Social Tango

Social Tango
A European Story Still Being Written

(Draft 1.0 - Reading time app. 8-10 minutes)

There is a side of Argentine tango that is easy to overlook when we tell its history from Europe.

We often tell the story through the great names, the music, the shows, the teachers and the revival of tango in the 1980s.

But there is another story running alongside this one.

It is the story of tango as a social culture.

When Trine and I travel to dance tango, we are not simply looking for somewhere to dance. We are looking for particular communities. The dance is an important part of what brings us together, but the way we are together is also part of the dance.

I have come to call this social tango.

It is not a style, and it is not a claim that one form of tango is more authentic than another. A local tango association can have a strong and important community around the dance. Social tango, as I use the term here, points to something slightly different: the meeting with another person, with the other dancers, with the music and with the space around us becomes part of the activity itself.

These are not two different kinds of tango. They are two ends of a spectrum.

The distinction is useful because it allows us to ask a historical question:

How did this particular way of being together through tango travel from one cultural environment to another, become part of European life, and gradually develop its own European forms?

And underneath that is another question:

What happens to a social practice when the circumstances that created it change?

Before tango became a global dance

The tango that developed around the Río de la Plata was not only music and dance. It was also a social practice with places, relationships, conventions and expectations.

In Buenos Aires, the milonga could be part of everyday life. People met repeatedly. Who invited whom mattered. How couples moved around the floor mattered. How dancers related to one another mattered. Music mattered. Relationships built through repeated encounters mattered.

Much of the knowledge was not necessarily taught explicitly.

You could learn something in a lesson and then have to discover the rest on the milonga floor. You watched, participated, received reactions and gradually learned how the social system worked.

In this sense, the milonga itself was a learning environment.

The knowledge was partly tacit: embodied in relationships and repeated participation rather than written down.

The community shaped the dance, and the dance helped create the community.

This social dimension is easily overlooked when tango is presented primarily as music, performance or a sequence of movements. Nóra Kovács has pointed to precisely this tension in the international tango world: local social practices and their communities can become less visible than the more spectacular and internationally marketable parts of tango.

A new beginning in Europe

Tango had, of course, already been hugely popular in Europe during the 1910s and 1920s, particularly in cities such as Paris and Barcelona. But the connection between that earlier European tango and the Argentine social tango environments that emerged again in the 1970s and 1980s remains unclear.

What we can see more clearly is a new beginning in the 1970s.

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. Gustavo Beytelmann went into exile in Paris in 1976, while Juan José Mosalini established himself there in 1977.

For many of these people, tango was not simply a dance that had suddenly become fashionable. It was part of a cultural world they had left behind.

In 1981, Les Trottoirs de Buenos Aires opened in Paris, providing an important venue for Argentine music and culture. In 1982, much of this world reached Berlin through the Horizonte festival.

Berlin offers an interesting glimpse of two tango worlds meeting.

On one side was tango as performance: large, visible movements and a stage-oriented understanding of the dance.

On the other was a much smaller group interested in dancing close to traditional orchestras such as D'Arienzo and Di Sarli, with physical connection and social interaction at the centre.

The two worlds were not necessarily opposed. But they were different.

And both would become important to the European tango that followed.

The surviving documentation also suggests that there were small local tango environments in several European cities before the great revival. How these environments were connected to one another, and exactly how much they influenced the later social tango networks, is still an open question.

Tango Argentino changes the landscape

In 1983, Tango Argentino premiered in Paris.

The production became an enormous international success and helped introduce Argentine tango to a much wider European audience.

It did not create tango in Europe from nothing.

But it changed the scale of everything.

A stage production could create fascination. Fascination created students. Students created demand for teachers, schools, workshops and events.

A new profession was emerging: teaching Argentine tango in Europe.

This created a powerful new way of transmitting tango:

teacher → student → workshop   instead of   friends → guy → milonga  

The festival model that developed alongside this brought together international teachers, workshops, shows, live orchestras, concerts and milongas. It gave thousands of Europeans access to tango and created an infrastructure through which knowledge could travel rapidly across the continent.

But a stage show cannot by itself recreate a milonga.

A social tango culture requires people who meet repeatedly, dance together, develop relationships and acquire knowledge through participation.

So another European story was developing alongside the teaching and festival world.

