July 28, 2005

The most passionate dance! Of all the ballroom dances, Argentine Tango may be the most passionate and elegant. (The possible exception being the waltz) Learn a few steps from the rich vocabulary of movement in Tango, and you may never turn back.

I scraped the surface of the tango last year, and have never quite been the same since.... I should be out of traction in a few weeks though!

posted by stomper 19 years ago
  • Nice stomper. Pleased to see it has a page on the great Enrique Santos Discépolo, who said "The tango is a sad thought that can be danced." Googling for another bio of Discépolo also found El Portal del Tango which looks like it may have some good stuff too.
  • And a whole section on Carlos Gardel too! Fantastic!
  • Thanks, stomper. I love the music- sometimes campy, sometimes heart-rendingly gorgeous. I love the mixture of passion and sorrow inherent in the tango. Swoon.
  • Lovely! (I once tried to learn to tango,and failed. Hispanic polka and two step are the best I can do. No dancer, me, but I do lurve the music.) Last year around carnaval time, I was going to do a post on the samba, which seems to me to be at another end of the passionate dance scale, but the links I found loaded lots of ugly ad-ware stuff on my computer. For a lesson in samba, I recommend the movie Orfeu Negro., which is a take on the Orpheus and Euridice Greek myth. If you haven't seen it, you should (scroll down.) /end derail.
  • Yeah, it's fun. I want to take more classes someday. Thanks for the links.
  • Yes, I spent quite a bit of time down in BA. Beautiful city, beautiful people. This stuff brings me back. Thanks stomper.
  • Great post, stomper! path & squid, tons of 60's samba and bossa nova stuff here.
  • Neat-o. I met my wife while we were learning to tango. Oh, the memories. Thanks for the cool post, stomper. :)

  • islander: rent Black Orpheus (Orpheu Negro) and listen to the music. Some of the music is lovely acoustic guitar, but the bulk is full on, fast stepping, orgiastiac music that makes you almost wish you lived in a favela (Brasilian slum.) The story is way good, as well. The more modern stuff in your links strikes we as boring, but that's just my taste. And, sadly, I couldn't find any links to what I think is the good stuff.
  • That's the plebian "we", of course.
  • Isn't this the kind of dancing that Robert Duvall does?
  • It really is beautiful, wish I could do it.
  • A few years ago on tv ABC-Oz had a program called 'race around the world'. Young people were given a camera and tickets and had to film/edit a piece from a different place each week. The segment that stands out in my memory is a 3mins piece by a girl in Buenos Aires in which she interviewed young women & men who were out on tango dates. It was absorbing and amazing - I presume it's a fairly catholic society and there's not as much 'fraternizing' as perhaps in some of the western world; so young lovers would sublimate their latent energies through dancing the tango. Each person who spoke was effusive but understatedly emotional, describing their passion for the dance and how it was the supreme form of sharing. It was really hypnotic. I vainly tried a few emails a couple of years ago searching for a tape of the segment but was unsuccessful. I've often thought since that one day I'd find a someone to partner in the quest for the tango deity. Alas...I keep searching. Thanks for the post!
  • No Peacay, there is plenty of 'fraternizing', as a matter of fact, way, way more so than here in stuffy, uptight Los Angeles. The average Argentine will say that he/she is catholic, but they hardly ever go to church. Oddly enough, I believe you have to be of the catholic faith to be president there. Menem was a muslim until just before he was sworn in as president. And yes Darshon, it is the dance that Duval does with his young Argentine wife. BA is a party town.
  • Yes, I spent quite a bit of time down in BA. Beautiful city, beautiful people. Squiddy, pibe! Yo también! Anyone interested in the history of the tango should find a copy of The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800-1900 by George Reid Andrews; his chapter on "Afro-Argentines in the Arts" explains that: ...Afro-Argentine dance formed one of the major ingredients of Argentina's most exportable cultural commodity, the tango. As early as the first decade of the nineteenth century, documents referred to the "tangos de los negros," meaning their dances. Historian Ricardo Rodríguez Molas has unearthed a series of sales documents for a "house and tango site" owned by blacks during the first two decades of the nineteenth century... An ordinance considered by the Montevideo town council in 1807 proposed to prohibit "the tangos of the blacks," their weekly dances. The composer of "El Entrerriano," accepted by many musicologists as the first tango of known authorship, was an Afro-Argentine, Rosendo Mendizábal, a tango accordianist who wrote the piece in 1896. Though most scholars of the tango tend to place its beginnings in the 1880s, black newspapers of the 1870s contain occasional references to it... Of course, modern Argentines, who pride themselves on their "Europeanness," would have a hard time accepting that there were Afro-Argentines, let alone that they were responsible for the creation of the national dance! The book starts off with the saying "Negros en Buenos Aires no hay" [there are no blacks in BA].
  • Cool LH, thanks for the heads up. If I have a partner again by the time the tango class comes round I'll be sure to give it a scan. Mean time, I forgot one link yesterday: for those who may be intimidated by how serious it all looks, take a look at the rules of the road -- seems like a pretty laid back bunch.
  • How did I miss this one? I love tango. I took classes this summer, but I never seem to have the energy for the practicas or milongas.