Modern Tango World N° 11 (Paris, France) | Page 6

In 1913, the journal Femina published a poem — Dans tout Paris on se m’arrache! De la vierge à la virago/ Chcune de moi s’amourache/ Je suis professeur de tango! However, apart from a few charlatans, they were dance master, great and not so great, who left the Rio de la Plata to come to Paris. Some of the best dancers to make the trip were Bernabé (El Indio) Simarra, Ideal (El Rey del Tango) Gloria and Casimiro Aín, who along with his wife Martina as a partner, will return to Paris again and again, teaching at the big hotels of the capital and those of the seaside resorts.. One dancer, Enrique Saborido, was to earn a real fortune. The press, always fond of novelty, reported extensively on the tango phenomenon and thereby amplifies it. The maga- zine Femina, for example, announced that This year, the fashionable dance will be the Argentine tango While Le Figaro said: There were some pioneering dancers around 1908 at Chat Blanc, on rue d’Odessa. For her part, the actress, Mistinguett introduced a tango dance into her review at the Marigny Theater. Many stories of these time agree on one point: that between 1910 and 1911 that the Parisian salons discover the tango dance. According to several witnesses, the tango was introduced, one evening of 1911 most probably, in a living room lo- cated at 53 rue de la Faisanderie, the home of the wife of the tenor and Polish pedagogue Jean de Reszke. That evening, the assembly was having fun improvising dance to foriegn music. Someone, a seductive writer who has just arrived from Buenos Aires, Ricardo Güiraldes, suggested Argentine tango. He embraced a woman and, sketched out a few elementary steps, giving the idea of the ​​ seduc- tive natutr of the tango dance. It triggered a kind of col- lective hysteria, everyone wanted to become the pupil of this improvised teacher. The news spread like wildfire of the arrival of an exotic and sensual dance from South America. It soon claimed, that every salon would have a tango dancer for their evenings. From that date on, what has been called tangomania won over, first and foremost, the whole of Parisian high society. Then, in the following years, all segments of the population, some wanting to learn to to dance, and the others, discovering this new and much desired teaching opportunity, a means to im- prove their incomes. What we will be dancing this winter will be Argentine tango, a graceful, undulating and varied dance. Can we see in these qualifiers proof that the tango taught in Paris was in no way the one danced in Argentina? Certainly., the first smugglers are, of course, discovering a polite tango that teachers continue to teach; This did not prevent every student in Paris to beliebe that their teacher was the only one, unlike the others, that taught the real tango. In any case, a new tango was born, French in a way, anxious for decorum and rid of all that could disturb. So much so that doctors would recommend it for children with fragile health. A transformation denounced by the Italian author of the Manifesto of Futurism, Tommaso Marinetti in his 1914 Direction of the Futuristic Movement — Mollusk couples, Argentine felicity and savagery foolishly coaxed, morphined, powdered The columnist and caricaturist Sem described [...] thus, in a chronicle of 1912 entitled The Possessed Ones — dancers that prey to a mystical exaltation ... with closed eyes on an inner dream ... half of Paris is rubbing the other ... the tango of Paris is the denico- tinized tango — 6 — TO SUBSCRIBE, CLICK HERE