Travelling against the flow

During the late 1980s and 1990s, some European dancers began travelling to Buenos Aires.

They were not necessarily travelling to become professional dancers. Some wanted to discover how tango was actually lived and danced socially.

But what they brought back is difficult to trace.

Some of what they encountered – embrace, improvisation, musicality, tanda structure, navigation and the social behaviour of the milonga – was already present in European tango environments.

So the historical question is not simply what Europeans learned in Buenos Aires.

It is:

What was the relationship between the early European milongas and Buenos Aires?

Did the European environments inspire people to travel?

Did Tango Argentino create the motivation and opportunity?

Did the two developments reinforce each other?

We do not yet know.

This is one of the missing links in the history of social tango in Europe.

When tango became something to travel for

Eric Jeurissen and El Corte in Nijmegen provide an important example of what happened next.

Eric began taking tango lessons 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. The first Chained Salon followed in 1991, the first New Year's Marathon in 1993, and the first International Week in 1995.

What makes this interesting is not simply the chronology.

It is the model.

People travelled.

They stayed.

They danced.

They met people from other places.

They returned.

Tango was becoming something you travelled for.

El Corte was an early European attempt to bring together tango, community, international visitors and longer periods of dancing. It is tempting to draw a straight line from this to the later encuentro movement, but the available evidence does not establish such a genealogy.

A more cautious interpretation is that El Corte was one of several early European experiments in creating an international social infrastructure around tango.

The importance of this may therefore lie less in inventing a particular format and more in changing the geography of the tango community.

From looking at tango to living it

During the 1990s and early 2000s, two broad tendencies became increasingly visible.

One was centred on teachers, schools and festivals.

The other was increasingly centred on dancers, milongas and networks.

They were never completely separate. Many dancers belonged to both worlds. But the centre of attention could be different.

The teaching and performance world naturally makes tango more visible from the outside: movement, technique, figures, posture, musicality and performance.

Social tango turns the attention increasingly inward.

What happens between us?

Can I hear what my partner is giving me?

Can we listen to the music together?

Can we respond to the other couples around us?

The question gradually changes from:

What can I do?

to:

What can we create together?

The difference is not necessarily visible.

A dance may consist of very small rhythmic steps and very little spectacular movement, yet be experienced as extraordinarily rich. The dancer's attention can become highly focused on the partner, the music and the constantly changing relationship between them.

Some dancers describe this as a deep state of presence, sometimes almost meditative.

This dimension is important because it may be the part of social tango that is hardest to transmit.

It cannot simply be taught as a sequence of movements.

It emerges from the relationship.

When the practice gets a name

Around 2005, the historical story becomes less certain – and more interesting.

Kendra Stepputat identifies Impruneta, Italy, as probably the first encuentro milonguero in the development she describes. But 2005 should not necessarily be understood as the moment somebody invented the encuentro.

The practice may have existed before the word.

People may already have been organizing gatherings with a similar intention:

We want to spend a weekend dancing together.

The desire may have come first.

The format came later.

And eventually came an attempt to describe the conditions that made the experience what it was.

Around 2007, Philippe Gonella encountered the Italian Raduno Milonguero. In 2009, Gonella and Marcel Lambert founded Milongueando de France and established Les Cigales.

Here the social practice was explicitly described through a set of codes.

They included close embrace, traditional tango music, cabeceo, ronda and floor circulation, limited numbers, balance between roles and, importantly, no workshops, courses or demonstrations.

These codes are historically important not necessarily because they invented a new way of dancing, but because they represent an early European attempt to put words around an existing social practice.

The practice came first.

The description came later.

What the codes can – and cannot – do

At first glance, the codes look like rules about dance.

But they can also be understood as an attempt to protect the conditions for a particular kind of social experience.

If people are expected to listen to one another, the environment must make that possible.

If they are expected to dance closely, the music and floor must support it.

If the floor is a shared space, people need common expectations.

If the group is supposed to feel socially coherent, its size and composition matter.

In this sense, the codes are not simply rules.

They are a kind of social technology.

But there is an important limit.

Codes can protect the conditions. They cannot produce the connection.

They can create a room in which something may happen between two people.

They cannot make it happen.

That distinction matters to the way we understand social tango today.

A marathon or encuentro can follow many of the external conventions associated with social tango without necessarily creating the same experience.

