The History of Tango

" First I want to say that, although the history of tango is fascinating in its own way, it contributes only a little, in a practical sense, to the dance you are about to learn. You could leave this whole chapter out completely and still tango satisfactorily. That would be a great shame, however, because it is fun to incorporate some of the flavour of tango"s earlier days in our dancing today. I believe that tango is as much a language as speech. In the same way as many of us love the poetry of Shakespeare even though we don"t communicate with each other in Tudor English, we are perfectly able to grasp the subtleties of tango without necessarily copying those who danced it in the past.

I dare to go one step further. I am eager to dispel the myth that there is some sort of "authentic" tango that can and must be copied and is set in concrete for all time. I know a number of people who choose to believe this, and that"s fine for them, though I wonder what they get out of that feeling. I just worry that, if we focus too much on the past, we may lose the joy of the present and - worse still - discover that there is no one to tango with in the future.

No one actually owns tango or can forbid anyone from connecting with it for any reason. It is a genuine, basically earthy dance of the proletariat; a dance created by the people, for the people. Tango did not evolve because people wanted to do only that which had been done before. It was new and fresh and dangerous. It pushed at the boundaries of human contact and was not subservient to form. I read somewhere that one lover of tango thought that, when Osvaldo Pugliese, a great bandleader, died in 1995, so did tango. That is exactly the attitude I feel we must fight against. While, at the moment of writing, there is no doubt a strong rise in the popularity of tango - both the music and the dance - it still needs all the friends it can get. "