Tango Lessons
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TANGO LESSONS TANGO LESSONS MOVEMENT, SOUND, IMAGE, AND TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE MARILYN G. MILLER, EDITOR Duke University Press • Durham and London • 2014 © 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Typeset in Arno and Univers by Copperline Book Services, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tango lessons : movement, sound, image, and text in contemporary practice / Marilyn G. Miller, ed. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5549-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5566-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Tango (Dance)— Social aspects — History. 2. Tangos — History and criticism. i. Miller, Marilyn Grace, 1961– gv1796.t3t3369 2013 793.3'3 — dc23 2013025657 Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of Tulane University, which provided funds toward the publication of this book. FOR EDUARDO CONTENTS ix Acknowledgments 1 INTRODUCTION • MARILYN G. MILLER 33 CHAPTER ONE • OSCAR CONDE Lunfardo in Tango: A Way of Speaking That Defines a Way of Being 60 CHAPTER TWO • ALEJANDRO SUSTI Borges, Tango, and Milonga 82 CHAPTER THREE • MARILYN G. MILLER Picturing Tango 118 CHAPTER FOUR • ANTONIO GÓMEZ Tango, Politics, and the Musical of Exile 140 CHAPTER FIVE • FERNANDO ROSENBERG The Return of the Tango in Documentary Film 164 CHAPTER SIX • CAROLYN MERRITT “Manejame como un auto”: Drive Me Like a Car, or What’s So New about Tango Nuevo? 198 CHAPTER SEVEN • MORGAN JAMES LUKER Contemporary Tango and the Cultural Politics of Música Popular 220 CHAPTER EIGHT • ESTEBAN BUCH Gotan Project’s Tango Project 243 Glossary 247 Works Cited 267 Contributors and Translators 269 Index ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A great many colleagues and fellow tangueros in Argentina, Uruguay, the United States, and elsewhere were extraordinarily gracious in sharing their time, knowledge, resources, and personal histories during the gestation of this edited volume. In addition to the contributors and translators whose formida- ble knowledge and hard work is represented in these pages, I would like to ac- knowledge and thank the Academia Porteña de Lunfardo, the Academia del Tango, Carlos Alonso, the Ateneo Popular de La Boca, Carlos Barea, Liliana Barela, Salvador Batalla, Florencia Bazzano, Marcos Blum, Eduardo Bucich, Juan Carlos Cáceres, Carlos Cañás, Giselle Casares, Juan Carlos Copes, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Arlene Dávila, Claudia DeBrito, Horacio de Dios, Lea Dolinsky, Estudio dni Tango, Luis Feldman, Horacio Ferrer, Paula Ferrio, Jorge Firpo, Sebastián Freire, Fundación Kónex, Florencia Garramuño, Omar Gasparini, Diego Goldberg, Adriana Groisman, Fermín Hontou (Ombú), Daniel Kaplan, the Latin American Library at Tulane University, Hernán Lombardi, Jorge López, Marcos López, Alfredo Lucadamo, Cristian MacEntyre, Acho Manzi, Deborah Miller, Gabriela Miró, Ben Molar, Al- berto Mosquera Montana, Gustavo Mozzi, Jorge Muscia, the Museo de la Ciudad, Curry O’Day, Marcelo Héctor Oliveri, Shannon Payne, Albert Paz and Valerie Hart, Marta Porto, Lydia Pugliese, Olga Reni, Walter Romero, Fernando Saavedra Faget, Alejandro Saderman, Marino Santa María, Gus- tavo Santaolalla, Walter Santoro, Marcia Schwartz, Claudio Segovia, Carlos Semino, Aldo Sessa, Luis Sessa, Gabriel Soria, Martín Soubiate, Rodrigo Spagnuolo, Rafael Squirru, Manuel Surribá, Julie M. Taylor, Cristina Tor- rallardona, Ignacio Varchausky, Rubén Vela, Leo Vinci, Manrique Zago, and all my colleagues and students at Tulane, with whom and from whom I learn so much. Four figures who nurtured mymetejón with the tango by providing an unending supply of information, friendship, and inspiration throughout the process deserve special mention. Oscar Conde indulged my curiosity and x • Acknowledgments questions from start to finish with patience, wisdom, and good humor. Fer- nando Rosenberg, a cosmopolitan porteño par excellence, recommended people, places, classes, and resources that were exactly right. Hermenegildo Sábat accompanied the project with his art, vision, ear for jazz, and remi- nisces of New Orleans. Gregorio Traub, the oracle of Barracas, offered privi- leged information on the histories of tango and Buenos Aires from a massive memory bank that he keeps in his head. Research and assembly of this book was made infinitely richer and sweeter when Eduardo Alvelo stepped in as the project’s guitarrista de Gardel, its es- sential accompanist. A great many of the contacts and interviews with hal- lowed figures ofrioplatense cultural history were secured through his inter- vention. This is very much his book, too. Many thanks to Valerie Millholland, Miriam Angress, Susan Albury, and everyone else at Duke University Press who