And an event that does not use every convention may nevertheless create a remarkably deep social experience.

The form is not the experience.

The European transformation

This may be the most important difference between Buenos Aires and Europe.

Buenos Aires historically had a density of milongas that allowed tango to be part of everyday life.

Europe cannot reproduce that geography.

European dancers are spread across countries. They have jobs, families and ordinary lives. There may be a milonga on Tuesday in one city and another somewhere else several hundred kilometres away.

So European social tango became a travelling culture.

You travel to another city.

You meet people you have danced with before.

You meet people you have only heard about.

You spend a weekend together.

You dance, eat and talk.

And perhaps you meet again somewhere else a few months later.

An encuentro can therefore be understood as a temporary concentration of a social network that is normally spread across Europe. Research on international tango communities describes precisely this tendency: experienced social dancers travel specifically to meet and dance with particular groups of other dancers.

The encuentro does not reproduce Buenos Aires.

It solves a European problem.

That may be one reason why it has become such a powerful form of social tango in Europe.

When a culture becomes a format

There is another question now facing social tango.

What happens when a social culture becomes a recognizable event format?

Professional organization is not inherently a problem. Organizing tango events costs money, and professionalism has made it possible for many people to experience tango.

But when a format grows, its external characteristics can become easier to reproduce than the culture that originally gave them meaning.

Some marathons and encuentros remain small, intimate and strongly dependent on personal relationships. Others become larger and more commercial.

Some communities therefore worry that the depth of the social experience is being diluted.

One response is to keep events small.

Another is participant selection.

At an encuentro, registration and selection can become part of the social regulation of the event. Who is present matters because the community itself is part of what makes the dance what it is.

And this may help explain the emergence of smaller, more private encuentros.

When the format becomes too large or too commercial for the experience people were seeking, some dancers create smaller gatherings through personal networks instead.

The practice begins to return to the relationships from which it emerged.

A history still being written

The history above is incomplete.

We know something about the Argentine exile communities. We know about early European tango environments in places such as Paris and Berlin. We know about Tango Argentino, the rise of professional tango teaching, European journeys to Buenos Aires, El Corte, the growth of international tango events and the emergence of encuentros.

But many of the connections between these things remain unclear.

Who knew whom?

Who travelled first?

Did the early European milongas inspire journeys to Buenos Aires?

What did the travellers bring back?

How did the Argentine exile communities connect with European dancers?

And how did these networks eventually connect with the people who created the encuentros of the 2000s?

If you were part of these environments – or have programmes, photographs, old websites, correspondence, personal memories or knowledge about the people involved – I would very much like to hear from you.

A single memory may provide the missing connection between two parts of the map.

This is not intended to be the final history.

It is an invitation to continue the research.

Why this history matters

For me, this question is not purely historical.

When I first encountered this side of tango, I was surprised that it existed.

Then I became frustrated that I had danced tango for so many years without anyone telling me that this world was there.

That frustration turned into curiosity.

Where did it come from?

Who created it?

Who knew whom?

What came from Buenos Aires?

What was created in Europe?

And what, exactly, are we trying to preserve today?

The more I look at the history, the less interested I become in deciding which tango is the "right" tango.

Perhaps there is no single original tango waiting for us to recover.

Perhaps there are simply people.

People who bring what they have.

One brings music. Another brings movement. Another brings knowledge. Another brings a place to dance. Another brings the ability to organize. Another brings an openness to the person standing opposite them.

And sometimes these things meet.

The dance changes.

The community changes.

The people change.

And sometimes something larger grows out of it.

Something human. Something meaningful. Sometimes something deeply emotional.

That is what I increasingly think about when I use the words social tango.

Not a style.

Not a claim to authenticity.

Not an alternative to all the other ways of dancing tango.

But tango in which the meeting with the other, with the others, with the music and with the space around us is part of the activity itself.

Perhaps this is also the challenge of transmitting a social culture from one place to another.

We can transmit the music, the dance, the codes.

We can build the events.

But can we transmit the quality of the meeting?

Perhaps we cannot transmit it directly. Perhaps we can only create the conditions in which it can emerge.

And perhaps that is what the history of social tango in Europe is really about:

People finding new ways to create those conditions in a different time and place.

And sometimes something larger grows out of it.

Something human. Something meaningful. Sometimes something deeply emotional.