Tango High and Low

“For the milonga one has to be splendid.” [1]

What do we see when we enter the room? An open space for dancing, tables and chairs, occasionally a small bar, dim lighting, a DJ. But more importantly, there is the crowd, of which we are one. The milonga has been described as the place where tango happens. Physically, it is a space—the requirements are minimal—where people assemble to dance. It is also a venue, a curated space for social activities and entertainment. But most importantly, it is an event. The specific identity of the locale—dance studio, banquet hall, church auditorium, bar, restaurant, wooden pier, park, even a sidewalk—matters less than the event itself. Like other forms of extra-ordinary social interaction, the milonga has certain ritualistic connotations, the way many specialized places of assembly had in more traditional contexts: churches, revival meetings, country fairs, circus tents, conclaves of various sorts, sacred and profane. As such it is a space somewhat removed from everyday life. This separateness, this distinctiveness, is no accident, for the milonga defines a space, physical and temporal, within our lives, that is separate, specialized, deeply focused, and more highly concentrated in the intensity of its emotions.

Though not immediately obvious, dancers assume a persona when they step inside. Even a stranger, although one familiar with the conventions of the milonga, understands that she is a participant in an event marked by its formalities, its codes, and its expectations. The entrance—up a staircase, down a long hallway, behind a restaurant or bar—defines a liminal space that serves to ease us into the transition to this new world. For the milonga is a place of transformation, whether we are habitués or not. Our everyday lives generally have no purchase here and are of little concern to the other dancers. In the traditional milongas of Buenos Aires, what mattered was not who you were but how you danced, how you carried yourself, how well you embodied what might be called the “ethos” of tango. And as if to emphasize the exceptional nature of the milonga, its distance from the everyday, anonymity was not only accepted but cherished. One entered as a new person, a different person, as someone who was judged, accepted, and appreciated as a co-equal, regardless of who or what they were outside. One’s private life and one’s actions at the milonga were distinct and little of a personal nature was shared. “One of the codes regulates the anonymity of the downtown milonga. Milongueros expostulate about the anonimato, as it is known, in the context of the striking intimacy of the milonga and the tango embrace itself. The anonimato is a respected value.” [2]

These aspects are fluid, malleable, and have been undergoing change, but when tango was at its apogee, during its “Golden Age” in Buenos Aires, and well into the 1990s in many places, they were well known and respected (the Julie Taylor quote above is from the mid-1990s). They existed in the “codigos” prevalent in the milongas and defined generations of milongueros, a term with a deep cultural resonance. At its most literal, it refers to a habitué of the milonga, a regular, a devotee. But regular attendance at a milonga does not make one a milonguero. The term implies both a profound knowledge of the music and a deep respect for the dance and its cultural associations, which can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Becoming a milonguero involved, in many cases, years of practice, before a man was deemed worthy of even being allowed to dance at a milonga. It required respect for the local customs, which governed dress, etiquette, and behavior on the dance floor, and a willingness to take seriously the importance of improvement as a dancer. To be a milonguero was to live with the need, the compulsion, to dance tango. For the men and women whose life centered on the milonga, tango was not something one did for entertainment or amusement, it was the focal point around which a life was structured. And the place where that life unfolded was the milonga.

“The blank looks or expressions of effort and concentration on the dancers’ faces, in place of stage masks, mesmerize the first-time visitor to a milonga; and tiny details, like pictures, can have sweeping connotations: a pair of street shoes, for example, a token of daily life left under the table by a woman who steps into her tango shoes and onto the dance floor, gliding into her imaginary life.” [3]

Edgardo Cozarinsky’s insight comes close to the heart of the matter, which is that the milonga, any milonga really, is a form of theater in which we are both spectator and participant, audience and actor. But first a bit of historical background, because there are less metaphorical, in fact, quite literal, associations between tango and theater going back to the turn of the last century.

Early examples of tango, both sung and danced, were often represented in popular theater in Buenos Aires starting in the late nineteenth century, contemporaneous with the birth of the tango itself. These short works, known as sainetes, reached their peak of popularity between 1890 and 1910, although they were well attended into the 1920s.[4] They flourished along with the success of the tango, and their popularity was mutually reinforcing. Generally one or two acts in length, the sainete served as a vehicle to investigate the trials and tribulations of recent immigrants, most often men of the Italian diaspora, and the world of the conventillo, where many of them lived. Its two main forms were melodrama and comedy. The sainete (as well as other forms of popular theater like the grotesco and the Spanish zarzuela) provided an opportunity to represent everyday life in its simplest and most direct terms.

