Tango Nuevo

1. There is No New Tango

1 There Is No New Tango In Argentina, everything can change, except the tango. Astor Piazzolla, quoted in Ramón Pelinski, El tango nómade (2000) There are many groups that have lost interest in making the music that musicologists expect from them. . . . Sometimes it’s the anthropologist that gets more upset over the loss of identity than the culture itself. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not, but if a people change it’s because everything changes. Carlos Reynoso, quoted in Sandra de la Fuente, “Los estudios culturales son una moda” (2007) January 2005, El Galpon, Buenos Aires He wore a fashionable sort of sweatpants, tie-dyed and low in the crotch, a ratty t-shirt, and sneakers. She wore a skimpy top that could pass for a bra, tight black leggings slit up the sides, rolled over to accentuate a long pelvis that swiveled and undulated, turning the most traditional of movements into more of an MTV affair. Low, red lights turned their sawdust- and sweat-coated bodies a beautiful pinkish bronze. ἀ e accordion-like cry of the bandoneon—the signature tango instrument—cut the drone of drum and bass, nudging generic dance sounds toward territory that spoke of tango. His walk was pounding, his stride long and wide; his turns hinted at other dances as a leg trailed out in back attitude (extension with a bent knee) before traveling full circle to settle into a front sacada (displacement). ἀ e steps were familiar, but their execution, the music shaping them, the space surrounding them, and the bodies enacting them were anything but. Just days left to my tango vacation, I decided it was time for a private lesson. We negotiated a time and a price, and then I asked him about his dance. Aware that I was on treacherous ground, careful not to mention the word, I asked what he would call it. His smile turned stiff as he asked what I meant, but before I could respond he cut me off: “Mira [Look],” he said, Merritt book.indb 15 8/23/12 11:23 AM 16 · Tango Nuevo “call it what you want, but for me it’s tango—nada más [nothing more].” End of discussion, he kissed me on the cheek and bade me goodnight. Seduction Why do dancers in Argentina insist that there is “no such thing as tango nuevo?” How is it that outside Argentina, flying limbs, gender-bending, electronica, and bell-bottoms are all cited as evidence—for good or ill— of something new, yet inside Argentina defended as simply part of an evolving tradition known as tango by young porteños? What does it mean when these same Argentine dancers reluctantly employ the nuevo label to market themselves to foreigners? In October 2005, I moved from Philadelphia to Buenos Aires to study Argentine tango, to collect stories, and to try to answer these questions. Armed with a couple of suitcases full of essentials, some (in)appropriately skimpy dance clothes, a humble collection of tango shoes that I hoped to expand, and a rather shell-shocked cat, I had a hunch that the glimmerings of growth and change I’d observed in the city’s tango scene earlier that year were a sign of something worth looking into. As nearly every young, hip tango dancer I spoke with on that trip was so fond of saying, I wanted to “investigate the tango.”1 For I had begun to make connections between my graduate studies in anthropology and my tango life. I was fascinated by questions of place. Through my newly trained eyes, I suddenly saw that the link between culture and place—always assumed and therefore unexamined—was indeed rather tenuous. I began to ponder what exactly made our practice in Philadelphia “Argentine,” when the events were organized and the dancers , even those from Argentina, trained by North Americans. Aside from distinguishing our tango from its ballroom cousins, American and International tango, I wondered if there were traces of place in the dance. To what extent did tango foster a sense of connection to a distant homeland among the Argentines, most of whom freely admitted they might never have taken it up had they not left home in the first place? And just why was it so important to make the pilgrimage to Buenos Aires, after all? I had studied ballet more than half my life, yet it had never crossed my mind to take that study...