Tango's Journey to Paris: How Europe Fell for the Dance

Every London milonga sits at the end of a long journey. The coats piled on a chair, the shoes coming out of the bag, the first cabeceo of the night across a crowded floor — all of it arrived here by way of the port districts of Buenos Aires, and by way of a very long detour through Paris. It is a good story. It is also a useful one, because a fair amount of what we do on a Tuesday night in Bloomsbury makes more sense once you know it.

The young men who packed a dance in their luggage

At the turn of the twentieth century, tango was a music and a dance of the Buenos Aires and Montevideo waterfronts — the immigrant tenements, the dance academies, the places respectable families did not discuss at dinner. The Argentine elite disapproved of it loudly and at length. Their sons disapproved rather less. The niños bien — wealthy young men with money, leisure and steamship tickets — had found tango in exactly the neighbourhoods their parents warned them about, and when they sailed for Europe, the dance went in the luggage.

Musicians followed. Ángel Villoldo, who wrote El Choclo, was recording in Paris as early as 1907, alongside the dancer-musicians Alfredo Gobbi and Flora Rodríguez. The writer Ricardo Güiraldes was reportedly demonstrating tango in Parisian salons around 1910, to an audience who had never seen anything like it. Within three years, an entire continent had opinions about it.

1913: the year Paris lost its head

What happened next is one of the great cultural fevers of the pre-war years. Paris did not simply accept tango — it annexed it. There were thés tango, afternoon tea dances where the orchestra played and you took a lesson between the sandwiches and the cake. There were tango teachers charging small fortunes. There was tango orange, a colour that briefly took over Parisian fashion, and couturiers cutting skirts that a woman could actually walk in. The poet Jean Richepin stood up at the Académie française in 1913 and delivered a defence of the thing, tracing its ancestry back to antiquity, which is either scholarship or excellent public relations depending on your mood.

And there was scandal, of course. Clergy denounced it. The Kaiser was said to have forbidden officers to dance it in uniform. Newspapers ran letters from concerned citizens about the ruin of modern youth.

Nothing in the history of this dance has ever filled a floor faster than being told not to.

London catches it

Britain was not far behind, and the fuse was lit in the West End. The Sunshine Girl opened at the Gaiety Theatre in 1912 with George Grossmith Jr and Phyllis Dare performing a tango on stage, and London decided it wanted in. By 1913 the city had its own tango tea circuit — the Waldorf's Palm Court is the one everybody still remembers, and the big department stores ran their own. Dance instructors found themselves suddenly, gloriously in demand. The same moral panic ran in the papers, only in a British accent and with better punctuation.

It is worth sitting with that for a second the next time you are hunting for a cheap dance floor in zone 2. There was a year when tango was the most fashionable thing in London. We are not reviving something foreign here so much as returning to something this city has done before.

The long way home

Here is the part that makes the whole story worth telling. Paris's enthusiasm travelled back down the Atlantic. Once tango was the toast of Europe, the Buenos Aires upper classes discovered they had loved it all along. The dance came home with a passport, a wardrobe and a certificate of respectability, and moved into the ballrooms that had spent a decade locking the door.

It came home slightly changed, too. The European salons wanted something more upright, smoother, more suited to a crowded ballroom and a long dress. Some of that polish stayed. The story continued through the 1920s, when Manuel Pizarro's orchestra held court at El Garrón in Montmartre and Paris became a genuine second home for Argentine musicians — Carlos Gardel himself recorded there in the late twenties.

The second crossing

Then tango went quiet for a long generation, and Europe fell in love a second time. In 1983 the show Tango Argentino opened in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet, moved to Broadway, and detonated. Suddenly there was demand for teachers, and the great Buenos Aires dancers — many of them by then in their sixties and seventies — started boarding planes. Europe built festivals and marathons around them. London's modern scene grew out of exactly that wave, which is why some of our longest-running milongas date to the 1990s rather than 1913.

What this means on a Tuesday night in Bloomsbury

History is lovely, but here is what it actually gives you:

• Two tangos in your ears. The tango Paris fell for in 1913 is not the tango most London milongas play. Spend an evening with the early guardia vieja recordings — Villoldo, the first Firpo sides — and then a D'Arienzo tanda from the late thirties. You will hear a dance growing up.
• Style is geography, not morality. The smoother, more open salon look and the tight close embrace of the Buenos Aires clubs are both legitimate children of this story. London has always mixed them. Nobody is dancing it wrong.
• The codes are a separate import. The cabeceo, the tanda, the cortina — those came from Buenos Aires practice, not from the Paris tea dances. That is why they vary so much between London venues. Watch the room for ten minutes before assuming.
• Travel the route. Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam are all a short hop, and a European festival or marathon will do more for your dancing in one weekend than a month of classes. The crossing still works in both directions.
• For beginners: pick one teacher and stay for six months before you start sampling. Tango absorbed a century of foreign influence and survived; your first year, less so.

Take the next boat

The thread running through all of this is that tango has never belonged to one city. It has always been a conversation between ports — Buenos Aires to Paris, Paris to London, London back out again. Every time somebody carried it somewhere new, it picked something up and kept going. That is not a dilution of the tradition. That is the tradition, and when you walk into a milonga in Islington or Bermondsey on a wet Wednesday, you are the current chapter of it.

So find a floor this week. Browse the milongas, classes, practicas and festivals listed on TangoLife.london, pick one you have never been to, and go. A hundred and thirteen years ago, a few young men got on a boat with this dance. The least we can do is get on the Northern line.