The 1980s Tango Revival: How a Dying Dance Came Back

The night tango stopped being a museum piece

In the autumn of 1983 a show called Tango Argentino opened in Paris. It had no plot and almost no set. Its cast included dancers well past sixty, men in dinner jackets whose style had last been fashionable thirty years earlier. Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli, the creators, had booked a short run and expected a polite reception.

Audiences refused to let it close. It toured Europe, reached Broadway in 1985, and played to full houses of people who had never heard the word milonga in their lives. Within a few years there were tango classes in cities with no tango tradition whatsoever — including this one.

So if you dance in a church hall in north London on a wet Tuesday, or in a basement bar with a floor that sticks in one corner, you are downstream of that run. It is worth knowing how close the whole thing came to ending.

How a national dance nearly disappeared

Between roughly 1935 and 1955, tango was simply what Argentina did on a Saturday night. Orchestras of a dozen or more musicians played to halls of thousands. Dancing was not a hobby you took up in your thirties after a bad break-up; it was the ordinary social equipment of an ordinary young person.

Then it stopped. The 1955 coup brought curfews and restrictions on public gatherings, and the neighbourhood social clubs where people danced — many of them tangled up with Peronist politics — became awkward places to be seen. Rock and roll arrived and did what rock and roll did everywhere: it turned your parents' music into your parents' music. Television kept people at home. And the great orchestras simply could not survive the arithmetic, because a dozen salaried musicians need a full hall to pay for them.

The dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 finished the job. Under a regime that disappeared thousands of its own citizens, a crowded room at two in the morning was not a neutral place to be. Musicians left for exile. Milongas shrank to a stubborn handful.

The missing generation

Tango has never really lived in books. There is no notation, no examinable syllabus, no authoritative recording of how it should feel. It moves from body to body, in embraces, on crowded floors, over years. A twenty-year gap in that transmission is not an inconvenience — it is close to fatal. By the late 1970s the people who could genuinely dance were in their fifties, sixties and seventies, and there was nobody standing behind them.

The export that came home

What saved it, oddly enough, was foreigners.

Tango Argentino put real dancers on stage rather than a stylised idea of them: Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves, Virulazo and Elvira, Gloria and Eduardo, Nélida and Nelson, Mayoral and Elsa María, with Roberto Goyeneche's ruined and magnificent voice over the top. Paris and New York looked at these people and treated them as artists rather than as a folkloric curiosity.

That verdict travelled back to Buenos Aires and changed the temperature at home. Young Argentines who had grown up regarding tango as something embarrassing, sentimental and safely dead started turning up at the surviving milongas — Sunderland out in Villa Urquiza, Sin Rumbo, the clubs of Almagro — and asking the old men and women to teach them.

They did. Antonio Todaro, Pepito Avellaneda, Mingo and Esther Pugliese and a few dozen others spent the late 1980s handing over everything they had to dancers in their twenties: Gustavo Naveira, Fabián Salas, Pablo Verón, Milena Plebs and many more. Those students went on to teach half the world, which is why the chain connecting a 1940s dance floor to a beginners' class in London this week is usually only three or four people long.

Tango did not come back because of a grant, a ministry or a marketing plan. It came back because a few hundred people in their sixties agreed to teach a few hundred people in their twenties, while there was still time.

Piazzolla, the other half of the story

While the dance was scraping through, Astor Piazzolla was being loudly informed that he was destroying tango. He was not, of course. His quintet work — and albums such as Tango: Zero Hour in 1986 — kept tango alive in concert halls at precisely the moment the dance floors were empty, and gave it intellectual respectability abroad. Plenty of dancers who came to tango in the 1980s arrived through Piazzolla and only later discovered D'Arienzo. Both doors were open then. Both are still open now.

What the 1980s left in our London rooms

Several things we treat as timeless are in fact inheritances from that decade:

• Practica culture. The revival generation had to reconstruct the dance by talking about it, taking it apart and trying things badly in front of each other. That habit is why a good practica still feels different from a milonga.
• The style arguments. Salon, milonguero, nuevo, close embrace, open embrace — these are revival-era categories. Nobody in 1948 needed a name for how they danced. Hold the labels lightly.
• Mixed-age floors. Tango is one of the few social activities in London where a twenty-three year old and a seventy year old regularly do the same thing at the same standard. That is a direct consequence of how it was rescued.
• Fragility. A dance scene is only ever one generation from vanishing. London's milongas live or die on whether people actually come out on a cold Wednesday.

Practical things you can do with all this

1. Learn one orchestra properly. Pick D'Arienzo for rhythm, Di Sarli for long clean lines, Troilo for phrasing or Pugliese for drama, and listen until you can name it from four bars. Your dancing will improve more than another six months of figures would manage.
2. Ask your teacher who taught them, and who taught that person. Two questions usually gets you to Buenos Aires in the 1980s. It is a genuinely moving conversation, and most teachers love being asked.
3. Watch the old footage. Search for Todaro, for Copes and Nieves, for Virulazo. You will notice how little they do and how much of it lands.
4. Go to practicas, not only milongas. The revival was built in practice rooms, and London has good ones.
5. Dance with the person who has thirty years in the embrace, and with the person who started in September. Transmission runs in both directions.
6. Turn up at the small venue on the quiet night. That is where scenes are actually kept alive — not at the sold-out festival.

The chain is still in your hands

The remarkable thing about the 1980s revival is how ordinary the mechanism was. No institution saved tango. Old dancers taught young dancers, a show gave everyone permission to take it seriously, and enough people kept walking through the door on unpromising evenings. That is the same mechanism keeping tango going in London right now, and you are part of it whether you intended to be or not.

So find a floor this week. Browse the milongas, classes and practicas listed on TangoLife.london, pick one you have never been to, and go. Somebody in that room learned from somebody who learned from a milonguero who came out of retirement in 1986 — and the only way that line continues is if you show up and ask for the next dance.