From Buenos Aires to Europe

The history of Argentine tango in Europe is often told as a story of revival.

After tango's enormous popularity in Europe during the 1910s and 1920s, it later returned in a new form. Argentine musicians and artists established themselves in Europe, *Tango Argentino* became an international success, European schools and teachers appeared, and dancers began travelling to Buenos Aires.

That story is true, but it leaves out an important question:

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

The answer is not a simple story of Argentina giving tango to Europe.

It is a story of transmission, interpretation and transformation.

Before *Tango Argentino*

The European story did not begin with *Tango Argentino*.

After the military coup in Argentina in 1976, Argentine musicians and artists established themselves in European cities. Paris became an important centre of Argentine cultural life. At the same time, local enthusiasts and Argentine exiles appear to have created small tango environments in several European cities.

The exact connections between these early environments are still poorly documented.

This is an important gap in the history.

Were European dancers already learning about Argentine social tango through these communities? Did these milongas provide some of the first bridges between Argentine social culture and European dancers? Did some of the people who later travelled to Buenos Aires already know something about tango through these European environments?

We do not yet know enough.

But the possibility matters because it changes the usual story.

European dancers may not simply have discovered Argentine tango in Buenos Aires.

They may sometimes have travelled there because something had already begun in Europe.

A new European tango landscape

In 1983, *Tango Argentino* premiered in Paris and became enormously influential.

It made Argentine tango visible to a much larger European audience.

But a stage production also introduced tango through a particular lens.

The spectacular, visual and professional side of tango became highly visible. Workshops, teachers, schools, festivals and performances developed around the growing demand.

A profession was born.

This was an extraordinarily important development for tango. It made knowledge accessible to large numbers of people and created an infrastructure through which tango could spread across Europe.

But teaching dance and transmitting a social culture are not necessarily the same thing.

Figures, technique and exercises can be made explicit.

The surrounding social knowledge is more difficult to package.

Travelling to Buenos Aires

During the late 1980s and 1990s, European dancers increasingly travelled to Buenos Aires.

They encountered something that could not easily be learned from a stage.

They encountered milongas.

They encountered dancers who had grown up inside a social culture.

They encountered music, embrace, ronda, invitation, tanda structures and forms of behaviour.

And some returned wanting to recreate what they had experienced.

This creates an important two-way movement.

Argentine dancers and teachers travelled to Europe.

European dancers travelled to Buenos Aires.

Both groups carried experiences back and forth.

The result was not a one-way import.

It was a developing network.

Europe changes the conditions

But Europe was different.

Buenos Aires had a dense concentration of milongas and local social networks. Tango could be part of everyday life.

Europe was geographically dispersed.

A dancer in one country might be hundreds of kilometres from another tango community. A local milonga could be important, but it could not necessarily provide the same density of encounters as Buenos Aires.

The European answer was partly to travel.

Tango became something people travelled for.

Long weekends, international events, marathons and later encuentros created temporary concentrations of dancers who normally lived far apart.

This is one of the major transformations of tango as a social culture.

The local community became an international network.

El Corte and the travelling community

El Corte in Nijmegen is useful here.

Eric Jeurissen began learning tango in 1987. El Corte was registered in 1988. Pepito Avellaneda became part of the story in 1989, and the first El Corte venue opened in 1990. Early marathons and longer international events followed.

The significance of El Corte is not necessarily that it invented social tango or directly created the encuentro.

The available evidence does not justify such a claim.

Its importance is that it illustrates an early European development in which tango became organised around international meeting, extended periods of dancing and a travelling community.

It helps us understand how European tango acquired a new geography.

From lived knowledge to written codes

There is another transformation.

In Buenos Aires, much social knowledge could remain tacit because people lived inside the system.

In Europe, parts of that system had to be reconstructed.

This becomes particularly visible in the early encuentro movement.

Around 2007, Philippe Gonella encountered the *Raduno Milonguero* in Impruneta, Italy. In 2009 he and Marcel Lambert founded Milongueando de France and organised Les Cigales.

They explicitly described codes for the kind of social tango environment they wanted to create.

Close embrace.

Traditional music.

Mirada and cabeceo.

Ronda.

Limited numbers.

Consideration for the other dancers.

No workshops or demonstrations as part of the event.

The significance of these codes is not simply that they created rules.

They made aspects of a social culture explicit.

Something that could once be learned through participation could now be described and communicated internationally.

Europe was, in a sense, trying to make context portable.

But transmission is never reproduction

The result could not be identical to Buenos Aires.

The circumstances were different.

The geography was different.

The relationship between tango and everyday life was different.

Gender relations were changing.

Teaching had become a major institution.

The event economy was developing.

And European dancers were creating their own networks and traditions.

So the question should not be:

Did Europe preserve Buenos Aires?

A more useful question is:

What did Europe make from what it received?

Some things were preserved.

Some were formalised.

Some were changed.

Some may have been forgotten.

And some new forms emerged.

A European social tango?

This is why encuentros are historically interesting.

They can be understood as a European response to a European condition.

People who were geographically separated wanted to experience a particular kind of social tango together. The solution was not to recreate the neighbourhood structure of Buenos Aires, which was impossible.

The solution was to bring the people together.

For a weekend.

In one room.

With a shared set of expectations.

That is not Buenos Aires.

It is something European.

And perhaps that is the most important lesson of the history.

A social culture does not survive by remaining unchanged.

It survives by finding forms that work under new circumstances.

The European history of social tango is therefore not only a story of what Europeans received from Argentina.

It is also a story of what Europeans created with it.