Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World

by Kathy Davis

Argentinean tango is a global phenomenon. Since its origin among immigrants from the slums of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, it has crossed and re-crossed many borders.Yet, never before has tango been danced by so many people and in so many different places as today. Argentinean tango is more than a specific music and style of dancing. It is also a cultural imaginary which embodies intense passion, hyper-heterosexuality, and dangerous exoticism.

In the wake of its latest revival, tango has become both a cultural symbol of Argentinean national identity and a transnational cultural space in which a modest, yet growing number of dancers from different parts of the globe meet on the dance floor.

Through interviews and ethnographical research in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires, Kathy Davis shows why a dance from another era and another place appeals to men and women from different parts of the world and what happens to them as they become caught up in the tango salon culture. She shows how they negotiate the ambivalences, contradictions, and hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and global relations of power between North and South in
which Argentinean tango is―and has always been―embroiled.

Davis also explores her uneasiness about her own passion for a dance which―when seen through the lens of contemporary critical feminist and postcolonial theories―seems, at best, odd, and, at worst, disreputable and even a bit shameful. She uses the disjuncture between the incorrect pleasures and complicated politics of dancing tango as a resource for exploring the workings of passion as experience, as performance, and as cultural discourse. She concludes that dancing tango should be viewed less as a love/hate embrace with colonial overtones than a passionate encounter across many different borders between dancers who share a desire for difference and a taste of the ‘elsewhere.’ Dancing Tango is a vivid, intriguing account of an important global cultural phenomenon.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2014

Reviews

[Victo Dolean]

Tango viewed from a historical and sociological viewpoint: several aspects that anyone would like to explain to himself/herself are there. Who is dancing, why they are dancing, are there geographical/cultural differences between tango dancers and how they feed the complexity of the communit(ies) and their different styles. Very enriching and revealing reading for anyone involved or aspiring to be involved in the "tango life".

[Mihir T Desai]

How does a misogynistic dance style outlive pretty much every social dance over the last hundred years, itself go through evolutions and yet have a wide majority who recognizes that there is indeed a pure form? Which dance style, in fact any style of dance or any recreation for that argument, has a noteworthy number of people that relocate from distant lands to Buenos Aires, Tango’s ancestral home, similar to Hare-Krishna members? What is striking about the writer is she’s s a feminist, one that has peers with raised eyebrows as she indulges in the dance. Davies makes a compelling argument: Tango enables its dancers to explore their masculinity and femininity and, in the process, address a first principle of human existence itself. Through a series of ethnographic interviews, Davis compares and contrasts the complicated sociology of the dance as it is acted out in Buenos Aires, a city with gender relations vastly different from 100 years ago, and Amsterdam, which represents male-female northern hemisphere sensibilities. At the heart of the book is the argument that to fully explore the dance one needs to fully explore express one’s self identified gender and share this authenticity with the community in the Milonga. By providing this canvas for authentic expression, where a member feels a sense of self transcendence, Tango is theater, addiction, and sublime all at once.