Tango

“ And go put on your cleats,
And come and trample me.
Your heart is hard as stone or mahogany.
That's why I'm in such exquisite "ogany".
My soul is on fire,
I's aflame with desire,
Which is why I perspire when we tango. ”

“ Body and soul; appearance and reality; the temporal and the eternal consciousness;—the old words chimed in his brain. Then came a swift memory of Antonia and himself dancing the tango in London, and then the memory of the dead face of a little French poilu he had come upon one evening in France, by the roadside, a face sweet and childlike. How many dead faces he had seen since he had danced the tango with Antonia, and how wraith-like, beside the agonies he had since passed through, were the mental disciplines and distractions of his studious youth! ”

“ Now we have the slower and more artistic music of the moment in the merry One Step, the Hesitation Waltz, and the stirring Tango. What will come next no one can prophesy, but we all, I imagine, must admit the fact that the music of to-day is far prettier than the music of yesterday—if it is not played too fast. That is a mistake that is often made, particularly by amateur musicians and dancers; too swift a tempo is set for the music and the dance steps. ”

“ Any one could share the pleasure of the tango-teas in the most fashionable restaurants by simply coming to them and either dancing them or drinking them. The dancing was actually the affair of young couples who seemed to stray in from the street, and
AN ANCIENT DOORWAY circled round between the tables in those rhythmical embraces of the dance to the harsh clatter of the band and the applause of those who preferred the tea form of tango. ”

“ In the evening every one had danced the tango in the hall. The great stir of the watering-place had begun—futile doings without number, comings and goings, from bar to bar, from casino to casino, from luncheon to luncheon.
"Oh, say, are you coming? Look here, Jean! Aren't you tiresome, always reading despatches! One would say that you were expecting something to happen. ”

“ He had never seen the women better dressed, with so manifest a hunger for pleasure and luxury. The tango of the violins on the Boulevard is answered like an echo by the tango of the violins all along the Riviera, and at the summer resorts which are beginning to open. Woman's dearest wish, at the moment, is to dance the latest dance with a fighter from the United States! ”

“ Still another stunt is a dancing act, first as a burlesque of ballet, and then as a straight tango, with Francesco as a rather wicked old dowager in a green dress, and Alberto with complete facial make-up, but otherwise extremely chic, dancing exquisitely. ”

“ The first four figures of the Tango really are the Tango; that is, the Tango, as danced in the parlor and the ball-room. They consist of Four Steps Forward and Back, Circling, the
Illustration 1
Grape Vine and the Draw. Mastering these figures means learning the Tango; for the many other figures are added merely for the sake of variety and come naturally after these first four have been learned so thoroughly as to be danced without thought or effort. The Tango cannot be danced to march or two-step music. ”

“ They all spend their days at the tango classes, from early morning till dark—mothers and daughters, grandmothers and demi-mondaines, Russian Grand Duchesses, Austrian Princesses—clasped in the arms of incredible scum from the Argentine, half-castes from Mexico, and farceurs from New York—decadent male things they would not receive in their ante-chambers before this madness set in! ”

“ To the many millions who have spent some of their most unforgettable and delightful hours dancing the dreamy Waltz, under the influence of its seductive music, this animosity toward their now accepted Queen of the Ball-room must appear ridiculous. And yet not a very few of these same passionate waltzers raise their voices in protest to-day and look horrified at the mere mention of the modern Tango. ”

“ From the waltz to the tango, from the tango to the current fox-trot or one-step, polite dancing has held more of what is essentially artistic than the art-dance, and it has had no pretensions. The old tango and the maxixe were the only ones which could not easily be269 danced by those who applauded them on the stage; classic dancing, on the contrary, has always been an art of professionals—almost a contradiction in terms in this case, for it is the essence of the dance that it can be danced. It is not the essence of the dance that it can be staged, or made into a pantomime. ”

