were gritted, and the lead led with a rose in his mouth. It was nothing like what the world had ever seen before.

Although Argentina’s high society looked down upon this class, just as all high societies do all over the world, it did not stop several well heeled young men from rich families to visit the slums, the brothels, the bars. And soon everyone knew about the Tango, and it started spreading from its birth city, and crossed the Rio De La Plata (Argentina Uruguay border) and spread into Uruguay.

Paris, meanwhile, was the centre of the world, and people from other countries were eager to visit this city of dreams. In the early 1900s, rich families from Argentina sent their sons to Paris, and in a society that was always eager for innovation, that wasn’t very disapproving of the risqué dance moves and neither dancing with wealthy young men, the Tango soon spread into the city’s beautiful dance halls.  The African rhythms, the Latin heart, the fast paced nature, the shocking body contact as a necessary element of the dance and the erotic nature of it all helped spread it like wildfire in Paris.  In 1910, the frenzy gripped London, after it was performed for the first time in a play called The Sunshine Girl at London’s Gaiety Theatre.

In 1916 the American dancer Isadora Duncan visited Argentina and declared: “I have never danced Tango, and today a charming tourist guide forced me to dance. My first steps were timid, but the feeling of the languid music caused my body to respond to the voluptuousness of the dance. Soft as a caress, toxic as love under the midday sun, cruel and dangerous as a tropical forest.”

The high society in Argentina which had shunned the Tango all this while, were now ready to accept it as a National treasure when Paris and London, and later the whole world fell in love with it.

Rock and Roll invaded the world in the 70s and it lead to an almost an extinction of the Tango. However in the 90s, there was a Tango Renaissance and today there are clubs all over the world, in India, in Kerala too, where people like that pretty being I met once learn the dance. In the last World Tango Championships, a Japanese couple won first prize.

 

There is a certain etiquette that is associated with the dance.  When you enter the hall (especially if you do so in Argentina), it is accepted practice to not approach a person directly, but to try and catch their eye. If they make eye contact and look back at you with favour, the lead takes the follow to the floor. In Argentina, the practice of asking someone to dance with eye contact and a nod is called Cabaceo. Dancers have the right of passage of way, and be careful to not go through it, but around it. Don’t hold up the traffic, the floor is constantly moving forward. It is common to dance in an embrace during the Tango, but be aware and sensitive to your partner’s comfort zones.  Once a tanda  (dance) is over, even if you want to have a second tanda with the same person, you are supposed to go off the floor and wait till the music starts again. This is to let all dancers sitting, have the opportunity to make eye contact with people they want to dance with.

For the last fifty odd years, Argentina and Uruguay have been fighting tooth and nail, insisting that the dance originated in their country. Recently the United Nations gave the dance an “Intangible Cultural Heritage Status” and jointly recognized both nations as the source. Well, maybe it really takes two to Tango.

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