“Next to tango, the theater was the most all-embracing of cultural spaces because of its capacity to include a wide array of allusions to urban areas, social types, everyday customs, and languages: cynical political committee men, fragile children selling newspapers, proletarian women bent over sewing machines, adulterous and virtuous women, fugitive anarchists, organ grinders from the barrio, drug traffickers, bacanes, naive provincials, aristocrats facing bankruptcy and suicide, exploited prostitutes and shady pimps from the sinful city, street vendors.” [5]

Intertwined with the stories of everyday life it represented, the sainete also introduced audiences to other forms of popular entertainment, most notably the tango. Many sainetes included interludes that were sung or danced. Music was provided sometimes by an individual musician with a guitar, sometimes by a small theater orchestra. These musical interludes were often integrated into the body of the play itself and sung by its characters—a passing musician, a couple living in a conventillo, a worker. [6] They enacted the close relationship between tango and theatricality that has existed since its inception. (The brothel also served as a kind of theater. It provided a stage for the fulfillment of libido by characters wearing the mask of passion or desire. However, the commonplace notion that “tango was born in the brothel”—Leopoldo Lugones called it the “serpent of the brothel”—is not born out by history. Brothels were legal in Buenos Aires at the time but they were licensed, and dancing was not allowed on the premises. Failure to comply could lead to the loss of one’s license and, therefore, the loss of one’s livelihood.[7] A closer examination of the historical record has shown that tango originated as a form of lower-class entertainment, both a popular dance and a popular musical form, and its origins were more likely to be found in the local conventillos or the slums of the arrabal. While the brothel was part of this universe, it wasn’t the focal point of the tango’s origin and development. Nonetheless, it served as a useful myth with which to imprint the dance with the trappings of illicit behavior and unrestrained desire.)

This relationship between tango and popular theater is further demonstrated by the intertwined nature of their themes. Both served as creative outlets for the expression of popular sentiments and the sense of urban anomie then prevalent among the lower classes in Buenos Aires and the Rio de la Plata region more generally. Popular theater and cabaret helped disseminate the tango to a larger audience, directly exposing its lyrics and, therefore, its themes of working and lower-class life to the outside world.

“The sainete was important to the tango in several ways. Many of the plots were based on local vignettes or social themes involving compadrito society and the growing tensions between them and immigrants. In addition, since many tango poems were known only through oral tradition, the sainete contributed extensively to the preservation of early lyrics and to the understanding of Lunfardo and tango language by the middle and upper classes.” [8]

More contemporaneously, tango has been a popular subject for stage and screen. These are part of a long line of cinematic productions that feature or make reference to tango. As early as the 1930s, tango was represented or became the thematic subject of film in Argentina. For the modern viewer it may be the most highly dramatized dance form of all. Its intrinsic qualities, often equated with the idea of heightened sexuality, desire, and danger, are seen to be intrinsically theatrical, excessive, and subversive. It has been represented in film—The Conformist (Bertolucci), Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci), Tango (Carlos Saura), The Tango Lesson (Sally Potter)—and in musical theater and dance—Milonga, Tango Argentino. The tango “show,” itself a compressed form of musical theater, is still a viable cultural production and such shows are presented all around the world by touring artists. These consist of song and dance, often with live music. The dancers are professionals and the presentations, for the most part, choreographed.

However, most theatrical representations of tango and all stage tango, are glorifications and embellishments of the popular dance; they are not Argentine tango as it was danced in the Golden Age or even as it is danced today in crowded local milongas around the world—at least those that claim to follow Argentine traditions. Though shrouded in multiple layers of myth and cultural associations dating back to the nineteenth century, tango has always been a social dance, one of enduring longevity.

The milonga is also, although perhaps not obviously, a theatrical space with its own formal requirements. Primarily an environment for social interaction, it is one governed by strict norms and conventions, and for the dancer these must be learned (see Codigos). Yet it is something else as well. Most obviously, the milonga is an exception to the humdrum of everyday life, something out of the ordinary, always and everywhere, no matter how often we participate or where we find it. For example, while the conventions of dressing for tango have certainly been relaxed since the 1940s and 1950s, there is still an emphasis on dress and semi-formal attire. Although few men at a milonga wear suits and ties today, women have access to special dresses for tango, which are colorful, often form fitting, and designed for freedom of movement. They are not costumes but neither are they streetwear or office attire. Dance shoes, high heels, folding hand fans—all the elements of our visual appearance and comportment help to signify that we are in a place of heightened expectations.