“ You see, at the last, the ring of men linked by hand-hold outside a ring of their partners, lifted locked arms over their partners' heads, and thus interwoven, the circle balanced before breaking up. Other times, other dances—ours is now the day of the trot and the tango. But they lack the life, the verve of the old dances, the old tunes. ”

“ He does not join in the dancing himself. The men dancers are nearly all paid dancers, I think, and the beautifully clad women who dance are either professionals, too, or else belong to a profession that is older even than dancing is. They all dance with a profound German gravity and precision. Here is music to set a wooden leg a-jigging; but these couples circle and glide and dip with an incomprehensible decorum and slowness.
When we were there, they were dancing the tango or one of its manifold variations. All Europe, like all America, was, for the moment, tango mad. ”

“ But the trouble we take to reconstruct on the stage, for the edification of travellers from Europe, the real Tango, in all the antique effrontery of its ingeniousness, proves that the heroic age, made up of the naïf and the barbarous, is fast losing its last vestiges of character in the wilderness of civilised monotony. ”

“ The Tango is a Spanish American dance which contains much of the peculiar charm of the other Spanish dances, and its execution depends largely upon the ability of the dancers so to grasp the rhythm of the music as to interpret it by their movements. The steps are all simple, and the dancers are permitted to vary or improvise the figures at will. ”

“ From the time of the perspiring, disordered, exhausted, and out-of-breath dancing devotees who gave to the ball-room ensemble the look of a football field after the battle, the day has at last come when repose is an essential quality for the up-to-date dance enthusiast.
For the modern dance, when properly executed, is an exquisite sight, and the swaying, gliding Tango lovers or Hesitation Waltzers develop a grace of motion and an ease of deportment that probably most of them would never develop without these aids. ”

“ The Tango as we dance it now is much modified from the first Argentine; the Hesitation Waltz has been evolved into a graceful dance seldom equaled; while the Innovation is really almost a Minuet, since the partners step the measures quite apart from each other. ”

“ It is time that the ghost should be laid, since the Tango is now, and has been for a year or more, a beautiful and irreproachable dance—assuming, of course, its performance in the clean spirit usually found in good society. Any dance can be made suggestive or offensive. So can walking. But that is no reflection on the intrinsic quality of either dance or walk. The measure of the beauty or character of a dance is to be found in the movements which, by common acceptance, that dance prescribes ”

“ The sharp in-twist of the foot is one of the points of individuality both of the Tango and the dance of the Arab. Now, probable family relationship puts the Tango under no obligation to family traits, for the sake of family dignity ”

“ In reply to the severe comments of some of the elder generation who still cling to its old-fashioned dances, let us resolve to take their uncharitable view of the young generation's dance-madness in good spirit and casually remind them that no present-day Tango fever will half equal the epidemic mania with which our great-grandparents twisted, turned, and whirled when the Polka was first introduced, or the rapidity with which it affected both young and old. ”

“ The Eight Step is really a Tango step. From the plain One Step, in which both partners are facing each other, the gentleman, who should be walking forward, turns the lady so that she is facing in the same direction as himself. It is not necessary to change the step or to stop walking. They then walk forward two steps on the first step of the figure—the gentleman on his left and the lady on her right. Without loosening the hold any more than is necessary, they both turn on the third step, making a revolution toward the inside. ”

“ It's worse than ice, to make it easy for those who can't dance. You just cling to someone and slip if you don't know any steps. Some of them say their slip is a waltz: others call it a gavotte, and some say it's the tango. Old Mike's very definite that it's a jig. The great thing is to make the slip coincide with a groan from the gramophone. Just watch a minute, and you'll see that there is quite a lot of method in it."
She looked round for Louis, who was in a corner with some of the miners. ”

“ By doing this you impress upon yourself that it is a slow dance, and that it should be simple, and not full of jerky and complicated steps. This walking to Tango time
INNOVATION—THE CORTEZ
is not as easy as it may seem; it should be practised frequently, so as to make it smooth. The shoulders must not go up and down, the body must glide along all the time without any stops. It is correct either to walk on your heel and toe or just on the ball of the foot; but the Argentines nearly all seem to walk flat-foot, or else they step out on their heel first. ”

