Paper Tangos (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 271 Paper Tangos Duke University Press, 1998 By Julie Taylor I caught a glimpse of Julie Taylor amid the antique stalls of San Telmo, Buenos Aires, one winter morning in the mid-nineties. I had seen her earlier in the week at a tango practice at the Ideal, one of the last turnof -the-century dance halls that remain in the city. In the faded opulence of the ballroom I watched the petite American anthropologist (and former dancer, as her biography notes) as she followed the movements of the instructor with great intensity Her book, Eva Perón: The Myths of a Woman, had recently been published and I recognized her immediately from a documentary about Argentina's most famous feminine icon. Taylor's latest book, Paper Tangos, is experimental and aggressively non-academic in nature. It is writing as dance—choreographed with great precision, sharp breaks, violence, and dizzying turns. The author uses excerpts from journalistic essays, tango lyrics, her own poetry, and autobiography to execute the steps of her dance. She is an aggressive lead, deftly challenging the reader, her partner, to keep up with her pace. The text is as much an experiment in form as it is in content. The challenge that Taylor faced was daunting—how to bring movement to text; how to express the aesthetic experience of dance through words or images on a printed page. She does so through the use of postage -size photographs of scenes taken from Fernando Solanas's film El exilio de Gardel (1986) that are located on the right margin of each page. When the pages are flipped through rapidly the images come to life. In the first of four that encompass the book, a couple dances amid shadows as others look on. The next scene shows letters flung from the top of a spiral staitcase, those written by Argentines in exile during the country's last dictatotship. These are the "paper tangos" mentioned in Solanas's film. The third shows a man grasping a woman violently and pulling her towards him to kiss her neck. In the final scene, a couple dances and their movements continue on the book's final pages after the words of the printed text have ended. Tango is about loss and loneliness. It is about anguish and violence. All of these themes are part of Taylor's life, her dance, and her text. She meditates on the nature of tango, the movements, music, and lyrics that form its core as well as the connections that may be made to recent Argentine history. She threads the violence of the dance and Argentina into her own personal history, connecting it to the beatings she suffered as a 272 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies young girl at the hands of her father and to a childhood rape. She demonstrates how it was the economic violence felt by the newly arrived immigrants at the turn of the century that spawned the emergence of tango in the slums of Buenos Aires. Taylor connects the violence of the dance to that which formed a part of quotidian reality during the Process of National Reorganization from 1976 to 1983 in which thousands were made to disappear. Finally, she casts it in light of the gray Monday morning of July 18, 1994, a day indelibly marked on anyone who lived in Buenos Aires at the time or for those of us who happened to be visiting. It was on this day that a car bomb destroyed the eight-story Jewish Community Center located in the heart of the city, killing almost 100 people. The author, thankfully, makes no attempt to intellectually "explain" tango to her partner, aware that one cannot explain in rational terms what must be felt, or experienced, viscerally. She does not claim to speak for anyone but hetself, an American who has spent much of her adult life in Argentina. She uses tango to express her own profound connection to the dance, to the city of Buenos Aires, and to the country. Those electing to read Paper Tangos to find the history of tango or an analysis of the dance...