A European Tango History

How a social tango culture travelled 

The history of Argentine tango in Europe is often told as a story of revival. Tango had been enormously popular in Europe during the early twentieth century, and later returned in a new form. Argentine musicians and dancers came to Europe, Tango Argentino became an international success, teachers and schools appeared, and European dancers began travelling to Buenos Aires.

That story is true. But there is another question that interests me more:

What happened to tango as a social culture when it crossed the Atlantic?

The answer is not simply that Argentina gave tango to Europe. It is a story of transmission, interpretation and transformation.

Tango Argentino opens the door

There were Argentine musicians, artists and political exiles in Europe before the show Tango Argentino appeared in 1983, and tango was certainly not completely unknown. But from what we know, this had not yet developed into a widespread European social tango culture comparable to the one that existed in Buenos Aires.

Brigitta Winkler's and others memories of Berlin give us an interesting glimpse of this period. Her own first encounter with tango came through the Argentine group around Coco Orlando Díaz and Alejandra Sedano at the Horizonte Festival in 1982. The regular milonga scene developed later.

Then, in 1983, the stage show Tango Argentino premiered in Paris and became an enormous international success. It put Argentine tango on the international map and introduced many Europeans to tango as a powerful and exciting dance.

This opened a door.

Teachers arrived, schools developed, and workshops, festivals and performances grew around the increasing interest. Tango became something that could be taught, organised and eventually made into a profession.

In Berlin, for example, the scene developed rapidly and in many different directions. The early milongas did not necessarily follow the structures that later became associated with Buenos Aires-style social tango. There were different kinds of music, different ways of embracing and different ideas about what tango could be.

Tango had entered Europe.

And Europe was beginning to make something of it.

Travelling to Buenos Aires

But for some dancers, learning tango in Europe was not enough. They wanted to experience it where it came from.

During the 1980s and 1990s, European dancers increasingly travelled to Buenos Aires. There they encountered something that could not easily be learned from a stage or in a classroom. They encountered milongas and dancers who had grown up inside a social tango culture. They experienced close embrace, ronda, cabeceo, tandas and ways of relating to music and to other dancers that were difficult to separate from the social environment itself.

Some came home with more than new steps and techniques. They came home talking about another way of being together through the dance, and about another expression of the dance itself.

This created a two-way movement. Argentine dancers and teachers travelled to Europe, while European dancers travelled to Buenos Aires and brought their experiences home. Ideas, techniques and stories travelled in both directions.

But the Europeans were bringing these experiences back to a culture that was not Buenos Aires.

Europe already had its own traditions of dance schools, associations, teaching, workshops, festivals and competitions. The experience from Buenos Aires therefore had to find its place within an existing European landscape.

The question was no longer simply how to learn Argentine tango.

It was how to make it part of European life.

From local community to travelling community

There was also a practical difference that would become increasingly important. Buenos Aires had a dense concentration of milongas and local tango communities. People could dance regularly with others who lived nearby and shared much of the same social environment.

Europe was different. The tango community was spread across countries, and the people you wanted to dance with might live hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away.

Tango therefore became something people travelled for.

El Corte in Nijmegen is an interesting part of this development. Eric Jørissen began learning tango in 1987. El Corte was registered in 1988, Pepito Avellaneda became part of its story in 1989, and the first El Corte venue opened in 1990. Over time, it developed into a place where dancers could meet, learn and dance for extended periods, and its activities helped connect dancers beyond their local communities.

The significance of El Corte is not that it invented social tango.

Its importance is rather that it illustrates a new European geography of tango. The community was becoming international, and people increasingly travelled to meet other people.

The local community was becoming a travelling community.

The emergence of the encuentro

The encuentro grew out of this changing European landscape. The exact beginning is difficult to establish, but Kendra Stepputat identifies the Raduno Milonguero in Impruneta, Italy, in 2005 as probably the first event of what later became the European encuentro movement.

A few years later, Philippe Gonella encountered Tango de mi Florencia, raduno milonguero in Impruneta in 2007. He was interested in bringing to France the kind of tango he had experienced in Buenos Aires. Together with Marcel Lambert, who had also spent considerable time in Argentina, he founded Milongueando de France in 2009 and organised Les Cigales.

