http://www.history-of-tango.com/tango-origins.html Need for tango: At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century Buenos Aires had been little more than a village at the furthest corner of the Spanish Empire. In the middle of the Nineteenth Century the British arrived to develop the railway network across Argentina. This opened up this practically deserted country, and made accessible its potentially huge wealth. It made possible the transportation of agricultural produce for export, and also the exploitation of mineral resources. The only thing missing was the workers necessary to make the landowners rich. The Argentine government decided to advertise in Europe for workers. They offered accommodation for a man's first week in Argentina with very generous rations, and sometimes subsidised passage. Immediately an avalanche of immigration began. Unlike the immigration to much of the New World, which might include families or whole communities hoping to start a new life in a new land, much of the immigration into Argentina was economic - people hoping to work for a few years, make some decent money, and then go back home to their families. So the overwhelming majority of the immigrants were men. And by the beginning of the Twentieth Century the overwhelming majority of people in Buenos Aires were immigrants. This meant that there was an enormous lack of women. There were really only two practical ways for a man to get close to a woman under these circumstances. One was to visit a prostitute and the other was to dance. With so much competition from other men on the dance floor, if a man wanted a woman to dance with him, it was necessary for him to be a good dancer, and being a good dancer only meant one thing. It didn't matter if he knew lots of fancy steps, or if the other men thought he was a good dancer. The only thing that mattered was that the woman in his arms had a good time when she danced with him - because with so many other men to choose from, if she didn't enjoy dancing with him she wouldn't do it again, and neither would her friends. This meant that it was necessary for the men to practice together in order to be good enough to dance with the women. It is important to remember that this was a time before recorded music was available. The only kind of music was live music, and there would have been very little of it. So if a group of men heard music playing they would jump at the chance to dance to it. In the brothels there would be live music and other men waiting. So it seems to me quite obvious that the clients of the brothels would have danced together while they waited, making the most of the opportunity to practice, not because they wanted to dance with a prostitute, but because they wanted to be able to dance well when they got the opportunity to dance with a woman who was not a prostitute. http://www.history-of-tango.com/couple-dance.html Dennis: Tango was not popular with the chattering classes until it became popular in Europe, but why did that happen? Although it seems now to be the only possible hold for couple dancing, Tango is only the third dance in history done with the man and woman facing each other, with the man holding the woman's right hand in his left, and with his right arm around her. The first dance done in this hold was the Viennese Waltz, which was a craze across Europe in the 1830s. Couple dancing before the Viennese Waltz was formal, with couples performing choreographed steps, and generally with no more physical contact than holding hands - if that (although some Renaissance dances like la volta could involve surprising levels of intimacy). The second couple dance to use this hold was the Polka, which became the fashion in the 1840s. The third dance, Tango, was radically different from anything that came before it because it introduced the concept of improvisation for the first time, and was a huge influence on all couple dancing in the Twentieth Century. Tango was the first couple dance ever seen in Europe that involved improvisation. Before the arrival of Tango, couple dance was sequence based, with every couple on the floor dancing the same steps at the same time. (The only notable exception to this was the Boston, a rhythmically difficult form of Waltz fashionable in London in 1911, although it was never widely danced. Some Ballroom dancers today dance a very simplified version of the Boston.) By this time Argentina was the seventh richest country in the world, with an average per capita income four times that of Spain or Italy. While the poor stayed poor, the rich got very rich indeed, and it became the fashion for families to send their young sons to Europe, either to go to university, or simply to do the Grand Tour and finish off their education. Young men of good families have a tendency to spend time in places they are not supposed to visit, and with girls that their mothers would rather they did not marry, and as a consequence several of these young men were quite good Tango dancers, even though Tango was still completely unacceptable in polite society in Buenos Aires. But when these young men began to dance in Paris the upper classes were entranced, and Tango became a massive craze. 