La Vida del Tango

TANGO … the word alone evokes the irresistible entwining of art and passion and their both inevitable and unpredictable consequences.

Tango is one among several “couple” or “ballroom” dances that rose to popularity during an exciting age of dance crazes that took off around the turn of the 20^th century.  Tango enjoyed a world craze in 1913, and soon became a fixture in the world’s popular imagination.

The center for the dance and the music as actual social practice, was in Argentina, particularly in the great port city of Buenos Aires.  There, it continued to grow, and reached a kind of apogee or “Golden Age” in the 1930s and 1940s.  The tango was danced socially, but for the majority of its fans in Argentina and in the Spanish-speaking world generally, it was first and foremost a romantic song style that, through the impassioned full-bodied voices of mainly male singers, brought heart wrenching stories of love and adversity to millions of fans via records, radio, and films.  The tango sustained and was sustained by a multitude of popular orchestras and singers, songwriters, composers, arrangers and lyricists.

In the 1950s, tango began to experience a decline, parallel to the decline in popularity of swing music and the Big Bands in the USA, where they were eventually supplanted by renovated musical idioms that appealed to changing generations and changing times.   By the 1960s, tango was considered old-fashioned, tied to a past that no longer spoke to the ideas and passions of the new age.  Argentina lived through an era of turmoil largely without the tango. 

In the 1980s, however, a new generation of musicians, dancers, choreographers and theatre artists, sometimes on their own and sometimes in collaboration with members of the older generation, helped revivify tango and bring it once again to world attention, as well as, eventually, a heightened relevance within Argentina itself (and to a degree also for Uruguay, a neighboring country which also has a claim to the tango).

Since the success of the show Tango Argentino! in the mid-1980s in London, Paris, and New York, the world has experience a revived passion for the tango, evidenced by the growth of tango communities in major world cities from Seattle and Denver to Philadelphia and New York to Paris and Berlin to Tokyo and Sydney, as well as a plethora of small local communities, tango clubs at colleges and universities, and a wealth of festivals, the numbers of which seem to be growing yearly.  The sheer fact of the matter is that a whole lot of people around the world today are in love with tango, the music, and the dance.  Among the ballroom styles of dancing, it is the natural dance, the intensely intimate dance, the elegant and sophisticated dance, the beautiful dance.  Join us in our adventures in tango!

 

The singer and songwriter Carlos Gardel, rose to popularity in the 1910s and remained the genre's greatest exponent until his death in an airplane accident in 1935.  He remains one of tango's greatest icons.