From the backstreets of Buenos Aires to Parisian high society, this is the extraordinary story of the dance that captivated the world - a tale of politics and passion, immigration and romance. The Tango was the cornerstone of Argentine culture, and has lasted for more than a hundred years, popular today in America, Japan and Europe. 'The Meaning of Tango' traces the roots of this captivating dance, from it's birth in the poverty stricken Buenos Aires, the craze of the early 20th century, right up until it's revival today, thanks to shows such as Strictly Come Dancing. This book offers history, knowledge, teachings and in-sights which makes it valuable for beginners, yet its in-depth analysis makes it essential for experienced dancers. It is an elegant and cohesive critique of the fascinating tale of the Tango, which not only documents its culture and politics, but is also technically useful.

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.

This book is the first to explore tango argentino as translocal practice, with a focus on the European context. Beyond that, the book crosses borders in the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods, ranging from participant observation to statistical data evaluation, including optical motion capture for movement analysis. Most of all, it is an important contribution to the emerging field of choreomusicology, focusing on movement and sound structures, dancers and musicians, and the complex relations between all of these factors that all have their share in shaping tango argentino practice.

The late nineteenth century witnessed the birth and popularization of a number of highly emotional musical styles that played on the eagerness of modern Europeans and Americans to toy with the limits of sanity and to taste the ecstasies of living on the edge. This absorbing book explores these popular, passionate musical styles -- which include flamenco, tango and rebetika -- and points out that they arose as well-intentioned intellectuals co-opted the emotional experiences most closely associated with women. In drawing those experiences out of female practice, they defined, objectified, and turned them into strategies of domination, the deepest impact of which was felt, ironically, by modern women.In bridging anthropology, sociology, cultural, media, body and gender studies, this book broadens the base of theory which has ignored the transnational world of Latin and Mediterranean popular culture and makes a powerful statement about the intersection of nationalism, sexuality, identity and authenticity.

Just like a gymnast needs to stick the landing at the end of the routine, a well-timed and executed ending is essential to dancing Argentine tango. This unique book unlocks the secrets to tango endings that have consistently frustrated beginner and intermediate dancers. After years of searching in vain for a class on endings, Steve Darmo took it upon himself to learn everything he could on the topic. Realizing that the music drives the steps, he extensively researched the best music from the Golden Age. He studied over 1700 tangos recorded by the 20 most popular dance orchestras in order to prepare the most comprehensive work ever written on the subject.This book gives everything you need to become an expert at tango endings and greatly improve your dancing. It is packed with tips and is written in an easy conversational voice.

In Argentina, tango isn’t just the national music—it’s a national brand. But ask any contemporary Argentine if they ever really listen to it and chances are the answer is no: tango hasn’t been popular for more than fifty years. In this book, Morgan James Luker explores that odd paradox by tracing the many ways Argentina draws upon tango as a resource for a wide array of economic, social, and cultural—that is to say, non-musical—projects. In doing so, he illuminates new facets of all musical culture in an age of expediency when the value and meaning of the arts is less about the arts themselves and more about how they can be used. Luker traces the diverse and often contradictory ways tango is used in Argentina in activities ranging from state cultural policy-making to its export abroad as a cultural emblem, from the expanding nonprofit arts sector to tango-themed urban renewal projects. He shows how projects such as these are not peripheral to an otherwise “real” tango—they are the absolutely central means by which the values of this musical culture are cultivated. By richly detailing the interdependence of aesthetic value and the regimes of cultural management, this book sheds light on core conceptual challenges facing critical music scholarship today.