Tango Nuevo

2. Finding Tango: From the Golden Age to the Twenty-First Century

2 Finding Tango From the Golden Age to the Twenty-First Century The relationship between periphery and center is not sufficiently explained by accounts of suĀocating Eurocentrism or analyses of defiant colonial resistance. At the very least, they fail to capture the complexity of Argentina’s relationship to Europe. . . . Argentina both feeds and feeds oĀEurope’s view of it, and Europe produces and consumes an Argentina that acts as a pivot between the exotic and the familiar. Amy Kaminsky, Argentina: Stories for a Nation (2008) Es más importante entender que recordar, aunque haya que recordar para entender . [It is more important to understand than to remember, but to understand you must remember.] Susan Sontag, quoted for Malvinas: Islas de la memoria (2007 exhibit at the Centro Cultural Recoleta) (author’s translation) August 2006, National Archives, Buenos Aires I arrive early to get a spot in the photo collection, and tell the archivist I’m looking for images of tango. To my surprise, he tells me they don’t have much, then asks, “Music or dance?” To my response, “Dance,” he brings one small box containing eight envelopes and a set of plastic gloves. Visiting the National Archives is not unlike sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table, poring over those shots that never made it into the neatly arranged family albums. In each envelope, arranged in no particular order, many void of any identifying details, are the various “tango dance” pictures held by the country that claims tango a national symbol. A good 50 percent are pictures of folklore performances, there are a handful of interesting tango images, and, for reasons I can’t explain, the box includes about a dozen shots of ballerinas in the woods. When I finally submit my order Merritt book.indb 30 8/23/12 11:23 AM Finding Tango: From the Golden Age to the Twenty-First Century · 31 form, I ask whether I can pay the twenty peso fee when I pick up my negatives. Payment on delivery is fine, I am assured, but cash is out. While they need the money, he tells me, the Archives cannot accept cash. Instead, I am to reimburse Argentina for the use of images of its national treasure in the form of Bic pens. In classes and in discussions with professionals, I am to hear time and again that the history of tango is, in many ways, a collection of myths, opinions , and hearsay. Undocumented by its originators and at the mercy of those who wrote history, tango did not fare well. Given its lower-class origins , its scandalous profile, and its fall from grace during the mid-twentieth century, one has to wonder whether the lack of archival material reflects the nation’s stance—still unsure—on tango. Or are the archivists taking a progressive stance? For the tango is a living tradition, not a mere relic from the past to be neatly “preserved.” As today’s young dancers so eloquently demonstrate in their words and their movements , tango is alive and well. No need to pack it away in a shoebox. In the dancers’ playful experiments, I see the thirst for innovation that drove generation after generation of their forebears—documented on film, some held in private collections, screened for me by more than one tango professional. From El Cachafaz and Calderón, to José and Lita Mendez, Petróleo, Copes and Nieves, el Pibe Palermo and Norma Soto, Virulazo and Elvira—it is not only skill, but difference and novelty that set them apart. At the same time, traditionalist criticisms of today’s innovators reflect the history of tango’s struggle, across time and space, to be recognized, understood , not left for dead. A Little History Its own extent is the evil from which the Argentine Republic suĀers; the desert encompasses it on every side and penetrates its very heart; wastes containing no human dwelling are, generally speaking, the unmistakable boundaries between its several provinces. Immensity is the universal characteristic of the country: the plains, the woods, the rivers, are all immense; and the horizon is always undefined, always lost in haze and delicate vapors that forbid the eye to mark the point in the distant perspective, where the land ends and the sky begins. On the south and on the north are savages ever on the watch, who take advantage of the moonlit nights to fall like packs of hyenas on the herds in their pastures and on...