Europe and the Transformation of Tango: Scenes from a Ritualized Narrative

Abstract

The article argues that works in social science granting an external origin to the development of tango dance in Buenos Aires, can be productively understood as the repeated recreation of a script that Argentine writers progressively developed and transcribed from 1910 to 1930. The histories of tango dance they imagined have been generally treated by social scientists as archives keeping reliable memories of the transformations suffered by dance. Thus, social scientists have contributed in direct or indirect ways to the ritualization, here understood as elevation, of a narrative that takes the dance from a marginal origin to acceptance by Buenos Aires élite. The export of the dance to Europe, where it was codified and refined was the event that supposedly fueled this transplant. The work explores the gradual construction of the script in the literature after a documentary anthology of two hundred and twenty Argentine writings on tango chronologically organized and published by Tomás de Lara and Inés Roncetti.