Tango Nuevo

Tango Nuevo names both a current within tango music and an evolution of the partner dance that took shape in Argentina during the 1980s, the phrase translating simply as new tango.^[1] It cannot be grasped apart from the older tradition it departs from: tango itself first cohered in the 1880s on the Río de la Plata, the river frontier dividing Argentina from Uruguay, where the Argentine milonga, the Spanish-Cuban habanera, and the Uruguayan candombe met in the port districts.^[2] The habanera strand carried a Cuban inheritance of its own, one that scholars have traced through the Havana and Sevillian press from the early nineteenth century to 1923.^[3] Where classical tango had settled into a fixed repertoire of figures across the twentieth century, the nuevo current reframed the dance as an open field of movement, and that reframing was as much a matter of teaching as of choreography.^[1]

The methods that preceded Tango Nuevo help account for why it emerged. Before the 1990s, instruction in Argentine tango proceeded chiefly by imitation, with pupils copying the patterns their teachers demonstrated and scant attention paid to why a movement functioned.^[1] The dance also endured a political eclipse, sinking into disrepute under the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983, when the few professionals who remained were looked upon with contempt and the young rarely took to the floor.^[1] That break in transmission left an older generation as the chief custodians of an increasingly formulaic practice.^[1]

The dance's recovery moved in step with the nation's return to constitutional rule. After democracy was restored in 1983 and the limits on social life loosened, Gustavo Naveira began teaching classes that, by his own report, drew "crowds of 200 or more", as many dancers of an earlier generation came back as instructors.^[1] From this revival grew a more analytic enterprise. Beginning in the 1990s in Buenos Aires, the Tango Investigation Group, later reorganized as the Cosmotango organization and founded by Naveira together with Fabián Salas, brought the kinesiological principles of modern dance to bear on the mechanics of tango movement, and from that study reoriented instruction away from prescribing which figures to perform toward explaining how a movement is produced.^[1]

The new approach met resistance within the established social scene. The traditional milonga kept its distance from the emerging style, a friction one professional cast as a clash "between generations" in which the older constituency guarded the formulaic manner.^[1] A separate setting for younger dancers consequently appeared in the modern practica, beginning with El Motivo, which opened in 2004 at the Villa Malcolm social club.^[1] Scholars have interpreted this ferment through the anthropologist Martin Stokes's notion of dance as a "play form" and a mode of "social creativity" that turns unstable in periods of social change.^[1]

A durable ambiguity surrounds the label itself. The founders of the movement hold that Tango Nuevo is not a manner of dancing at all but a method of analysis and teaching produced by applying dance kinesiology to the tango.^[1] In a 2009 essay titled New Tango, Naveira contended that "Tango Nuevo is everything that has happened with the tango since the 1980s. It is not a question of a style".^[1] Beyond Argentina, however, the term has been widely embraced to designate a distinct style of dancing, a usage the movement's originators consider a misreading.^[1]