Forever Tango and Tango Argentino: The Shows That Sparked a Boom

A tango revival that began in a Paris theatre

If you learned tango in London at any point in the last thirty years, you owe a quiet debt to two Argentine designers and a cellist. It is easy to assume tango has always been what it is now — a worldwide social dance with festivals, marathons and a milonga somewhere in the city every night of the week. It hasn't. In the early 1980s, tango in Buenos Aires was widely treated as music for grandparents. Years of curfews under the dictatorship, the rise of rock nacional, and a generation that associated tango with their parents' politics had emptied the dance halls. Plenty of the great dancers were working day jobs.

Then, in November 1983, a show called Tango Argentino opened at the Festival d'Automne in Paris. It had no plot, no love story, no narrator. It was simply tango: an orchestra, singers, and couples dancing, one number after another. Paris lost its head over it. Two years later the show opened on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, and the story properly began.

Why a show with no story worked

Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli, the creators, made one brilliant decision: they cast real dancers rather than a chorus line. The Sexteto Mayor played live. Singers like Roberto Goyeneche and Raúl Lavié brought the words. And the couples on stage were, in several cases, well past the age at which a Broadway producer would normally cast anybody.

The most famous example was Virulazo, a heavyset man from Rosario who danced with his wife Elvira and who barely appeared to move. He walked. He stood still and turned her around him. Audiences who had come expecting acrobatics found themselves watching a man of considerable bulk make stillness look like the most desirable thing in the room. Alongside him, Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves brought the polished, theatrical line that the stage rewards. Both approaches were on the same bill, and the contrast is arguably what made the show so persuasive.

The revelation of Tango Argentino was not that tango could be spectacular. It was that tango could be ordinary people, dancing extraordinarily well, in an embrace.

What the show gave back to Buenos Aires

The most interesting part of this story is the return journey. Young Argentines read that Paris and New York were queuing round the block for a dance they had written off, and went to find out what the fuss was about. Practicas that had been running for a handful of loyalists filled up. Older milongueros who had been dancing in near-obscurity for decades suddenly had students — and then had passports, because Europe, North America and Japan wanted teachers.

That export is the direct ancestor of the classes you take here. The line from a Paris theatre in 1983 to a Tuesday-night beginners' class in Bloomsbury is shorter and straighter than most people realise.

Forever Tango and the second wave

A decade later came the second push. Forever Tango was the creation of Luis Bravo, an Argentine cellist, and it built its reputation the slow way: a run in San Francisco that was supposed to last weeks and lasted the better part of two years. It reached Broadway in June 1997 at the Walter Kerr Theatre and stayed for roughly 500 performances, making it the longest-running tango show Broadway has had.

Musically it was the more muscular of the two. Bravo put an eleven-piece orchestra on stage with four bandoneons, and if you have ever wondered why the bandoneon sounds like an entire weather system rather than an accordion, four of them in a theatre will settle the question.

The lean that changed a thousand embraces

The moment everybody remembers is Carlos Gavito and Marcela Durán dancing to Eduardo Rovira's A Evaristo Carriego. Gavito, in a fedora, leaning so far forward into his partner that the two of them formed a single improbable triangle, holding the position while the music decided what to do next. It is one of the most imitated images in tango.

It also did something genuinely useful. Gavito went on to teach all over the world, and he brought with him a vocabulary for the close embrace — shared axis, weight given rather than held back, the pause as an event rather than a gap — at exactly the moment when a generation of new dancers outside Argentina were being taught mostly open-embrace patterns. A great deal of what London teachers say about the embrace today traces back through that lineage.

The honest caveat: the lean itself is theatre. It is calibrated between two people who rehearsed it, on a stage with nobody else on it. Please do not attempt it on a Friday night at a packed milonga.

How the wave reached London

Britain got the boom slightly second-hand, through touring productions. The companies that came out of these shows — Tango x 2, founded by Miguel Ángel Zotto and Milena Plebs after they danced in Tango Argentino, and the various tango spectaculars that followed — toured through Sadler's Wells, the Peacock and regional theatres, and every visit left a residue of new dancers behind it. London's first regular milongas appeared in the late eighties and multiplied steadily through the nineties.

The pattern hasn't changed. Ask around any beginners' class here and you will find someone who saw a show, or a film, or an Argentine tango round on Strictly, and looked up classes the following morning. Spectacle is still the front door. The embrace is what keeps people in the building.

Watching stage tango as a social dancer

Stage tango and social tango are relatives, not twins. Here is how to get the most out of the former without letting it distort the latter:

• Know which one you are watching. Tango escenario is choreographed for an audience at a distance, with room for lifts and high boleos. Tango salón is improvised in a shared lane of traffic. Judging one by the standards of the other helps nobody.
• Watch the feet on the floor, not the legs in the air. The ornaments are the easy part to copy and the least useful. The weight changes, the timing of the collection, the quality of the walk — that is the transferable material.
• Steal the pauses. Almost every memorable moment in Forever Tango is a stillness. Pausing well is available to a dancer of three months. Ganchos are not.
• Listen to the arrangements critically. Shows favour dramatic, often modern arrangements. The social floor still runs largely on D'Arienzo, Di Sarli, Troilo and Pugliese. Train your ear on the orquestas you will actually dance to.
• Use shows as recruitment. A friend who says tango isn't for them will rarely come to a class, but will often come to a theatre. Several of London's most committed dancers started exactly that way.

A short watchlist

1. Gavito and Durán dancing A Evaristo Carriego — for the embrace and the pause.
2. Copes and Nieves in their Tango Argentino years — for line and theatrical clarity.
3. Our Last Tango (2015), the documentary about Copes and Nieves — for the human cost behind a fifty-year partnership.
4. Any decent floor-level video from a Buenos Aires milonga — watch it straight after the stage clips and notice how differently good dancers move when there are eighty other people on the floor.

Take it to the floor

These two shows didn't invent anything. What they did was put tango in front of people who had no reason to look for it, and trust that the dance would do the rest. It did — in Paris, in New York, in Buenos Aires, and eventually on a Friday night in Holborn.

The most direct way to honour that is not to watch more tango, but to dance it. Whether you have been dancing for a decade or have never taken a class, have a look at what's on this week — classes, practicas and milongas across the city are listed on TangoLife.london. Pick one, go, and see what the fuss was about.