BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – Argentine tango duo Solange Acosta and Max Van de Voorde made their country proud this week when they won one of the two championship titles at the Tango Buenos Aires Festival and World Cup in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital.
“We breathe together, at the same time, in connection,” says Van de Voorde, revealing to local media the secret of their success in the stage tango category.
Standing tall and with her back to the air, Acosta knew how to embody the femme fatale on stage. On the ground and in the air, she moved her feet and head to the rhythm of the music and Van de Voorde, her tailored partner. The audience at Luna Park, Buenos Aires’ downtown stadium, erupted in applause when the duo finished its performance and the judges concurred that the title would go to the native pair.
Argentine and Colombian couples won the two tango titles at the Tango Buenos Aires Festival and World Cup 2011. Tango experts say interest in the dance is growing every year around the world and among youth. Some say they would like to see more incorporation of local culture in the international event. But city government officials say the event was a success and aim to continue to raise the bar in future years.
For Buenos Aires, the tango is a stamp of identity. The ninth Tango Buenos Aires Festival and World Cup, held every year in Buenos Aires, attracted some 400,000 spectators this year, according to the Buenos Aires city government. Nearly 500 couples competed in the two-week affair.
The night before the Argentine couple’s success, Colombian flags peppered the same stage, one of the most traditional in the city. “Long live Colombia,” was the shout that rippled through the audience when Natasha Agudelo Arboleda and Diego Julián Benavidez Hernández won the tournament’s other title, in the salon tango category, becoming the first Colombian champions of salon tango.
“In the salon tango category, one grades the elegance, the timing, the form in which the motions and characteristic steps of salon tango are carried out,” says Oscar Velázquez, a dancer who served as a judge in the semifinals. “In stage tango, one pays attention to the wardrobe, the choreography, the movement. One looks that the essence of tango in the contemporary dance isn’t lost.”
Amid strong applause, the Tango Festival and World Cup slowly came to an end. Nearly 500 couples participated from various countries – including Japan, Chile, South Korea, the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Greece and Italy – as well as Argentine provinces – from the hot province of Misiones to the cold province of Tierra del Fuego.
Ruben Iribarren and Mariana Ocampo, tango salon semifinalists, say they travel every year from Chubut province to the capital to participate.
“We wait the whole year for this moment,” Ocampo says.
But she says it’s not just about the competition.
“It’s not only coming to compete,” she says. “The World Tango Cup is an engine for learning. Here you can find teachers that are not available at other times of the year. This forces you to grow all year.”
Juan Manuel Fernández, supervisor of the Tango World Cup, says that interest in tango grows each year.
“What one sees is that each year, interest grows for the tango in some countries, and there are more youth that dedicate themselves professionally to dancing,” he says. “This is connected with social dancing, with the opening of ‘milongas’ and the carrying out of festivals in different parts of the world.”
There are more than 80 milongas, places where people dance the tango, in Buenos Aires. Dancing the tango is a viable activity any day of the week. There are milongas for people over 50 and milongas for young people. But all follow the unbreakable codes of the tango.
“For example, in the milongas, pairs are rotating counterclockwise,” Fernández says. “And this is a code that one can’t violate and that even the judges take into account in the moment of evaluating who are the winners of the World Cup in the tango salon category.”
That’s why the pairs have to dance in groups of 10 in the qualification rounds, the semifinals and the finals, he says.
“This way, one analyzes the form in which they move and respect for the others,” he says.
The explanation of why the tango attracts cultures as different as Caribbean and Oriental lies for Fernández in “the embrace.”
“One summarizes the tango in the embrace,” he says. “The tango legitimizes the embrace in cultures where it’s not legitimized. There are very cold Europeans, countries where men greet their brothers by shaking hands. The tango authorizes the embrace in those cultures, the embrace as something natural, not as something sexual.”
Hiroki Kambe and Yoko Koga, dance partners from Tokyo who reached the semifinals, say they have noticed this effect.
“When I dance tango, I feel the music,” Kambe says. “I feel my partner dancing together with me. I feel the embrace. Studying tango, I realized how the Argentine culture was, and that changed my form of dancing.”
Fernández, an expert on the history of the tango, says that Japan and Argentina developed a strong connection during World War II. He says that after the United States dropped the two nuclear bombs on Japan, Juan Domingo Perón, then-president of Argentina, sent the first boats with food to the starving Japanese. He says this tie extended to music.
“In Japan, listening to music of the Allies was prohibited,” he says. “They used to listen to Japanese music and tango. That’s why there are many people who have the tango in their memory. That’s why there are many ties and important Japanese delegations who participate in the World Tango Cup.”
With the growth of tango, though, some say more needs to be done to infuse the event with more local culture and participation.
Entrance was free to the qualification rounds, shows with live orchestras and tango classes. The semifinals and finals were also free to attend, but people had to start getting in line at 5 a.m. and wait for hours for tickets.
“The Tango World Cup is organized by the government with a strongly tourist aim, but it’s bypassing broad local sectors that are excluded from the creation process of each one of these events,” says Marcelo Salas, a prominent milonga organizer and creator of “La Glorieta,” an open air dance that takes place every weekend in a park in Buenos Aires.
Salas says the event excludes many organizers of milongas, who have wanted to collaborate in the assembling of the show for years.
“This is handled by a few, always the same people,” he says. “And some who are working with the tango for 20 years don’t have a voice or a vote.”
He says that there should be more interaction between local neighborhoods and the international event.
“In addition, the Tango World Cup has to be taken to the neighborhoods so the visitors get to know the tango in its place, close to reality, and not removed on stages,” he says.
He says that the event should expose visitors more to local tango culture.
“The foreigner who comes to the Tango World Cup doesn’t have access to a milonga as it is,” he says. “Inside of the area where the Festival is held, the different dance salons that are in the city could be reproduced, with their lights, their chairs, their tables, with what characterizers them.”
Far from these criticisms, Joaquín Navarro, press officer for the Ministry of Culture of the city of Buenos Aires, says the Tango Festival and World Cup was “all a success.”
“We are going to make it better each year in the organization,” he says. “We tried to start in the neighborhoods with prequalifying runs and end on a big stage like is Luna Park. So we did it this year.”
