For those who find that the contemporary interpretation of popular dancing is often ludicrous and better left to the sights and sounds of futuristic discotheques, "Tango Argentino" might recall gentler days when cheek-to-cheek romance held its beauty and attraction for civilized night owls. Indeed, this legendary if barely known national dance of South America's most cosmopolitan country presents a silent if eloquent challenge to the lurid behavior one sees on the dance floors of the 1880s. The many forms and styles of "The Tango"--that elegant, rhythmic, polished dance of controlled passion, born in perhaps marginal circumstances of 1880s Buenos Aires--offer an evening of unsurpassed entertainment for Broadway audiences.
This surprise hit of the season contains a theatrical history of the twentieth century's most provocative dance form. Soon to leave New York on a national tour, "Tango Argentino" offers thirty talented dancers, singers, and instrumentalists who combine the many threads of lineage which constitute the nation of Evita. As the line goes, "The Argentines are Italians who think they speak Spanish, pretend they are British, and wish they were French."
By the Roaring Twenties the tango had found its way to Paris and became all the rage, adopted by the beau monde as the period's finest expression of hot blood and cold control--the essential elements for sizzling romance. Of course, it was not until after World War I that the "smart set" of Buenos Aires deigned to recognize even the existence of the suddenly fashionable blend of intricately interwoven steps, defiant but plaintive melodies, and tantalizingly brisk syncopations. Once the sophisticated Latin choreography was associated with Rudolph Valentino, however, tangomania endured until World War II.
This seductive brew of an often nearly balletic form of ballroom exhibitionism apparently simmered for a number of years on the fringes of Argentina's majestic capital city. The tango's pulsating rhythmic structures are thought to derive in part from the milonga ballad, itself an admixture of the somewhat Arabic habanera--imported by the original Spanish colonists in the days of the Holy Roman Empire--and of the indigenous Indian drumbeat language. While the milongas were sung and played out on the pampas with the gauchos, black African slaves were creating another community within Argentina, which undoubtedly lost its identity within the fertile sociological soup but contributed its own even more exuberant percussive musical vocabulary. These immigrants and refugees from the Old World were ultimately subsumed in the vast uncounted population that in those days, a century past, had few prospects. These portenos, as they came to be known, developed in their declasse world a living, creative expression of their strange existence. It was eventually dubbed the tango, possibly from "tangere" (to touch), and soon emerged as Argentina's most significant contribution to the common culture.
The lyrics of the many tango songs, to which a rich array of carefully choreographed and gracefully executed steps, kicks, flings, feints, and embraces are set, are generally melancholy; moreover, the poignant strains of bandoneones, concertina-sized accordions played by an enthusiastic orchestra, create an atmosphere of depth and character. Each song tells a story of unrequited love or loneliness or perhaps despair in the face of life's misfortunes. Each pair of highly poised and trained dancers portrays personalities caught in a relationship with his or
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