“ A well-known writer has said that wherever the African negro has gone, he has left traces in the music of that country. The Spanish Habanera, which we have danced by the name of Tango came from Africa; even the 18name is African, “tangara,” and was a vulgar dance unfit for civilized people. The rhythm of the African dance and of our tango is the same.
Like other savages, the African negro loved rhythm better than melody. His songs were monotonous and were made up of a few tones and short repeated phrases. They used the scale, of five tones (called pentatonic) , the same as the Indian’s. ”

“ She was also conscious of the fact that the variety of waltz popular thirty years ago was an oddity, and that a middle-aged woman who went hopping and twirling about a ballroom must be callous to the amusement that followed her gyrations.
With the advent of the turkey trot and the tango, things have changed however. No one is too stout, too old or too clumsy to go walking solemnly round, in or out of time to the music. ”

“ It was very hard science to describe this tango-waltz when I saw it, Mr. Editor. It are similar to a minuet danced by eels. Angry elbows seem to be slipping around everywheres while each ladies and gentlemen seem to be walking sidewise without intending to go there. Such117 chuckly movements of ducking away from music amid bounces! Such clutch and jolt containing great poetry! I could not unstand how persons could do this American jiu-jitsu without injurious breakage of their personality. ”

“ Every one is at liberty to test his powers of invention and composition, to experiment with the adaptation of steps of one dance into another, and, in general, to give play to his individuality. But, to hasten the uniform acceptance of a certain set of figures as a standard basis of each dance, it would be best to postpone indulgence in fantasies until after the subjoined figures have been learned. At present the progress of the Tango, in particular, is hampered by the fact that hardly two people in the same ballroom will be found in agreement as to what steps constitute that dance. ”

“ The Romans called it 'Micare,' (sc. digitis) . It was formerly played in Germany, and called 'Fingerlein snellen.'
Paro o sparo.—'Even or odd.' It was called by the Greeks artiazein, and by the Romans 'Par impar.'
Lo Tuocco.—Perhaps our English game of 'Tag' (Touch, from the Latin tango or tago) , in which one, who is called Tag, runs after and tries to touch the others; when he succeeds he cries Tag, and the one touched becomes Tag in his turn. ”

“ This rendered it difficult to dance without a swaying accompaniment. By making the tempo a little more rapid it has been found possible to eliminate the last feature, and good dancers have proved that the tango, one-step, and the like can be executed well and gracefully without holding the partner too closely. It is evident that the new dances have been greatly modified, and that they will not be given up at present. It is pointed out that there always have been, and perhaps always will be, some persons who dance in a way that people of refinement disapprove of. ”

“ The Tango Walk (Spanish, el Paseo; French, la Promenade) is used as a variety to figures. The man moves forward, starting with the left foot, the woman backward. The step brings the advancing foot to position squarely in front of the supporting foot, both (by the present mode) pointed straight forward. The full weight is transferred to the advanced foot as soon as possible, the knee of the leg in posterior position promptly relaxed, the posterior foot resting, for a moment, lightly on the point. The step in advance is made with a light gliding movement. ”

“ At the larger and more fashionable of the teas it is now customary to have a pair of professionals to dance if tea is to be served to every one at once. This gives the guests a chance to watch the dancing while they eat, and even where no professionals are to be seen the hostess often asks some especially clever young couple to do a dance for the other guests to break the endless round of One Step, Hesitation, and Tango. ”

“ The same is true of the Flamenco dances in Spain. Their superior use of the trick justifies attention on the part of those under whose influence the new dance is determining its final form.
In point of merit, the Tango measures up to a standard which, though by no means a true measure of quality, has a certain practical value: it is sufficiently picturesque to cover the faults of a half-good dancer. Conversely, as a vehicle for the equilibrium and style that unite in a very good dancer, it is not excelled by any social dance of modern times. ”