1913 was the Year of the Tango all over the world. Tango was the couple dance everyone wanted to learn. In this year the Tango Teas began at the Waldorf Hotel in London, picking up the fashion of Tes Dansants from Paris, and a grand Tango ball held in the Selfridges department store was declared the event of the season. All of Europe was dancing the Tango. There were many disapproving voices, but the mania had bitten. Fashions in clothing, already changing away from the restrictions of the Victorian corset and hooped skirts, changed more quickly under the influence of the Tango. It is said that women in Paris abandoned the corset in order to dance it. The feathers in women's hats moved from horizontal, sweeping across in front of the face, to vertical, going up from the forehead, letting a couple dance without the feather getting in the Tango partner's way. Tulip skirts, which opened at the front, made dancing easier. Women were sold not just Tango shoes, but Tango stockings, Tango hats, Tango dresses, and anything else that manufacturers could think of. And the colour of Tango was orange. In 1913 and 1914 a variety of books were published in Europe claiming to teach Tango, four of them in London. It seems to me that one of these, Secrets of the Tango, has a ring of truth about it. It was published in 1914, under the name of an English author, but the steps in it are credited to a young Argentine living in London. His parents thought that he was studying Engineering. In fact he was appearing on the stage of the Queen's Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue dancing the Tango. The popularity of Tango in Europe, and especially in Paris, made it an interesting couple dance to the upper classes in Buenos Aires, and the Tango was re-imported for their benefit. I have seen a book published in Buenos Aires around the time of the First World War (the publishing date was not given on the copy I saw) which says in its introduction that this is to teach people the elegant Tango as it is danced in Paris, which is nothing like the tasteless, squalid little dance done by the lower classes in the outskirts of Buenos Aires! http://www.history-of-tango.com/dance-tango.html the golden age: From 1935 people again began to dance Tango in Buenos Aires in huge numbers, inspired by the powerful Tango dance rhythms of Juan D'Arienzo . D'Arienzo was unapologetic about creating the kind of Tango music that people wanted to dance to, even though his style was criticised as a backward step in the evolution of Tango music. And it was precisely the injection of energy that the Tango needed. The period between D'Arienzo 's recording contract in 1935 and the military coup that changed everything in Argentina in 1955 is generally considered to be the Golden Age of the Tango. It is the period when all aspects of the Tango were in the greatest harmony. Musicians played for dancers. Singers sang within the orchestra, as another instrument, rather than dominating the orchestra as the star. The dancers, inspired by the many great orchestras, created a massive evolution in the dance, and also provided the market for the many orchestras, encouraging them to compete and reach new heights in Tango dance music. In the 1940s and the 1950s practically everyone in Buenos Aires danced the Tango. Generally those who did not dance Tango were the members of the upper classes, for whom the bulk of the population still represented the recent immigrants, whose culture was very different from their own. To the upper classes in Argentina, Tango, particularly the dance, was then, and remains today, at least as exotic and alien as it is to the bulk of people in Europe or the United States. But for most of the people of Buenos Aires, Tango was very much a part of their everyday lives. I asked a friend of mine who began to dance Tango in 1940 how he managed to go out dancing every night when he also had a job to go to. He told me that he would go out dancing, then go home to shower and change, work from 6 or 7 a.m. until 2 p.m., go home and sleep, and get up in the evening, ready to go out dancing. http://www.history-of-tango.com/dark-age.html Peron supported tango, so the regime, which associated everything bad with Peron, preferred rock and roll. No minors in the tango halls, but ok for rock & roll. "But one very subtle and clever attack was made specifically against the Tango. This story was told to me by someone who ran a number of Tango dances in the mid-1950s. There were laws banning the presence of minors in nightclubs. These laws were rigidly enforced for Tango clubs, but were not enforced at all for clubs that only played Rock and Roll music." Reasons: Underground gatherings: Tango dancing in public was suppressed because it involved people gathering, which was seen as a potential cover for political dissent. The junta forbade public meetings and enforced curfews to make social dancing difficult. Political subversiveness: The junta banned any song lyrics that criticized the state of affairs or sympathized with the working class. The repressive military blacklisted, persecuted, and even exiled tango artists to silence their potentially subversive voices. Moralistic prejudice: Tango had long been associated with the working class and marginalized communities. To the upper-class military rulers, tango was seen as indecent and linked to "womanizers and layabouts".