By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Dec 10 1996 (IPS)

The Tango, quintessential symbol of Argentine culture, is enjoying a renaissance. Young people who had once discarded the sensual dance as something for oldsters are now embracing it as they search for identity.

New schools have opened up to teach the art of dancing the tango to novices and tango dance halls are multiplying. Several are open on weekdays.

“Tango pulsates inside the people of Buenos Aires,” says Ricardo Barrios, a professor of tango. “It is alive in there, in a latent state. They carry it in their genes, it runs through their veins.”

He himself has the passion of the converted. “I had to learn tango in order to find a job, and now I can’t let it go.”

Barrios says that it is a very emotional experience to go to the first tango class of a group of young Argentines.

“They come here out of curiosity, and they end up feeling something very compulsive that they can’t let go of. It is an emotional experience that transports them back to their ancestors, to their history”.

In this sense, tango has emerged as the unexpected refuge for a nihilistic youth. Wearing worn-out jeans and workboots, adolescent young men have flocked to the dance halls. According to a study by the University of Buenos Aires, Argentine “punks” are revindicating neighborhood, the family… and the tango.

Some say it is not simply a fad. “It’s the search for an identity,” explains Mario Cejas, director of the National Academy of Tango. “Some may come to tango because of Madonna, as if they were imitating something foreign, but immediately, they find something bigger”.

Singer Adriana Varela — one of the representatives of this new tango culture — offers a different explanation.

“Young people need to embrace and physical contact, and they do not have that in the discos, where couples dance separately, without touching, without looking at each other, without speaking. They don’t even understand the lyrics of the songs they are listening to”.

At the Club Almagro recently, Sandra, a 21-year-old teacher of Italian, sat at a table waiting for an invitation to dance. This is the same dance hall in which Madonna chose for a nocturnal escapade while she was in Buenos Aires for the shooting of the movie “Evita”.

Then she partners “Petaca”, a 68-year-old retiree and maestro of the “milonga” who has been kicking his heels in dance halls in Buenos Aires for 48 years. His style is well-known in Berlin, Brussels and Barcelona. Now, he comes to the Almagro from Tuesdays to Sundays. “It’s a vice”, he tells IPS.

Petaca signals with his head and Sandra interprets. Couples in tango do not need to talk. The man looks at the woman, makes a movement with his head, and she either accepts or declines.

Sandra accepts. Despite the difference in their ages, it is an considered an honour to be led by a “milonguero” from the old days, a living legend.

They embrace and begin dancing, with typical movements that are never the same.

“In the milonga, couples make their own figures; it’s very different from the tango danced by professionals who choreograph their steps and repeat them. Here, you have to let yourself be swept by the emotion, which is always changing”, Cejas explains.

Professional tango is the most well-known internationally. It shines in the musical performances that tour theaters throughout the world and which is depicted on the postcards of Buenos Aires: the couple bent over, the woman almost lying down, and the man leaning over her at an almost 90-degree angle.

But the milonga, the typical tango that has been danced in Buenos Aires since the 1930s and which was condemned by the Catholic Church, can only be found in the dance hall in the neighborhoods.

There, each couple dances differently, making “their own figures”, Cejas would say, though it is all tango.

Petaca thinks that Sandra dances well, but she could be better. “Young people are enthusiastic, but they do not want to work at it. They imitate, they don’t create. They sit down, they look, they imitate, and then they want to become teachers and earn lots of money. But tango is not for that; if I had to live from the tango, I would kill myself”.

Many of the young people that go to the Almagro and other tango dance halls are dancers or actors. But there are also professionals, students, and workers who simply had some experience that made them decide to learn tango, particularly those who have travelled abroad.

“I was living in Europe and every time I said I was Argentine, they would ask me to dance the tango. I said that I didn’t know how and they would be surprised. Others would ask me to sing, and I couldn’t do that either. I didn’t know any lyrics,” said Constanza, a 26-year-old graphic designer.

Today’s young people searched for the tango because they lost a generational battle with their parents. For those between 35 and 40 years old, on the other hand, the tango is a thing of the older, conservative generation. They were seduced by rock and roll, and are now finding it difficult to approach the tango.

Younger women also do not carry around so much prejudice about gender roles.

“Nothing is nicer than being led by a man”, said Sandra. She does acknowledge, however, that in the 50s, a woman like her could not go out alone to dance tango without being branded a prostitute. Now, she can come alone every day of the week.

It is not a question of the tango having survived or being revived. It is not a fashion, either.

“The tango never died”, says Petaca. It’s just that now, it has been discovered by foreigners and many young people, and they have been seduced by the dance. That is why there has been an increase in offers, in order to meet the demand.”

An FM radio station “FM Tango”, which transmits only tango music, has been in existence for two years. Its audience is an average of 35 years old. There is even a cable television channel “Solo tango”, which is a year old and transmits tango 24 hours a day.

However, neither the lyrics nor the music is being renewed by its followers. The quality of the lyrics written by younger people is a far cry from the poetry of the 30s. The dance music has merely been modernized with new arrangements on already existing ones.

Some believe that there is a lack of themes for inspiration. But Barrios does not subscribe to that theory.

Love, tradition, solitude, alcohol, exile, return and disillusion are not only themes of the past. These are precisely the themes being expressed in the tango by today’s youth: the search for a lost identity, the alienation, and the vertigo created by a nervous Buenos Aires of the end of the century.

Excerpt: