Book Excerpt: A Life in Paragraphs
TANGO IS MELODRAMA YEARNING TO BE TRAGEDY.
— ROBERT FULFORD
Robert Fulford wrote a column regularly in the National Post from 1999 until 2019. A new book titled A Life in Paragraphs has collected some of his best writing from his extraordinary career. This excerpt is adapted from Under the Spell of the Tango, which originally ran in Queen’s Quarterly in the fall of 2013.
When I was a boy, Hollywood musical comedies taught me that tango was a kind of joke, an over- the- top, tempestuous exhibition of feigned emotion. Often a movie would contain a brief tango performance inserted purely for comic effect. Typically, the male dancer would miss his cue and hurl his partner violently across the room, or ( in one film I remember) into a swimming pool. In retrospect the cultural meaning of those scenes is clear: by the middle of the last century tango had become ( in North American eyes) so outlandishly passionate that it could be dealt with only through parody and burlesque.
The people who run El Querandí, one of many supper tango clubs in Buenos Aires, are only too aware of this derisive tradition. They know it has affected many South Americans ( the largest part of their clientele) as well as North Americans and Europeans. Before beginning its big show of the evening, El Querandí projects a montage of scenes from old movies in which the stylized passion of the tango is the butt of the joke. When I was there about ten years ago they ran a delightful piece by Laurel and Hardy, another by Chaplin, and a glimpse of Valentino in action — he being, in the eyes of tango aficionados, the definition of tango as unintentional parody. That done, El Querandí set about the task of demonstrating how tango should be performed — seriously, ardently, with a sense of history and a commitment to the art. But of course this still involved displaying some of the often-parodied elements as well as the originality and grace of the dancers, singers, and musicians.
The women wore net stockings, t ransparent gowns, and facial expressions as blank as runway models. Male dancers, of course, wore fedoras pulled down over their also blank faces. Every year the fedora comes closer to extinction, and it occurred to me several times during my visit to Buenos Aires that perhaps male tango dancers would someday be the last fedora- wearers on earth. ( But at this point in history, a national fedora shortage in Argentina would paralyze the art of tango.)
In the first dance of the evening a knife appeared briefly in a male dancer’s hand, as if in tribute to the primitive beginnings of tango (in the 1880s or 1890s) among the pimps, prostitutes, and sex- starved gauchos, in from the pampas to make love and trouble in Buenos Aires. That dance, and some of those that followed during the evening, achieved a fierceness that hinted at the dark appeal Jorge Luis Borges always found in the stories of fearless and sometimes murderous gauchos. Tango has al
ways carried an overtone of menace.
Those who listen only occasionally to tango music miss its diversity of expression, the subtle shadings of its narrative. Tango works within a limited emotional range, true, but so does a fugue or a Broadway ballad. It is only when confronted by a whole evening of dancers and singers that one understands the multiplicity of attitudes they strike and the subtle pacing of their performances. I had heard about the millions of people
enthralled by tango (I had also seen Buenos Aires record stores where half the CDS were tango music) but until visiting El Querandí I didn’t understand how it draws the audience into its special ambit.
Once engaged, the audience begins to realize that the energy depends on swift mood changes in the stories that the dancers perform symbolically.
These miniplots are never more than fragmentary, glimpsed out of the corner of the mind’s eye, like the
lyrics of Paul Simon songs. But their existence transforms the tango into drama as much as dance.
The performers slowly unfold a story, often involving a hint of erotic history. As it develops they depict acceptance, then rejection, then perhaps acceptance again. Angry indecision is the essence of the characters they are playing. Often disillusionment becomes part of the narrative, and sometimes contempt. Each character is aware at every moment of potential betrayal.
A compelling sexuality provides the fundamental mood, never more powerfully felt than when the dancers pull back from each other’s touch. Disappointment is never more than two bars away. Tango is a choreographed seduction with no guarantee that it will achieve its goal.
It requires athletic skill, but these athletes must never show even a hint of strain. They dance their complicated figures, legs gracefully entwined, as if there were nothing else that a sensible person should be doing at this moment. They tell their anecdotes without words, of course, but also without facial expression. They relax their masks only to indicate irony or disdain, but never anything approaching happiness. Tango is melodrama yearning to be tragedy. It is saturated with self- pity. Its tone is bathos raised, by the compressed intensity of its performers, to the level of art.
Over a century or so, tango has established itself as the most cherished art form of Argentina and the special pride of Buenos Aires, where it was born. Buenos Aires is to tango what New Orleans is to jazz; the parallels are undeniable. Both cities grew up as world ports with heterogeneous populations, and in both places danger plays a large part in local mythology. In each city an art form sprang to life in bordellos, patronized by ( sometimes performed by) criminals. In both cases art followed the same course, from whorehouse entertainment to high- class nightclubs to concert halls. In both Buenos Aires and New Orleans a once-scorned popular form has become the city’s signature, its main attraction, and its consolation in times of trouble.
This excerpt from A Life in Paragraphs is printed with the permission of Optimum Publishing International. All rights reserved. If you would like to obtain an autographed edition of the book go to https://www. optimum publishing international. com/ shop For more of Robert Fulford’s writing, and more, please visit Robertfulford.com
Buenos Aires is to tango what New Orleans is to jazz; the parallels between the art and the dangerous ports are undeniable.