Tango (22 page)

Fernando Solanas was a key figure in the vigorous and diverse world of Argentine cinema.
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His iconic film
La hora de los hornos
(The Hour of the Furnaces) was radical in every sense, politically and aesthetically. Released in 1969, it exemplified what Solanas himself described as a ‘third cinema':
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radical in content – it was shaped by Peronist ideas – it was cinema as a political instrument, a means of agitation. It was banned by the existing regime, but shown in factories and schools; this method of distribution was made easier by its episodic structure and its deliberately roughcast style. But its fierce critique of neocolonialism and its creative use of montage gave artistic form to the ideology of resistance.

Clearly, Solanas would appear on the list of those pursued by the military and he moved to France to join the community of Latin American political exiles in the French capital. There he made what is arguably his most complex and most important film,
El Exilio de Gardel (Tangos)
, eventually issued in 1984. The film's theme is, at its simplest, exile and its impact on individuals and communities. A community of Argentines exiled in Paris are preparing a tango show. The film opens with a couple on a bridge across the Seine dancing a stylized and balletic version of tango – its artistic and Europeanized expression. But when the couple move down beneath the bridge and dance their tango on the towpath, it is the recognizable, erotic encounter of tango's origins. It is perhaps the moment of rediscovery of Argentina, of the community idealized in the tango-song bound together by its sense of marginality; an interior exile nostalgic in its turn for another half-remembered place.

But it is also a sensual encounter. Later we meet the members of the ensemble on a rooftop, responding like automata to
electronic sounds, until those sounds merge with the music of Piazzolla which awakens and rehumanizes the characters.

In this complex film the sensual utopia of tango is interwoven with the shocking memories of the military regime, of the disappeared and the raw relived experiences of torture and imprisonment. Begun in 1981, it was completed just as the military regime fell in the wake of the war with Britain over the Malvinas, to be replaced (in 1984) by a return to democracy. But it was a return against a background of rage and distress and of gathering economic crisis. The film was not well received at first; tango seemed to some to belong to a world that had been murdered by the Dirty War, and to be too oblique and symbolic for a society that now expected its film and theatre to unmask the period of government terror.

Yet
El Exilio de Gardel (Tangos)
did address important and complex issues of national identity and community in the aftermath of a period that had torn apart the notion of a shared culture. Solanas's exploration of tango and its rediscovery of Gardel and Discépolo as the icons of its Golden Age are essentially journeys through the consciousness of exile, its references, its nostalgia, its preservation of a national imaginary. His subsequent film, with its soundtrack also by Piazzolla, addressed the opposite phenomenon, defined by Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti as ‘el desexilio' – ‘dis-exile', or more conventionally, the return from exile.

Nostalgia is often a feature of exile, but counter-nostalgia may equally be a feature of the return from exile. Just as the home country is not a flag or an anthem, but the sum of our childhoods, our skies, our friends, our teachers, our loves, our streets, our kitchens, our songs, our books, our language and our sun, the country that takes us in gives us its own fervour, hatreds, habits, words, gestures, landscapes, rebellions and
there comes a moment when we become a curious conjuncture of different cultures and dreams . . .
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The film was
Sur
. Its protagonist, Floreal, is a trade unionist imprisoned by the regime, who, on his release, wanders the streets of Buenos Aires through a long night, afraid of returning to his home and his wife. In this case, it was the loss of his own landscape rather than the acquisition of another which produced his alienation from his own world. His nocturnal conversations with El Negro, a murdered ex-comrade, lead him finally to reconciliation and return to his broken society with the dawn.

The iconic tango ‘Vuelvo al sur' (I return to the south), with music by Piazzolla and words by Solanas himself, accompanies the protagonist through this nocturnal journey into his own soul. But he returns, as you always do, to what is most familiar and most welcoming, with doubts, fears and confusions, but with love. Piazzolla's bandoneon illustrates the drama and inner conflict that attend the journey, but its sound itself is in a way what draws Floreal inexorably back. Solanas himself subsequently turned to politics, and is currently a member of the Argentine Senate.

The irony of all this is that, not for the first time, the revival of tango in Argentina itself began in Paris, or at least in Europe. After the defeat of the military government, the exiles began to return; but in the interim many of Argentina's finest tango artists – musicians, singers, dancers – had also left Argentina, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes because the decline of tango had left them with few means of earning a living. Some of the old dance ensembles had survived in the salons that remained open for their largely ageing clientele. The resurgent nationalism of a younger generation found its favoured expression in contemporary rock music or in the music of a protest song movement which embraced the whole of Latin America and part of which brought a rediscovery of national
folk traditions in the music of Jorge Cafrune, Atahualpa Yupanqui or Léon Gieco.

Those tango musicians who had survived were largely of the old New Guard, dedicated to keeping alive the Golden Age of tango and to dance. Radio probably contributed more than anything else to maintaining enthusiasm for tango, at least among its devotees, but radio itself was highly territorial and it was unlikely that new younger audiences would be drawn to what felt like an exercise in nostalgia.

Europe, by contrast, was discovering tango anew in a theatrical context. The towering success of the show
Tango Argentino
at its first showing in Paris in 1983 was not easy to predict. The show was ten years in the making and its performers were not in their first flush of youth; great dancers though they were, Juan Carlos Copes and Virulazo were no longer young, and nor was Roberto Goyeneche, the acclaimed tango singer. According to the show's director, Claudio Segovia, only 250 tickets had been sold days before the performance in Paris in a 2,500-seater theatre. Yet, on the day, it was a runaway success and set a precedent for a series of identical shows to follow.
Tango Argentino
sold out wherever it was produced, and has continued to do so for twenty years around the world – though the great breakthrough was probably its sell-out shows on Broadway.