helped see the book through to publication. Research for this edited volume was supported by several generous grants from the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. INTRODUCTION MARILYN G. MILLER The tango is an infinite possibility. — popular saying The Tango Continuum For more than a century, an eclectic array of students, scholars, and fans have debated the origins, meanings, and relevance of the tango. Where did it orig- inate? Who invented it, and who has composed, sung, played, or danced it best? How did it develop into what we know today as tango, and how should it be performed and preserved in our own times? Why is it called tango in the first place?1 The scholars convened in this edited volume address the fields of music and dance but explore tango’s vitality in language, literary critique, film, and art as well, concluding that tango is alive and flourishing in all these venues, in some cases to a degree perhaps never before seen. For some, this heightened interest and enthusiasm signals a resurgence, for others a contin- uation, and yet for still others a rupture with hallowed traditions. However one understands its recent history, tango praxis today constitutes a hub of rich, diverse, and multifarious activity in contexts both local and global. Questions about tango’s present state in relation to its storied history are not new. In an essay published in 1926, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges distinguished between a “contemporary” picturesque tango and a more gen- uine “primordial” tango built of “pure insolence, pure shamelessness, pure happiness in bravery” (On Argentina 43). Such categorizations, resting on the tensions between tradition and innovation, authenticity and creativity, still generate impassioned debate. Attesting to tango’s deep resonance in the twenty- first century, the twenty- four members of unesco’s Intangible Heri- tage Committee named the music and dance forms of thetango rioplatense a world cultural heritage in 2009.2 2 • Marilyn G. Miller As scholars and students who find ourselves in its thrall, we are witnesses to tango’s vitality and complexity. Though we take into account its many historical trajectories, here we focus principally on its current resonance and power. In addition to its relevance as dance or music or literature, tango pres- ents a useful tool for studying global cultural flows and their interactions. Indeed, there are few popular cultural forms so thoroughly interdisciplinary as the tango.3 In tango, “musical and nonmusical materials [are apt] to com- ment on, criticize, or reinterpret each other as well as to repeat each other” (Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice 14).4 Nonetheless, scholarly investiga- tions from different disciplines have rarely acknowledged this multivalence. As dancers, listeners, and participants in other practices of the form, we use this edited volume to make a case for tango as a vast repository of local ex- perience, wide- ranging knowledge, and global significance. Inspired by the luminaries who have contributed to its rise to international fame in the last century, we offer fresh perspectives on tango’s vigor and continuing appeal for new generations of aficionados. The backstory to tango’s unlimited possibilities can be found in the par- allel and complementary processes of local development and transnational circulation. Within this story, scholars refer to varied influences in the forms and styles that contributed to its basic structure (candombe, milonga, mi- longón, habanera, tango andaluz, etc.), in the home cultures of those elements (Spain, Uruguay, Cuba, Africa, Italy, the Argentine pampas, specific Buenos Aires neighborhoods, etc.), and in the colorful characters who implemented them, such as immigrants from Europe, people of African descent, compa- dritos (pimps), and payadores (street poets), among others. These myriad musical and kinetic practices conjoined and coalesced as tango rioplatense in Buenos Aires and across the Río de la Plata in Montevideo about 1880.5 The initial attractions were the dance and the rhythms driving it, rhythms so infectious that twenty- first- century tango still retains a movement repertoire based on the same holy trinity of milonga, vals (waltz), and tango proper.6 Of its three principal rhythms, milonga offers a key to understanding tango’s history as well as its contemporary practices. Milonga harkens back to the late nineteenth century and a brash, rules- bashing dance style (canyengue) that developed from African diasporic elements and aligns tango with other popular American forms such as jazz and Cuban son (see Thompson; Salinas Rodríguez).7 Aníbal Ford describes the milonga, popularized in rural zones and Buenos Aires’s suburbios or marginal neighborhoods, as a “slow, conver- sational,