Did tango die?

You hear lots of stories. TV and rock swept Argentina in the late 50s and 60s. The Argentine musician Joaquín Amenábar says that tango declined, then died, killed off by the later military rule, and there was a period when there was no tango dancing. Miguel Balbi, a singer and dancer who danced through the 70s, says that as few as 30 couples were still dancing when the military finally lost power in 1983. Well, all you need is a terrace or reasonably-sized room, 20 or so friends, some music, drink and food and you can have your own milonga and who would know about it? So tango may well have continued.

But research here suggests that quite a few milongas stayed open at least some of the time. They were cheap and some even had live music. A picture is worth many words, so here's the picture:



That's a familiar address. Humberto is the street, building no. 1462, first floor, and it's still a tango venue. I've been there. The Nino Bien milonga is held there every Thursday night. It's big enough for several hundred people to dance. 1976 was the grim year in which some 47% of all the “desaparecidos”, perhaps as many as 14,000 people, were seized and last seen.

& more: “...many old-timers credit Copes with keeping the Tango flame alive through the years of the cruel military rule in Argentina when the generals did their best to kill Tango as a popular expression. Many others quit; Copes kept going and mounted the highest of quality shows continually. Even though there was a curfew in Buenos Aires, there was a Copes show, often with Goyeneche, Troilo, even Pugliese making his music. Only the Best. He and his company were "untouchable" by those seeking to hold tango back in the wild Argentina political atmosphere... In the audience, the generals would be on one side of the room; the mafia on the other; the "people" in the middle. Everyone left their politics and rivalries at the door.”

The generals on one side, the mafia on the other, and the people in between: plausible enough. And I read that in 1977 Copes appeared with Nievas in Argentina es asi, a film shot in part on Corrientes Street, although there's no record of it on IMDb.

All of this may be true, or partially true. For what it matters, it seems tango never died out in Buenos Aires. But for sure it was the tours by Copes and his company that created and revived an interest in tango outside Argentina. Leandro Palou remarked to me, “Things become popular in Argentina because they are popular elsewhere. It's sad, but true”.

A postscript: I often wondered what Pugliese did during the 'dirty war': he was openly a communist, hardly the flavour of the decade. I found this in Tango: the art history of love: 'The management of the Michaelangelo, a San Telmo nightclub that staged big tango shows, loved him too: ignoring bomb threats they kept him employed during the grim days of the Proceso, 1976-1983. The junta did not dare "disappear" him: as Copes explains, "he was simply too popular".'

No, tango did not die.