Daily Times

Every night, 69-year-old Edinson chooses one of his 11 pairs of dance shoes, slips into a smart suit and heads out to dance tango in the clubs of Montevideo, a city that is looking to breathe new life into an old tradition, one that has long been eclipsed by its more famous neighbor, Buenos Aires.

“I’ve been dancing for 10 years now,” said Edinson, a retired soldier, and this stylized exit from his house has become a nightly ritual, “no matter what the weather is.”

With a nod of his carefully coiffured-head, he invites a woman onto the parquet dance floor, where they skillfully glide past other couples in a club that is almost hidden behind a covered market.

It is here that the Joventango (“Young tango”) association organizes so-called “milongas” every week, evenings of dance that are open to initiates as well as to the merely curious and the passing tourist.

Tango was born in the late 19th-century, behind the closed doors of salons in Montevideo and Buenos Aires because the spectacle of dancers pressing passionately against each other was originally deemed to be too steamy to be performed in public.

It later gained popularity and then respectability after it spread to Paris.

In an ironic twist of history, today in Uruguay tango is “relegated to something old people do,” fumed Martin Borteiro, who like his wife Regina Chiappara is a former professional dancer.

At the start of the year, Martin and Regina were called on by the mayor’s office to come up with a diagnosis of what is ailing tango in Montevideo, with an eye to developing a strategic plan to revive the dance.

The picture painted by the couple was bleak: fewer and fewer milongas, older dancers and less public support. In a sign of how far the decline has gone, only one local maker of tango shoes still exists in the Uruguayan capital.

“The current tango community is very fragile,” said Martin. “Montevideo is the city where tango was born, so there is a danger of something vanishing which is part of our identity, part of our tradition.”

‘Liking losing football’

Esteban Cortez, a 43-year-old tango teacher, refuses to countenance it: losing this dance would be “like losing football for me, it’ll never happen” in a nation in a country where soccer is almost like a religion.

“If our tango disappears, we will disappear as a country,” he said.

His wife Virginia Arzuaga, 40, who is herself a teacher, noted that the dance had been named part of the world’s cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2009.

“And when something is named a cultural heritage, it’s because it’s about to die out,” she said.

“There are those who’ll tell you, ‘when the tango bug bites you you are lost, it’s a voyage of no return,'” said Virgina, reflecting on the growing popularity of the dance overseas, in particular in countries like Turkey, Russia and France.

“It’s a shame that here, in a city with so much tango in its history, it’s not appreciated, valued or cherished,” lamented Joselo Ferrando, 45, who runs one of the city’s main tango events, Chamuyo.

Published in Daily Times, June 15^th 2018.