Forbes FYI - April, 2006

The Tango Experience

By Maria Finn

From opulent boulevards to narrow, cobblestone streets, modern restaurants to old world cafes, the unifying factor to Buenos Aires is the tango. This music and dance born in this city tell of the melancholic pleasure of surviving a broken heart, the swelling of hope when eyes meet across a room, and all the nuances in between. With the devaluation of the Argentinean peso in 2001, Porteños, or denizens of Buenos Aires are finding tango to be a cure for more than romantic ills. Tango dancing has grown in popularity worldwide, and people who dance tango don't just dabble; it quickly grows from a passion to a near religion. And Buenos Aires has become a very affordable Mecca.

While there are tango guesthouses and B&B establishments scattered throughout the city, Buenos Aires just got its first five star tango-themed hotel, the Abastos Plaza Hotel. The hotel is new, but located in a historic neighborhood, near the home of Carlos Gardel. This legendary crooner made the tango song an international phenomenon, but died young in a plane crash in 1935.

The hotel draws on the Belle Epoch theme of Gardel's time and tango's first heyday with art deco furniture, a green marble staircase and vintage black and white prints of tango dancers along the hallways. The gift shop carries specially designed high-heels for tango dancing and sexy dresses with slits in strategic places. Tango music is piped throughout the lobby, and there are two tango suites, each with a parquet dance floor, mirrors, and vitrolas. Private lessons are an option for these guests. For those in the regular rooms, the hotel offers free tango lessons every night at 8 pm.

Alejandro Barrientos and Rosalia Gasso Villar both teach lessons and perform in the hotel's restaurant. Alejandro instructed a hotel guest in some of the basics:

"You must feel the connection with your partner," he said. "When you embrace, it's not like hugging your mother-in-law. You hold the other person. And the man invites the woman when he leads, he doesn't push.î"
He and his dance partner Rosalia demonstrated the basic, showing how to move together, and they were as smooth as butter melting.

"At tonight's show in the restaurant, we will be dancing "show" tango," Alejandro explained. "It will tell the history of tango."

The history of Buenos Aires is inextricably entwined with tango. The rhythm was set by black slaves in the 1800's in Argentina, mixed with the habanera music brought by Cuban sailors. Then an enormous influx of immigrants from Italy and Spain introduced the bandoneÚn, violin, and piano to tango, and gauchos, or cowboys in from the pampas added steps and flair to the dance. So many more men than women arrived from Europe that they gathered at the brothels and danced tango with one another, hoping to win a dance with one of the women who worked there. The upper classes in Argentina snubbed the tango, until the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, where Argentine tango was introduced, and became the rage in Paris. Once it was fashionable with the French, the Argentinean upper classes came to accept it.

There are two kinds of tango danced in Buenos Aires, and two types of tourists the Abasto Plaza Hotel caters to. Some tourists do not want to learn tango, but merely experience it as part of their trip to Buenos Aires. The tango guest relations concierge, Sandra Silva, helps them arrange tours from the home of Carlos Gardel to the Chacarita cemetery where he's buried. She also offers suggestions for dinner clubs that include tango music and dance shows geared towards tourists, many with the dÈcor and music replicating the 1930's.

But tango is not a historic relic in Buenos Aires, and every night until daybreak there's a milonga, where couples press their foreheads together and move in fractals around the floor, proving that passion and style will always outlast economic crisis. This is where the second kind of tourists go to dance. There's the classic La Confiteria Ideal, a dark glamorous club from the belle epoch era, then La Viruta, which attracts a younger crowd to its wood floors, and as a sign of social change, there's even a gay milonga in the neighborhood of San Telmo on Wednesdays, where men and women figure out who leads who.

Despite the most recent fiscal crisis, Portenos still gather to embrace and dance to music that declares love not just for another person, but often, for Buenos Aires itself. As Gardel sang in his famous tango,

My beloved Buenos Aires,
the day I see you again,
there will be no more sorrow or forgetfulness.