We could speculate endlessly on the reasons for the acclaim it enjoyed and continues to enjoy. The precedent, of course, was Piazzolla, who had won a growing and appreciative audience for his ‘tango nuevo'. Jazz and classical musicians like Gary Burton and the Kronos Quartet performed with him and his compositions became a standard part of their repertoire. But outside Latin America the dance still belonged to the ballroom dancers in the bowdlerized version that owed more to the manuals of Vernon and Irene Castle at the beginning of the century than to the sensual dramas played out by dancers like El Cachafaz in the same era.

Street tango in Buenos Aires.

Tango Argentino
, by contrast, was athletic, sensual and balletic – it was modern dance with interwoven bodies and an open sexual interplay. And it was a dramatic and beautiful spectacle. Its scenario was nostalgic and evocative of an underworld whose vocabulary and characters were widely recognizable – though not necessarily as Argentine. Perhaps its success was that it made seduction, heterosexual and homoerotic, acceptable not just on stage, but in the intimacy of the dance salon. Yet its impact was most problematic in Argentina itself – at least at first. Claudio Segovia reports that it was difficult to win an audience and the show was not presented
there until nearly a decade later. Perhaps it was once again the case that it was Europe's enthusiasm for tango that regenerated interest in its homeland. But it is also true that a new phenomenon,
tango nuevo
, a new musical fusion, built around the work of Piazzolla (who died in 1992), was winning back the young to tango in electronic versions by groups like the Gotan Project or Bajofondo Tango Club.

Today, Buenos Aires has rediscovered tango as a language that connects it with a wider world. It is the source of a good part of its tourist income. In 2010, it was recognized by
UNESCO
as part of ‘the intangible cultural heritage of humankind'. In late 2011, a demonstration at the Retiro Station demanded that the government devote more resources to its preservation. In China, it has become a form of protest against government repression.

Tango's extraordinary resilience tells a story beyond survival; it is a demonstration that its music and poetry respond to a deep sensual desire in all of us.

TANGO IN THE WORLD

In fact, tango had led a double life for many years. The ups and downs of its acceptance in Argentina were matched, but not exactly paralleled by its fate elsewhere – and sometimes in places that would seem to have very little in common with the society that gave the tango birth.

Tango was brought to Finland by a Danish couple who danced it at the Börs Hotel in Helsinki in 1913. Odeon Records (founded in Berlin in 1903) was aggressively exporting its catalogue across Europe as well as to the United States and it continued to do so until 1936 when the Nazi government appointed a new, politically reliable director who substituted acceptable ‘Aryan' recordings for the broad range of ethnic musics offered by Odeon. When the Argentine operation became independent during and
after the First World War, under Max Glücksmann, his new Discos Nacional label produced a much more authentic tango sound than its parent company whose recordings tended towards march rhythms in slower time. Finland took its lead from the German interpretation, and through the 1920s and 1930s Finnish tango echoed the heavier tread of the German version. With the Second World War, however, the ties were severed and a new Finnish tango emerged, now described as a ‘national tango', whose references and language owed more to rural traditions than to the urban scene. Its rhythms are more languid than the Argentine tango; its lyrics express the same yearning for love and nostalgia for a better time as its Argentine equivalent. But the most famous of them all, Unto Mononen's ‘Satumaa' (written in 1947, but most commercially successful in the 1960s in Reijo Tapale's recording) creates an imaginary place outside time, a paradise, where ‘the concerns of tomorrow can be forgotten' and love waits patiently.
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Mononen's iconic ‘Satumaa' sits more comfortably within the tradition of a romantic ballad, and was sung for the slower and more formal dances in Finland's outdoor summer pavilions. But just as foreign music became the vogue for youth in the early 1960s, tango had its own revival. The star tango singer Reijo Tapale's recording of ‘Satumaa' was at the top of the record charts in November 1961 and the same singer's ‘Takdet meren ylla' (Takdet by the sea) competed with the Beatles' ‘All My Loving' for number one in 1964. Popular among an older generation, tango had a second rebirth in the late 1980s, when the Seinajoki tango festival attracted crowds for the election of the Tango King and Queen which exceeded 100,000 every year by the end of the Nineties.

Equally surprising, perhaps, is the enormous enthusiasm for tango in Japan. It was first introduced by an aristocrat, Baron Megata, who learned tango in Paris while convalescing from an illness and opened a tango academy on his return to Tokyo in 1926. The first tango orchestra to visit Japan, however, was Juan Canaro's in 1954. A year earlier, Argentina was surprised to hear the recordings of the singer Ranko Fujisawa, who had learnt her tangos phonetically. Francisco Canaro followed in 1961, but it was in the 1970s – during tango's lean years at home – that many of Argentina's finest musicians visited Japan. It was, furthermore, a two-way traffic, with Japanese exponents of the ‘new Japanese tango' visiting the salons of Buenos Aires. It was generally the dance that attracted the vast number of Japanese followers, and it was relatively late when bandoneon player Ryota Kamatsu was able to win appreciation for the Piazzolla style. In 2009, Hiroshi and Kyoko Yamao won the tango salon category at tango's world championship in Buenos Aires, El Mundial.
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