Tango is ubiquitous. It appears in films, in literature, in television series, and in art all over the world, although the accuracy of how it is depicted is variable at best. The imagery of tango is used on posters and calendars, and whenever Argentine Tango features on a televised competition show such as Strictly Come Dancing (known as Dancing With The Stars outside of the UK) the crowd go wild. There is something special about tango that draws people in, and even if the audience know nothing specific about dance they know that tango is something a little different to most other dance styles. There is a mystique around it, and where there is mystery there is intrigue and interest.

Whenever you start talking about tango with anyone who does not dance it you know that the sexiness of the dance will be the first thing that they latch onto. The way it is usually portrayed in the media emphasises the sensuality of the moves, and the closeness of the embrace reinforces this view. They have seen pictures and demonstrations of tango that focus on the passionate side of the dance and they assume that all tango is like that to some degree. So they want to know about it, even if their natural British reticence makes them reluctant to ask.

The use of stylised tango in film and television is common, as whenever a film director wants to represent passion or sensuality at all artistically in a film the chances are that they will use a version of something that might loosely be called tango. The male leaders will be dressed in sharp black suits with crisp white shirts and highly polished shoes, and the female followers will at most be wearing backless dresses with long splits in the skirts, and frequently a lot less. This trope may well have started with the 1990 film “Naked Tango”, starring Vincent D’Onofrio and Mathilda May, but this vision of the dance has set the tone for cinematic tango scenes ever since. Not many directors take the wardrobe decisions quite as far as Leonard Schrader did in that film, but the influence is there nonetheless in countless productions both on and off the screen. If you watch the film “Take The Lead” from 2006, the iconic tango scene where Antonio Banderas dances a powerful tango with Katya Virshilas is a pivotal moment in the plot. It plays heavily on the sexuality of the dance, and it sets the tone for the way that the rest of the cast come to see dancing as a whole.

There are notable tango – or at least tango-adjacent – scenes in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Mr and Mrs Smith (2005), Scent of a Woman (2005), Moulin Rouge (2001)… I could go on, but it would take far too long to list every film containing tango here. But in most of those films the tango is used to portray passion, sexual tension, or connection through confrontation – all of which have come to be associated with tango over the years.

The Beginning

The popular belief that tango was first danced in the brothels of Buenos Aires in the late 19^th century does nothing to dispel this seductive impression, and nor do the stories about it being banned by the Pope for being too sensual and seductive for public performance. Some say that the shape of the embrace was influenced by the man trying to stop the woman from picking his pocket during the dance, or that men would dance to ‘prove their worth’ to prostitutes. But are any of these stories correct? Does tango really have such shady origins or is there more to it than that?  What do we really know about this dance? Where did it originate and how did it gain this reputation? To find that out we will have to take a look into the somewhat contested history of tango.

It all began in the region spanning the Argentina – Uruguay border around Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the late nineteenth century. The details of exactly when and how tango started have long since been lost as very little history ever gets written down as it is happening – and of course there is no-one still alive who was around back then to ask about it. But there are a few things that we can be reasonably certain are true as much of the history of tango was passed down from maestro to student by word of mouth, and we can see what fits with what we do know and can verify about the world during that time period.

There is little doubt that tango started to come into existence as a result of the Great European Immigration Wave to Argentina (as it was known) which began in approximately 1853 and continued into the early twentieth century. This influx of migrants and speculators from Spain, Italy, and much of the rest of both western and eastern Europe, merged with the local Argentine population as well as the descendants of the African slaves who had been transported there in earlier times. They brought with them a wide range of cultural influences and entertainment traditions which naturally all began to blend together as people moved into and around the crowded centre of Buenos Aires. Exactly how this blend turned into the tango we know now is something of a mystery, but there are certain things that can be inferred from what we do know of the history of the region.

