<i>Tango: Creation of a Cultural Icon</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tango: Creation of a Cultural Icon Michael S. O'Brien Jo Baim. Tango: Creation of a Cultural Icon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. 204 pp. Black and white images, musical transcriptions, appendices, index. I received Jo Baim's new contribution to the tango literature with high expectations. Baim is an organist and freelance choreographer who has formally studied tango dance and holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. Much of the copious literature devoted to tango tends to emphasize a discussion of either dance or musical elements at the expense of the other, and a scholar who has the training to deal with the subtleties of both aspects of the art could provide much-needed contributions to this developing conversation. In the first chapter, Baim attempts to problematize some of the most enduring literary tropes of the tango's origins in seedy brothels among dangerous criminals who are sometimes erroneously conflated with the rural gaucho cattlemen. As Baim explains, these tropes were largely established in narratives written by Argentine elites looking down on, and projecting their own anxieties upon, a cultural practice that they engaged in only furtively. Baim joins a chorus of Argentine writers who have sought to complicate this view, examining contemporary police reports and criminologists' treatises that characterize the tango's iconic compadritos as stylish but relatively harmless rogues rather than dangerous murderers and thieves. She also takes care to note the importance of the sainete popular theater as a venue through which the middle class came to know the tango. Baim, as a dancer, is naturally interested in not only the social milieu of the dance but what it looked like and how it was practiced. While a precise reconstruction is of course impossible, she does reconstruct a list of contemporary dance steps, arguing for the importance of the influence of European-derived social dances such as the quadrille, the polka and the mazurka. While the author mentions the infamous cortes and quebradas, hip-oriented movements that were frequently cited as the most scandalous elements of early tango dance, she does not engage any of the recent scholarship that explores the relationship between these dance moves and the Afro-Argentine candombe.1 Ultimately, though, this is a qualified, limited reassertion of a more prominent role for middle-class Argentine and [End Page 243] European-derived cultural elements in early tango history. While tango may have additionally occupied less "scandalous," more bourgeois-friendly social spaces, Baim does not entirely negate the literary trope she challenges, conceding that "the stereotype of a steamy bordello filled with gangsters and ladies of easy virtue … is, as far as it goes, probably accurate" (41). Chapter 2 traces tango's first forays overseas, and its acceptance, following a Parisian purging of some choreographic elements, among European and American high society starting in 1913. Baim has isolated some amusingly horrified anti-tango screeds in local newspapers and ecclesiastical decrees, and includes a helpfully illustrated glossary of some of the ways the American dance teachers Vernon and Irene Castle adapted and standardized specific tango moves. Baim also creates a table tracking the frequency of these steps' appearance in a number of period dance instruction manuals. These manuals' descriptions of the steps in question are also reproduced in the first appendix, although Baim leaves the reader on her own to interpret this raw data. Ultimately, the chapter is rich in facts and wanting in interpretation. The source material is so fraught with levels of postcolonial and exoticizing ideology that I found myself frustrated with the complacency with which the author glosses over these issues, which are given a much more thorough and nuanced treatment in Savigliano (1995). Chapter 3 follows the tango back to Argentina, where its popularity in Paris had earned it a newfound acceptance among the upper classes in its homeland, who saw and learned versions of these steps that reflected the French exaggerations and alterations of the tango that wealthy Argentines had historically shunned (at least publicly). Baim identifies the two earliest known dance manuals written by and for Argentines, from 1914 and 1916, comparing them step-by-step and hold-by-hold...