Something important happened in this period. A desire that had previously existed mainly as an experience began to be described more explicitly.

The organisers wanted a particular kind of social environment: close embrace, traditional tango music, mirada and cabeceo, dancing in the ronda, small movements and consideration for the other couples. The events were limited in size and deliberately avoided the workshops, demonstrations and performances that had become common in other forms of tango events.

These were not simply technical instructions.

They were an attempt to protect a particular social environment.

From lived culture to written codes

This may be one of the most interesting differences between Buenos Aires and Europe.

In the older Buenos Aires tango culture, much of this knowledge could remain implicit. You learned by being there. You watched other people, danced, made mistakes, were corrected and gradually learned what belonged and what did not.

In Europe, that original context was not naturally present. It had to be reconstructed.

The codes of the early encuentros can therefore be seen as an attempt to make some of the invisible visible. They created a common understanding between people who might come from many different countries and who did not share the same local tango history.

In that sense, the encuentro was trying to make cultural context portable.

But a code is not the culture.

You can follow the rules and still miss something. Close embrace does not automatically create connection. Cabeceo does not automatically create a respectful invitation. Traditional music does not automatically create musicality, and a small event does not automatically create community.

The people in the room still have to create something together.

The codes can protect the conditions.

They cannot create the relationship.

Reconstruction becomes something new

This is where the European encuentro becomes more than an attempt to recreate Buenos Aires.

Its inspiration is strongly connected to Argentine social tango. Its codes refer to that culture, and many participants continue to travel to Argentina and learn from Argentine dancers. But the circumstances are different.

Europe is geographically dispersed. Participants come from different countries and different tango backgrounds. The community has to travel in order to meet.

The encuentro therefore became a temporary concentration of a European tango community. For a few days, people who normally live far apart can inhabit the same social world.

That is not Buenos Aires.

It is a European solution to a European condition.

And perhaps this is why the encuentro became so powerful. It did not simply reproduce an Argentine milonga. It created a new way for Europeans to experience community through tango.

What was actually transferred?

So what did Europe really receive from Buenos Aires?

It is tempting to answer: steps, technique, embrace and musicality. But perhaps that is only part of the story. What travelled was also an idea of how the dance could feel, and of the relationship between the individual dancer, the partner and the room.

The close embrace can create a different kind of attention between two people. Small movements can make space for rhythm, music and connection. Navigation can become an awareness of the other dancers rather than simply a way of avoiding collisions. Even cabeceo is more than a technique for choosing a partner. It changes the way an invitation happens.

The music can become a common language shared by everyone in the room.

And beneath all of this is something much harder to describe: the quality of the connection itself. The connection between two dancers, the connection with the music, and the connection with the couples around you.

Perhaps this is what some European dancers discovered when they travelled to Buenos Aires. They were not simply discovering another way of dancing. They were discovering another relationship between the individual, the partner and the room.

When they brought that experience back to Europe, it had to find a place within a different culture.

Something was preserved. Something was formalised. Something was changed. Something may have been lost.

And something new began to grow.

From Argentine model to European culture

This is why I hesitate to describe the European encuentro simply as an Argentine format.

Its inspiration is strongly connected to Argentine social tango. But the culture that has developed around it is European.

There are local scenes, associations, independent milongas, marathons, encuentros and communities. They have different histories and different values. Some are strongly connected to the social traditions of Buenos Aires. Others are shaped more by European traditions of teaching, organisation, performance or competition.

There may therefore not be one European social tango culture.

There may be several.

But perhaps we can still begin to see the outline of something shared: a culture where the dance is not only about what the individual dancer can do, but also about the partner, the people around you and the atmosphere we create together. Where music is something shared, where participation can be more important than performance, and where the freedom of the individual exists within a relationship with others.

The European story of tango is therefore not simply the story of how Argentina gave tango to Europe.

It is the story of what happened when a social dance entered another culture.

Some things were preserved. Some were formalised. Some were changed. Some may have been lost.

And something new began to grow.

Perhaps that is what makes the history of social tango in Europe so interesting.

It began as an encounter with another culture.

And over time, it became part of our own.