Tango (8 page)

From time immemorial, the rich society of Paris adopted a neutral space where all classes could rub shoulders, see each other, talk to each other, without making any more contact than the pursuit of pleasure demanded.
²

And apart from talking and seeing, the bourgeois and the shopgirl or the demi-mondaine could dance the sensuous dances of this new age together. Dance manuals provided diagrams for urban Europeans on how to dance the cakewalk, just as, before the decade ended, classes and manuals would allow them to learn the tango.

While in Buenos Aires the contact between the outer, marginal areas and the modern city was limited to clandestine trips in the darkness, Paris was more liberal and perhaps less hypocritical in its pursuits of pleasure. Transgression lay across the boulevard, and the artists of the underworld, like Toulouse-Lautrec, were uninhibited in their representations of the diverse crowds of men gathering in the brothels and nightclubs. His portraits of the women, waiting for their customers and chatting desultorily, evoke people much like the 20–30,000 prostitutes gathered by then in Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires, the first decade of the century saw the first cracks in the social barriers that had kept the Buenos Aires that saw itself as Paris apart from the marginal barrios and immigrant communities. But the full breakthrough would be made in the French capital itself.

There was a bizarre conjunction between a Paris that stood for the gamut of technological progress, as represented in the Great
Universal Exhibition of 1900, and its fascination with the primitive and the exotic. The exhibition itself erected circuses and performance spaces replete with symbols and images of the other distant world.
³
Paris was as fascinated by the machinery and technology, whose most glorious expression was the Métro, as it was by the colonial world, with its dark-skinned people and its echoes of the primitive. The Arab world concealed all that was mysterious and dangerous: Africa was the home of an uninhibited sexuality, the Far East was impenetrably (inscrutably) ‘other'. And though Latin America remained more remote perhaps from France, the vision of the transatlantic world was equally distant from the civilized society of Paris, and equally exhilarating. The seduction of the primitive and the exotic was not exclusive to France, of course – but it was intensified there in social and sexual mores.
⁴

There were meeting points between those two worlds, crossroads where the primitive and the modern met and co-existed uneasily for the briefest of moments. In France the archetypal place of encounter was in Marseilles, where ships brought Africa, Asia and the Americas to the very threshold of the most advanced modern world. It was the underworld of the port that was the birthplace of the Apache Dance,
⁵
which became a craze as the twentieth century began. One or two men, usually dressed in the sailor's striped
maillot
, danced with a woman in a brothel or a café – the clear implication was that one was a pimp and the other a customer, or perhaps a lover, and she a prostitute. The dance was dramatic, violent and acrobatic – a representation of the violence of men against women. When two men were shown battling over the woman, she was thrown between them, hurled across the floor, spun in the air. The new craze spread rapidly to Paris, where it was given its name by a newspaper reporter who, after watching a gang fight outside the Sacre Cœur cathedral, likened them to warring Apache Indians. It had little to do with any knowledge or understanding of this particular group
– rather he was using the word ‘Apache' as a symbol of the primitive and the uncivilized. The gangs of Paris seized the definition and appropriated it for themselves.

It was brutal and acrobatic, yet it was also a couple dance imbued with a kind of violent eroticism. It was the theme of a short 1902 silent film called
A Tough Dance
, with Kid Foley and Sailor Lil, and two years later Joseph Smith took the dance to New York. It emerged very quickly from the shadows into mainstream Parisian life, albeit on the other side of the boulevard. The famous and influential dance teacher Maurice Mouvet created his own version of the dance at the Café de Paris in 1907, and two years later Mistinguett, who dominated the world of dance in France for many years, danced this first ‘tough couple dance' at the iconic Moulin Rouge.

Others came through Marseilles too. Manuel Pizarro, a musician, landed there in 1900 and made his way to Paris, where he found a room at the Hôtel Pigalle in Montmartre. Meeting a friend there, he joined the musicians at the Princesse. Meanwhile, when the frigate
Sarmiento
docked at the southern port,
⁶
the crew took to the local taverns and cafés the sheet music for some of the tangos popular in the port of Buenos Aires. They played Ángel Villoldo's ‘El Choclo' and ‘La Morocha', both popular pieces in La Boca and Nueva Pompeya, from which many of the sailors would have come.