Theater is a live collaborative event between actors and audience, and generally takes place on a stage in a purpose-built space, which can be formal and permanent or makeshit and transient. While there is no stage, no proscenium, at the milonga, an audience and actors are essential, although here the roles are interchangeable. Like theater, the milonga is staged: there is a host, a DJ, a dance floor, a sound system, lighting, audience seating, sometimes an intermission; and sometimes an actual (scripted) performance of stage tango. The milonga is an artificial construct, one that provides a context for tango, and within that context everyone has a role to play.

But here the roles are fluid and changing. At the milonga we are always the “audience,” observing not only the couples on the dance floor, how they move, how they interact, but the other members of the audience as well, for it is here that we are likely to find a potential dance partner. As spectators we learn to judge the significance of the events unfolding on the dance floor, which is, in a sense, also our stage. Other dancers are our most severe critics. These roles are frequently reversed—spectators become participants, actors become audience—in a regular round of continuous change, which lasts for the duration of a tanda.

Could such a theatrical moment be said to have a genre, an overarching form or direction? What do we expect walking into this theater of dreams: tragedy, comedy, melodrama, farce, burlesque? To a large extent it depends on what we bring to the table: our expectations, our hopes, our needs and fears, which are all reflected in the mask we wear and the persona we project. Comedy would be the logical choice given that most participants anticipate a successful, if unknown, resolution to the evening. But why not melodrama or farce, for we cannot predict which way events will unfold, and the milonga is often a place of false starts, unexpected occurrences, and sudden mishaps?

And what of tragedy? Histories and anecdotal reports of tango’s earliest years often describe a scene fraught with the possibility of danger. Of real danger rather than a reenactment or staged presentation. Borges often writes of his admiration for the early tangos, that is, the simple, raucous songs sung in the corner bar. He disdained the more sophisticated, often overwrought songs (specifically their lyrics) of tango’s maturity, steeped in the bathos of unrequited love, spurned affections, and a nostalgia for home and lost youth. (“The early milonga and tango may have been foolish, even harebrained, but they were bold and gay. The later tango is like a resentful person who indulges in loud self-pity while shamelessly rejoicing at the misfortune of others.” [9]) The earliest tangos were derived from the milonga campera or the milonga ciudadana, and sung, more often recited, to the accompaniment of a guitar or flute, instruments that could easily be carried from place to place during an evening’s peregrinations. They were hastily constructed (sometimes improvised) songs that told tales of love, lust and heroism by deceitful women and brave men. They stomped and swaggered across the stage. It is tango’s association with violence, with the tragic nature of a kind of raw courage, that appealed to Borges. For Borges this is primordial; he relates violence to courage, and the courage of the guapo, of the taita of the local barrio, was integral to his conception of nationalist mythmaking. In Evaristo Carriego, he elaborates on what these primitive tangos, the form’s rawest and simplest expression, meant: “We read in one of Oscar Wilde’s conversations that music reveals to each of us a personal past which until then we were unaware of, moving us to lament misfortunes we never suffered and to feel guilt for acts we never committed. For myself, I confess that I cannot hear ‘El Marne’ or ‘Don Juan’ without remembering exactly an apocryphal past, at one and the same time stoic and orgiastic, in which I have thrown down the challenge and, in silence, met my end in an obscure knife fight. Perhaps that is the tango’s mission: to give Argentines the conviction of having had a brave past, of having fulfilled the demands of bravery and honor.” [10]

Although there is no text and no director, every milonga is a play, every dancer an actor. The milonga is the site for the unfolding of an alchemy of desire, of expectations and uncertainties that have no equivalent in the everyday.

Footnotes

1. Julie Taylor, “Death Dressed As a Dancer: The Grotesque, Violence, and the Argentine Tango,” TDR (1988-), Vol. 57, No. 3 (Fall 2013), 123.
2. Ibid., 120.
3. Edgardo Cozarinsky, trans. Valerie Miles, Milongas (Archipelago Books, 2021), 4.
4. See: Donald S. Castro, “‘El sainete porteño’ and Argentine Reality: The Tenant Strike of 1907,” in Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 1990, Vol. 44, No. 1/2 (1990), pp. 51-68.
5. Adriana J. Bergero, Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900-1930 (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), 78.
6. Domingo F. Casadevall, “La influencia del tango en el sainete porteño,” in Buenos Aires – Arrabal-Sainete-Tango, (Buenos Aires: Compañía Fabril Editora, 1968).
7. See: Hector Benedetti, Nueva Historia del Tango: De los origines al siglo XXI (Siglo Veintiuno, 2021).
8. Jo Baim, Tango: Creation of a Cultural Icon (Indiana University Press, 2007), 36.
9. Jorge Luis Borges, Evaristo Carriego, translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983),146.
10. Ibid., 136.

Tagged: Borges, codigos, milonga, sainete, theater

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