The Passion of Music and Dance: Body, Gender and Sexuality, and: Antonia Merce, "La Argentina": Flamenco and the Spanish Avant Garde (review)

Flamenco, rebetika, and tango, the subject of William Washabaugh's edited collection, are dance and music styles that grew out of urbanization and migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus rebetika developed among those Greeks who had been forcibly repatriated by the Turks in the early 1920s. In men-only, hashish-smoking Café-amans in the hastily built slums of Piraeus, bitter songs of lament and terse, melancholy dances fused Greek, Turkish, Jewish, Gypsy, and other cultural influences. Tango sprang from similar disappointments among immigrant Europeans enticed to settle in Argentina, who found themselves in the rough barrios of Buenos Aires. Flamenco emerged in Southern Spain in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, drawing on Gypsy and Andalucian folk traditions and on retentions of Moorish culture, but thrived later in the century in urban café cantantes, especially in heavily industrialized Barcelona. Flamenco quickly attained its romantic, bohemian associations for international audiences through its hint of non-European exoticism and its low-life, semi-criminal, sub-cultural provenance. In similar ways, tango and rebetika subsequently acquired comparable connotations. Washabaugh and his fellow contributors thus investigate the different ways in which these dances and songs have both mediated and been the focus of social anxieties around class, race, and sexuality.

Most of the essays in this collection focus on the desire and fascination these dance and music traditions have aroused through their savory mix of otherness, forceful passion, and melancholia. Thus Gail Holst-Warhaft evokes the iconic scene from the 1964 film Zorba the Greek where Alan Bates dances on the beach with Anthony Quinn to Theodorakis's arrangement of rebetika music. Despite being a romantic and distorted picture of masculine, working-class Greek culture, it appealingly evokes an exotic world in which men could express ecstasy, sure of their manhood. Donald Castro seeks to explain the insecurity of the male Argentine soul, exemplified by the most famous and mythologized tango performer of the 1920s, Carlos Gardel. In Castro's view, tango became emasculated after Gardel's death when the offensive language of the old tango songs became nostalgic lyrics pruned of social content, making tango "more a vehicle for the feet and the body than for the ear and the mind" (65). Castro gives no indication of Gardel's physical presence or even the quality of his voice as he performed the songs whose lyrics Castro analyzes. It is left to Jeffrey Tobin to interrogate the homosocial world Castro uncritically evokes. Drawing on his experience learning to tango from dance teachers in Buenos Aires, Tobin focuses on when it is and is not permissible for men to partner one another. Having done his fieldwork, Tobin then agonizes about whether it is appropriate to apply to his methodologies from queer theory. The question is important to him even if he is sadly inconclusive. Comparatively, it is far less clear whether some of the other male writers in this collection are doing any more than following academic fashion in addressing the subject of masculinity.

Some of the complexity with which these dances aroused anxieties around gender, class, and race emerge in Susan Cook's essay on Irene and Vernon Castle. The Castles, the leading American exhibition ballroom dancing couple of the ragtime era, "tamed" the tango and African American-derived dances like the fox-trot by performing reformed versions, exampling propriety and refinement in opposition to the roughness associated with their working-class and ethnic dance predecessors. This did not altogether overcome prejudices against men dancing, as Vernon Castle's obituaries after his early death in 1918 during World War I revealed.

No such prejudices exist in Buenos Aires. Martha Savigliano's ethnography of present-day...