Free Tango by Mike Gonzalez

French at all, proved too much for the transatlantic public. And the tango in any case was changing – perhaps in preparation for its triumphant return home.
    In Paris, the tango was at the heart of an exploration of sensuality and eroticism, albeit restrained by middle-class mores. But its stars were as sensual as the two dominant figures of the cabarets –Mistinguett and Josephine Baker. Cabaret was a spectacle, a theatrical drama that on a smaller scale could be re-enacted on the dance floor with a greater or lesser degree of physical contact and erotic simulation. In a sense, as it developed, tango moved between the rufianesco – the pimp’s enactment of sexual pleasure and the battle between men for the attention of the prostitute – and romántico , in which those initial gyrations had been stylized and dramatized. 16 In these early years of the twentieth century, as it travelled the world, tango moved between these two expressions.
    In the French capital, the memory of the Apache dance conserved that feeling of the underworld and a struggle for power between men and women. Among the early pupils there was the young Rudolph Valentino, whose tango in the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse not only launched him into the realms of superstardom but also created an iconic image of the dance itself. As described by Marta Savigliano, Valentino’s version is closer to the Apache dance or the valse chaloupé that Mistinguett presented before her public. The scene is ‘the famous Boca quarter of Buenos Aires’. Valentino, dressed as a gaucho , complete with riding crop, watches Beatrice Domínguez dancing with a man she clearly does not like. He pushes him away and Valentino and Domínguez enter the frame.
    After some individual gyrations, their hands join and they move around the dance floor performing smooth glides, controlled dips and slow sensuous swayings. Finally they embrace too closely and she breaks into contortions attempting to avoid a kiss that he insistently seeks. Unable to satisfy his desire, Valentino pushes her away with violence. She lands on the floor and drags herself to his feet in an ambivalent gesture of hatred and rapture. In the end he resorts to his secret weapon, his boleadoras , . . . and lassoes her.
    It is the perfect machista ritual.
    The journey to London, and from there to New York, softened and modified the element of erotic confrontation. The dance craze in Britain was tied to a notion of ‘social dancing’, with its emphasis on etiquette, refined social conduct and a properly prepared environment – as set out in Gladys Beattie Crozier’s manual The Tango and How to Do It (1913). By 1913, the instruction manuals were proliferating and exhibition dancing on both sides of the Atlantic became a profitable pursuit. And the influence of tango was not limited to the dance itself. Fashion acknowledged the demand for freer movement for women, boned corsets were replaced by more flexible basques, and lightweight fabrics were introduced which both permitted ease of movement and emphasized the sensuality and fluidity of the dancer. Orange, the colour of tango, became dominant and new dishes claimed their origins in tango. 17
‘La Rumba’ poster.
    The dance that had celebrated its origins in the sexual underworld and the primitive rural world, exemplified in dress and gesture, was giving way to the romantic version on the one hand, and on the other to dance as a sport. The sensual movements of the original became athletic actions instead, and the embrace gradually returned to the formal distance between the partners that had been closed in the body contact that had so taken aback the Scottish writer Robert Cunninghame Grahame.
    As they walked through the passages, men pressed close up to women and murmured in their ears, telling them anecdotes that made them flush and giggle, as they protested in an unprotesting style. Those were the days of the