But by this time, tango was not entirely new. Pizarro and his friends were already playing at the Princesse, tango had been seen on film for the first time in 1900, and Giraudet, a much respected dance teacher in Paris, had begun to teach it. Erotic dance was nothing new, of course; the Moulin Rouge was renowned for its cancan, a much bawdier overtly sexual version than the one most of us have become familiar with. The Apache dance itself, behind its dramatic violent content, was a dance charged with eroticism. And the excitement around tango had as much to do with its
origins in the Argentinian underworld and its suggestive gestures as with a confused notion of a primitive world of cowboys and open prairies.

In 1907, Alfredo Gobbi and Flora Rodríguez, already famous in Buenos Aires, arrived in Paris, where they remained for seven years, feeding the tango frenzy. The popular fascination with the dance was inadvertently inflamed by the visit of the Argentine president Julio Roca in that same year, and by the comments of his ambassador in France, Enrique Rodríguez Larreta.

In Buenos Aires, tango is found only in whorehouses and filthy taverns. It is never danced in the respectable lounges, nor between civilized men and women, for tango is crude to the ear of any Argentine worthy of his nation.
⁷

If Larreta's intention was to shock or frighten off the Parisian middle class, he failed signally. Tango was exciting precisely because of its exotic foreign origin!

For the public of Paris or London, tango is no more than a vaguely sinful, exotic dance and they dance it because of its sensual, perverse elements and because it is somewhat barbaric.
⁸

Tango rapidly took the place of the Apache in the nightclubs of Montmartre, or Montparnasse, which was rapidly becoming de rigueur for lovers of nightlife. Picasso, Matisse and all the young artists congregated there and shared with the liberal bourgeois public a love of things sensual and primitive. The collections of erotic photos of the era show naked women in classical poses against backgrounds of Roman vases and painted landscape; but they also contain a high proportion of photographs of nubile young African and Arab women in pornographic poses.

The Exhibition of African Art caused a sensation in the Paris of 1905, and inspired a wide range of artworks, among them Picasso's
Desmoiselles d'Avignon
. And Diaghilev's Ballets Russes reflected the new fashion in its scenography, its costumes and its choreography.

We might suspect that the choreography was adapted to Parisian taste, to the ‘dances brunes' (brown dances), the Apaches and the bals musette. Given people's boredom with the waltz and the quadrille, a kind of convulsive and sensual new waltz was invented which evoked a fantasy Buenos Aires, a mix of Shanghai and Chicago.
⁹

The impression was probably encouraged by the 4,000 or so Argentines living in Paris who introduced tango to Paris in this first decade of the century. But there were also growing numbers of tango musicians, dancers and singers there, many of whom were first or (by now) second generation immigrants. There is disagreement over when and where the tango was first danced in Paris. What is certainly true is that it was popular on both sides of the Atlantic by 1906 or 1907, and that by 1913 it had taken Paris, London and New York by storm. Argentine musicians were arriving in Paris in numbers now, partly because of tango's popularity and partly to make the first recordings, since Buenos Aires had no recording facilities as yet. The majority of visiting Argentines, however, were the young scions of the wealthy urban classes for whom a stay in Paris was an obligatory part of their social education. They had already paid clandestine visits to the brothels and cafés of La Boca and the working-class districts before they left – and in Paris they could practise their new-found techniques in a far more open way. The Apache dances that they witnessed in the
boîtes
of Paris seemed very like the tango – and their European fellows seemed thirsty for any physical expression that smacked of primitive places and forbidden desires.

If it was sailors who brought the sheet music to Paris, and the musicians of the bordellos who first took their instruments to play there, it was the Argentine aristocracy and its Parisian confrères who took up the tango with the greatest enthusiasm. Ricardo Güiraldes, a writer from an Argentine landowning family, who was in Paris in 1910, attended all the parties in the palaces of the aristocracy: he demonstrated the daring new dance at a ball held by Madame de Reszke and the Princess Murat. ‘Do we dance this standing up?', the Princess asked. The tango's dramatic sensuality clearly excited the wealthy friends of Güiraldes and his friend Jorge Newbery, son of another of Argentina's wealthiest families and, like Güiraldes, a good dancer. Güiraldes's poem ‘Tango' was written in that year:
¹⁰

Creator of silhouettes that glide by silently

as if hypnotized by a blood-filled dream
,

hats tilted over sardonic sneers
.