Tango most certainly did not appear all at once and looking anything like it does now. At the beginning there was no dance style of any type that was called ‘tango’, and most of the music played in the social events and gatherings was a fusion of European and African styles. This included the Polka, Flamenco, Contredanse (French rural dancing), and Candombe, all of which contributed to the cultural melting pot that was the Buenos Aires social scene of the late nineteenth century. Argentina may have encouraged tens of thousands of people to migrate there to take advantage of the rich natural resources in the area, but once they had finished work for the day there was little else for them to do. So they gathered together to play music, to eat, and to dance.

Music was provided by whatever musicians were around at the time and frequently included harps, drums, flutes, violins, or anything else that could be used to make a tune or keep a rhythm. The music was fast, lively, and energetic, and the dancing that went with it was all of those things and more. The slowest music may have been around 120 beats per minute going all the way to 200 beats per minute for the very fast pieces. Dancing at that time was a workout!

The social gatherings became known as “milongas”, a word that today has two meanings. It is still what we call the place where people come to dance tango, but it also refers to a particular style or subset of tango music and dancing. The word itself reputedly comes from an old Brazilian Portuguese term for “angry or repetitive words”, or maybe “witchcraft”, possibly referring to the heavy rhythmic African drum beats common to the music played at those gatherings. It may have been intended to be a disparaging term used by outsiders to describe what they heard, but the name was adopted by the dancers themselves and soon was the accepted way to refer to the gathering place for social get-togethers at the end of a long working day.

Because most of the migrant population in Buenos Aires had travelled there for work there were far more men than women in the region, and so it was only natural that men would end up dancing with other men far more often than they danced with women. Sometimes one would lead and the other follow, but they would also switch roles multiple times during a dance, alternating who was leading and who was following. With the tendency of men to turn anything into a competition, it is not hard to see how this role-switching could turn into a game of challenges to see who could outwit the other first or who could perform the most complex sequences. Street dancers do this even today, challenging each other to dance-offs to test their skills, and this competitive element could easily explain the myth that men used to dance together in the waiting rooms of brothels to attract the attention of the best prostitutes.

Tango Comes to Europe and the World

The migration of workers continued, but by the early twentieth century this had become a two-way flow with people travelling back to Europe after having made (or failed to make) their fortunes, and more were travelling down to Argentina to find a new life. This continuing exchange of people brought in yet more musical influences and styles, and bands started to form to play the new music that came about as a result.

This music tended to be slightly slower than the earlier beats, and when played by the ‘orquesta tipica’ of the region it began to sound a lot more like what we would recognise today as traditional tango music. The ‘tipica’ was the Latin American term for any band that played popular music, and had a reasonably consistent composition of piano, double-bass, one or more bandoneons, and a string section with violins, violas, and cellos. This structure continues today in the way that tango orchestras are put together, and is fundamental to the traditional tango sound.

The slowing down of the music led to a change in the dance itself, and this is where what we now know as tango really started to emerge. The name “tango” was just another name for a ‘closed gathering’ or ‘social event’, itself derived from a word (‘tanbo’) that had historically been used by the African slaves, but it soon became inextricably linked to this new dance style.

Tango was not just a slower version of the earlier style that we now think of as ‘milonga’, it was a whole different approach to dancing. Where milonga required a regular beat, small steps, repetitive movements, and lots of energy, the new tango allowed for pauses, expression, changes in flow, and more. The scope for creativity was huge, and a wide variety of different tango styles began to appear throughout the region. They were all basically the same dance, but some forms would emphasise the close upright hold of the milonga dancer, whereas others would develop long extended steps to emphasise the stretched out pace of the music. Some styles favoured a parallel chest-to-chest hold, and some had a more open vee-shaped connection between leader and follower. Straight legs, bent legs, extended arms, compact frame… there were as many different styles as there were regions, and yet there was enough movement around the country that they were all still fundamentally tango.

Tango music and tango dancing both continued to evolve, and the period from 1935 to the early 1950s has historically been described as the “Golden Age of Tango”. If any tango dancer refers these days to “traditional” tango music it is likely that they are referring to one of the recordings made in this period. Often scratchy and of poor sound quality, these recordings give us a window into what it must have been like to dance in Argentina in that time, and the flawed but wonderfully evocative sounds of the orquestas tipica of those years can transport the listener back to the very beginning of the evolution of tango.

