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The true Tango never ends, at least in Buenos Aires or wherever you are lucky enough to have some Argentine in the audience. In this case, the applause is triggered when the tango is about to end, just before the chan-chan.
The classic dominant-tonic closure, the so called chan-chan, even though it’s the signature and the trademark by which you can tell a band from another one (each group has its own chan-chan), it is always and irremediably abrogated by the impatient argentine stalls. Maybe it’s a simple matter of squandering and precipitation, maybe it’s a sort of schoolboys bumping at a photo session; the fact is that, once it has been revoked for invasion of the pitch, the tango doesn’t stop but goes on flowing like one of those clandestine rivers that first run under our feet and then come up suddenly where they please. This embankment caked with cheers conveys the Tango in its original bed, that’s to say in the community inner life which is the soul and the force of every Great (Popular) Art.
If today not much is left from that swingin’ Buenos Aires of the Sixties Hugo Pratt came back from, when Corto Maltese and his amazing Tango were also approaching, it’s right because the military dictatorship have methodically plundered the fabric of society, murdered the poets and banished the dreamers. A cruel chan-chan for the whole Argentina.
So the Tango of these last twentyfive years is not popular anymore: it only lives in a few personal quests scattered over the world. Nevertheless, it is very fashionable and subjugated, as well as the whole reality, to the financial manoeuvrings and to the market quotations. Maybe the ululations that greet the sexy performances of the cannon-fodder dancers in the Buenos Aires Tango Houses and the ovations that welcome certain Tango Companies’ luxury junk right on the not-touring Tourist’s doorstep, are the same cheers that hide its renaissance.
The Tango that invisibly flows in the veins can surface again in any moment, in any town, in any harbour. When it will, it will be new, and as new as ourselves, since, as an Heraclitus from the River Plate said many times, we can’t swim twice in the same river,
© Marco Castellani, 1998