The all-absorbing love of a tyrant
,

jealously guarding his dominion

over women who have surrendered submissively
,

like obedient beasts . . .

Sad, severe tango . . 
.

Dance of love and death . . .

Güiraldes's famous novel,
Don Segundo Sombra
(1926),
¹¹
was a romantic recreation of
gaucho
life which established for his own class and their European friends the myth of a mysterious and primitive Argentina.

Tango bands were already playing in the clubs of Paris and London, though in Paris local rules obliged them to dress in national costume, in the uniform of the rural
gaucho
, which, in the context of Paris, served only to emphasize its exoticism. These
orquestas típicas
played in nightclubs and at the afternoon
thés dansants
where
the ladies of the middle and upper classes could dance with their chauffeurs and hairdressers. Casimiro Aín had been dancing since 1904 and gave classes to men and women, among them the young Rudolph Valentino, who would later become Hollywood's favourite tango dancer and archetypal Latin seducer.

It was Josephine Baker's pastiche of African dance and her spectacular erotic shows that summarized the era. But Jean Cocteau described the atmosphere with a more jaundiced eye:

It was 1913. Soto and his cousin Manolo Martínez had brought Argentine tango on a gramophone. They lived in a little hotel in Montmorency. You could see old ladies who had never left home before and young rebellious women from the upper classes. Old and young danced pressed against Soto and Martinez. . . . The whole city was dancing the tango, whose steps at that time were very complicated. Fat men walked with grave expressions, marking the rhythm, stopping on one leg and lifting the other like a dog about to urinate, showing the soles of their shiny patent shoes. They pasted down their hair with Argentine ‘gomina'. Age didn't matter. Everyone tangoed.
¹²

This was 1912. By the following year, the craze for tango had engulfed everything – much to the distress of the Archbishop of Paris who said ‘We condemn the dance imported from abroad known by the name of tango which, by its nature, is indecent and offensive to morals . . .'.

And the Kaiser forbade any member of the armed forces to dance to this scandalous rhythm while wearing their uniform. In the following year, President Poincaré banned the tango at the Élysée Palace. But it was all to no avail; none of the condemnations had the slightest effect. Tango had begun in the shadowy barrios of Buenos Aires, it had taken ship to Paris and from there spread at extraordinary speed across a world living through the fragile
pre-war years in a kind of endless carpe diem – eating, drinking and making merry, for tomorrow we die.

The craze had crossed the Channel and the Atlantic and had moved east through Europe. In February 1911, the
New York Times
announced: ‘Some steps of a new dance called the Tango Illustrated'.
¹³
There were equal numbers of articles condemning tango for its overt and provocative sensuality, but the
thés dansants
had taken root there among the ladies of the middle class. In 1913, dance teacher Gladys Beattie Crozier wrote airily about the
‘Thé Dansant
clubs which have sprung up all over the West End of London', where one could enjoy ‘a most elaborate and delicious tea served within a moment of one's arrival, while listening to an excellent string band playing delicious, haunting Tango airs, with an occasional waltz or lively rag-time melody . . .'.
¹⁴
In Fulham, tango could be danced with accompanying fish and chips!
¹⁵

In the United States, formal dance was dominated by the elegant brother and sister team Vernon and Irene Castle. They had become hugely wealthy by exploiting the dance craze, opening dance centres and academies, giving exhibitions and publishing dance instruction manuals. The popularity of dance and the frantic search for novelty had produced a list of new forms in the first decade of the twentieth century. The older dances, like the schottische or the waltz, were supplanted by other more vigorous, wilder forms like the maxixe, the cakewalk and later variants like the turkey-trot and other animal imitations. The tango, of course, was less athletic and more sexual – but the twisting of bodies and the obvious erotic references, which did not seem to disturb the French at all, proved too much for the transatlantic public. And the tango in any case was changing – perhaps in preparation for its triumphant return home.