3880  Workshop w/Horacio Arcidiacono/No.12~13

Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 11:13:59 -0400
From: Kathryn Johns <tangoartist@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Workshop w/Horacio Arcidiacono/No.12~13

*2nd NOTICE*
**
*Charleson(SC) Argentine Tango Society invites you to join us November 12
and 13 in the(finally) cool **fall weather to enjoy a weekend at The
Humanities Center with Argentine-born Horacio Arcidiacono and his masterful
tango/milonga techniques.Early-bird registration ends on November 5.*
*Details follow in a seperate e-mail.Please **direct questions to
Kathryn~~~tangoartist@gmail.com.*
**
Why Tango?

The last decade has seen a worldwide explosion of interest in the
Argentinean tango. Tango clubs are springing up in the most unlikely places.
In London you can tango every night of the week; in tiny towns in Holland,
Germany, even Finland, tango aficionados gather together night after night.
Japan has its own tango sub-culture. Tango shows play to packed houses on
Broadway, in Paris, London, Berlin and Tokyo. Why?

Social dance forms arise out of a profound physical need to create a
language in which people can speak to each other without words. But since
the sixties, most social dancing in Western culture has been essentially a
solo activity. People did their own thing, unencumbered by the needs of
another body, unencumbered by rules and conventions. But during the last
decade, there has been a huge revival of interest in ballroom dancing: the
waltz, the quickstep, the Latin dances such as the salsa and rumba, and
various forms of jive.

But the Argentinean tango holds a unique place in couple dancing. The body
is closer, more intimate than in any other dance form. And yet the 2 legs
move faster and with more deadly accuracy than in any other comparable
dance. It is this combination of sensual, meditative, relaxed contact in the
upper body and swift, almost martial arts-like repartee in the lower body
that gives the tango its unique identity.

Add to this vibrant mix the music - melancholy, ecstatic, growling,
predatory, soaring, seeking, heartbreakingly beautiful (especially compared
to the insipid kitsch that most ballroom dancing music has become) - and you
have the ingredients for something more than a craze. You have a genuine
participatory art form, which can express the most profound and complex
longings that people can have about their lives, about each other, about the
nature of existence itself.

"The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried
to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration. " - Jorge
Luis Borges.

Controversy surrounds the origins of the tango. However, most researchers
agree that the earliest tangos were danced in the streets, bars and brothels
of Buenos Aires around the 1800s. The vocabulary of the dance and rhythms of
the music that accompanied it echoed the ethnic origins of its proponents.
In fact, one of the earliest meanings of the word "tango" is "a place where
black people gather to dance."

African slaves in Argentina had brought with them the rhythmic patterns of
the candombe and later black Cubans brought the habanera to Buenos Aires. A
new dance evolved based on the steps of the candombe, the habanera, together
with the polka and the mazurka and became known at the time as a milonga.
(Milonga is now a term used to describe both a variant of the tango and
also, somewhat confusingly, a dance hall.)

Before long, this new dance had been taken up by the new European
immigrants, and the tango, as we now know it, was born. If you add kicks and
flicks of the legs (that resemble some of the footwork of African dance) to
the simple walks and turns of European folk dance and a close embrace that
may have originated in the brothels, you have the basic vocabulary of the
tango. Small improvising bands, usually guitar, violin and flute,
accompanied the early tangos. Around 1910, the bandoneon (a larger, more
expressive version of the accordion, probably brought to Argentina by the
earliest immigrants from Germany) became the key instrument and identifiable
sound of the tango.

At the turn of the century it was common for the sons of wealthy European
immigrants to frequent the bars and brothels of the barrios (districts) of
Buenos Aires. Here, they learned to dance. Their wealth enabled them to
travel outside Argentina, and they took the tango with them, introducing
this dance to "polite" society in Europe and America. After its initial
scandalous reception in about 1913 the first wave of tango fever swept the
world.

In the twenties, in Buenos Aires, classically trained musicians, such as
Julio de Caro, who formed one of the earliest tango sextets, started to take
the tango into new areas of subtlety and complexity. The improvising
abilities of individual musicians were now held within a more formal musical
framework. Meanwhile the tango cancion (song) started to become a subculture
of the tango world in its own right. Carlos Gardel, arguably the greatest
singer of them all, became the beloved voice and adored icon of the people.

In the thirties (in effect, the "swing era" of tango) came the first big
band sounds. Juan D'Arienzo (the "King of Rhythm") and Anibal Troilo created
full orchestrated versions of such tunes as "La Cumparsita" that became
internationally recognizable tangos.

In the aftermath of World War II, under the Peronist government, Argentina
started to become politically isolated from the rest of the world. Several
decades followed in which the tango developed under a series of political
crises. Osvaldo Pugliese, one of the great bandleaders of this period, was
one of many who were blacklisted or imprisoned for their beliefs.

By the sixties, rock 'n' roll had eclipsed all other popular music
worldwide, and then Argentina fell to a military dictatorship. But despite
laws forbidding groups of more than three to gather together, the tango did
not die. And by the eighties (partly under the influence of the great dance
teachers, Antonio Todaro and Pepito Avellaneda), the tango had been revived
as a form for the stage. Audiences around the world (through such shows as
"Tango Argentino") started to become familiar with the musical vocabulary of
the tango, and with a theatricalised version of the dance. To dance tango on
stage the couple moved further apart, and the moves became more athletic,
balletic, and spectacular. A split developed between the stage style
(imitated, poorly, around the world by tango novices) and the milonguero
close-hold style danced in the clubs and dance halls of Buenos Aires by
people for whom tango was a way of life.

A healthy debate began to rage in the tango world about what was the "real"
tango. Meanwhile, a parallel argument about what constituted "real" tango
music had been sparked by the emergence of "modern" tango, spearheaded by
Astor Piazzola, whose tango compositions were reaching concert hall
audiences around the world.

As a new millennium approaches, the tango is evidently, once again, a living
art form, with Buenos Aires the epicenter of a cultural phenomenon. The
tango remains essentially a popular musical form, rooted in the visceral
sense of its dance; combining melodic, lyrical beauty with its unmistakable
rhythmic drive. Heady and passionate, sensual and meditative, melancholic
and joyful, it is identifiably Argentinean and yet, clearly, is universally
accessible. The tango is as complex as its own roots and as simple as the
primal impulse for two human beings to move as one.

"The soul is not really united unless all the bodily energies, all the limbs
of the body, are united. " - Martin Buber.