Tango Locura

Sprung from the barrios and arrabales of the cities and settlements along the banks of South America’s Río de la Plata, a melting pot of Spanish, Italian, African, and Indigenous cultures, tango’s rich history is like no other. One doesn’t merely dance tango, it embraces you, it inhabits you, you succumb to its spell! © 2022 Karlos Bermann In the late 19th Century, for the first three decades of tango, there was no printed sheet music. Sound recording didn’t yet exist. Itinerant musicians—duos or trios, usually—guitar, flute, violin—spread the music they learned and played by ear for the most part. In 1866, in fact, the first tangos were danced to habanera , a musical genre from Cuba, with roots in Spain, West Africa, and France. Perhaps you never heard of habanera, but in the 19th Century it was popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Listen to the aria “Habanera” from Georges Bizet’s 1871 opera Carmen . You may recognize the tune. You can easily hear its similarities to tango...

W hen, in 1866, a couple danced the first tango, it was a shocker. So much so that the other dancers cleared the floor and stood back gaping. These dancers were not the middle class elite. They were workers at a produce market, farmers, carters, casual laborers, and women who were there to sell the only thing they had to sell. As a class they were not overly fixated on propriety or morality.  U ntil that day, dancing with a partner had been chaste—involving  no physical contact beyond touching hands. But here in a rancho —a large thatch-roof stall, cleared on a Sunday evening for the weekly dance that had become an attraction at this recently established market, with a conjunto of two or three musicians playing a habanera , a man grabbed a woman and danced around the floor with her pressed tightly to his body. Given the provocative appeal of this new approach to dance, the onlookers quickly mastered their surprise and joined in. Two weeks later they celebrated th...

I t was a year or two ago that a woman who’d just returned from Cuba posted in the “Stranded at an Airport Tango Meet-Up” Facebook group. Said she’d danced tango in one of the Havana hotels. That post gave me the motivation I needed. I’d been to Cuba once, long before I became a dancer, and wanted to go back. But I’d been prevented by the US Government’s ban on travel to Cuba. That policy has been relaxed in recent years, however, and commercial airlines have resumed scheduled flights to the island. So, I decided, this year I’d go to Havana to look for tango. It’s still technically illegal For US citizens to go to Cuba as tourists, but I’m not a tourist. I go places to dance, to hang out, to see how the world looks from a different vantage point. Or in this instance to get information, do research, satisfy my curiosity. (The bizarre meanderings of my career, before I finally realized that I was meant to be a tango dancer, included several years as a journalist.) My plan to inves...

Copyright ©2018 Karlos Bermann Below is an actual satellite photo of the Río de la Plata. Formed by the confluence of the Río Parana and the Río Uruguay, it is only 170 miles long, but 120 miles wide at the mouth, making it the world’s widest estuary. On the northeastern shore is Uruguay with its capital Montevideo, while on the southwestern shore is Argentina with its capital Buenos Aires. It was from this basin with its great port cities that tango emerged during the second half of the 19 th century—from the laborers and fishermen--in the waterfront dives, cafés, and brothels, in the streets of the “ arrabals ”—the poor barrios at the city’s outskirts. The word “ porteños ”—people of the port—appears in the lyrics of many a tango song. In Uruguay, when they feel the need to add any qualifier to the word tango, it is “ tango rioplatense ”—tango of the Río de la Plata.

Copyright ©2018 Karlos Bermann Look, Ma, no hands! Here, on Argentine TV, tango master Carlos  Gavito and his partner Marcela Durán assume an extreme carpa position to demonstrate shared balance. In Spanish the word “carpa” means “tent.” In tango, “carpa” refers to the posture of the dance partners in relation to each other. This posture can be described as an inverted “V.” In English, the image of an “A-frame” is perhaps more evocative than that of a “tent.” In any event, in carpa, each partner maintains a straight posture, much like the yoga “plank” position, while inclining or leaning toward each other.   In practice, the lean is often more evident in a female follower with a male leader, given that the man usually has greater body mass. To offset the greater mass of the man and equalize the pressure/counter-pressure, therefore, the woman inclines more of her weight toward her partner.              Whether the dancers are in c...

This is my translation of Chapter 2 of La Orilla Oriental del Tango: H istoria del Tango Uruguayo (“Tango’s Eastern Shore: A History of Uruguayan Tango”) by Juan Carlos Legido ( Montevideo: Ediciones de la Plaza, 1994). Legido (1923-2011) was an Uruguayan dramatist and Professor of Literature and Art History. In Chapter 2 the author relates an oral history recounting the first tango danced in Uruguay—or anywhere for that matter, because the date given, Sunday, December 2, 1866, predates any account that has yet come to light concerning the origin of the tango dance we know today. Legido himself makes no claim for the veracity of this account; he is skeptical of the protagonists portrayed because they seem too iconic, too neatly symbolic. Nevertheless, those facts and circumstances of this very detailed account that can be verified do, in fact, check out. December 2, 1866 was, indeed, a Sunday ( https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=1866&country=59 ). Likewise,...