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 —
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