Disapproval

But tango did not stay in Argentina. Over the first few years of the twentieth century, dancers left South America and took their skills to North America, Europe, and beyond, and tango began its journey into becoming the worldwide phenomenon that it is today. This journey, however, was not without its hazards and diversions. Parallelling an earlier reaction to the waltz, upper-class Parisian society decided that tango was too flirty and sensual for public dances and dancing it was discouraged in society events. Furthermore it was formally banned by Pope Gregory in 1913, and European tango looked to have reached an impasse.

Tango dancers, however, had other ideas. By that time it had become extremely popular throughout Italy, and so a group of dancers arranged a performance of tango especially for the Pope so they could ask him what the problem was with the dance. But they planned ahead, and after performing the most careful and respectful tango ever danced, Pope Gregory had to admit that he could see nothing wrong with it and lifted the ban. Tango was back!

The discouragement and disapproval from Parisian society fared little better. The problem with declaring something “too flirty for polite society” is that people immediately want to know what kind of flirty it could possibly be, and they want to try out this secret forbidden thing to see what all the fuss is about. Tango never went away, and soon was being danced by everyone.

At around this time in the first few years of the twentieth century there was also a move to incorporate tango into the ballroom dances alongside foxtrot, waltz, quickstep, and the others. Because of the regulated element to ballroom dancing and the need to be able to judge competence based on the execution of known steps, this resulted in the creation of two codified and regulated versions of tango – American Ballroom Tango, and English Ballroom Tango (which eventually became known as International Ballroom Tango). These were specific dances in themselves that drew on the styles and steps of the tango that had come from Buenos Aires, but were more rigid in their interpretation and lacked the freedom of the original dance. If you have ever seen them performed you will have seen that they share some roots with the tango danced in Argentina, but that they are unrelated to it in almost every way that matters. Choreographed, rigid, and staccato, the Ballroom Tango variants are a world away from the fluid and expressive tango we know and love. But the existence of ballroom tango was to play a crucial role in the history of tango in later decades, and without it we may not have the dance scene that we do now.

The Singers

Early tango music was largely instrumental, and if singers were present they were there for atmosphere rather than being the focus of the music. But all this began to change when in 1917 Carlos Gardel released a track called “Mi Noche Triste”, and the age of the tango singer began.

From that time the role of the tango singer became more and more important, and bands began to base their identity on the singers as much as on the rest of the musicians playing. Records were released, performances were booked, and eventually the singers started to take centre stage to the point where the audiences would stop and listen to the singers rather than continue dancing.

With emphasis shifting to the vocalists it allowed tango dancing to evolve and adapt once again. Dancers began to shape their movements around the lyrics, perhaps following the rise and fall of the singer’s tone as they danced the verse, and then switching to follow the strings or the bandoneon for the chorus. The versatility of tango gave the singers and bands the opportunity for great creativity, and a wide range of different styles began to emerge.

The End… Nearly

Tango looked as though it would be a permanent part of Argentine culture and would continue unchallenged around the world for a long time to come. But events in Argentina were about to take a dark turn, and tango was to face an upheaval that no-one could have predicted.

Argentina is a country with a long and turbulent political history, and in the mid 1950s there was a takeover by a military dictatorship. Typical for regimes of that type they immediately banned all public gatherings, and so the ever-growing tango community found that milongas, social dances, practice sessions, and everything to do with the dance they loved was suddenly illegal. Tango effectively stopped, and whilst a few people continued to dance in smaller rooms and in their houses, the momentum was lost.

This could have been the end for tango, at least in its original form. Although there was nothing stopping people from dancing in the privacy of their own homes there were now very few places anywhere in Argentina where you could go to dance with others. Tango had met an impasse, and if it had not been for an unexpected turn of events almost 30 years later we may not be talking about ‘traditional’ tango now.