The Geography of Tango

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.

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Tango—The Original "Dirty Dancing"

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...

Tango in Havana

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...

TANGO—A RUSTIC BEGINNING

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,...

Tango Locura

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