Dance, DJing, History, VJing

What is neotango?

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»In the matter of tango it is always very precarius to express an opinion. The risk to claim something fallacious about the tango or to offend living or dead historical persons of the genre is immense. It´s no valid question whether Carlos Gardel is an Argentinian or Uruguayan by birth - in fact it seems natural to assume that by Gotan Project the fourth tango revolution has taken place.«

What is neotango? And if so how many? A polemic to the relation of neotango and Retro Tango »In the matter of tango it is always very precarius to express an opinion. The risk to claim something fallacious about the tango or to offend living or dead historical persons of the genre is immense. It´s no valid question whether Carlos Gardel is an Argentinian or Uruguayan by birth - in fact it seems natural to assume that by Gotan Project the fourth tango revolution has taken place.« Philippe Cohen Solal, Gotan Project The guess that Diego Siegelwachs supposed in his article of 2007 »GOTAN PROJECT and the fourth tango revolution« unmistakable has been proved to be true.(cf. http://www.alolatino.de) »La Revancha del Tango« of Gotan Project in 2001 marks not necessarily historically, but stylistically the birth of the neotango, to a trendy, danceable style mix of the tango with electronic beats and sounds. The neotango has lined up to burst open the congealed musical, dance-like,

social and communicative conventions of the tango of the 80th and 90th. Comparable to the formation of the jazz it melts the tango with impulses of the broad range of the contemporary youth culture, revitalises itself and regains its basic liveliness, power of innovation and improvisation.In this process it meets with disapproval by the exponents of the soi-disant »Tango Argentino « which refers his identity to the classicistic zenith of the Tango Ríoplatense, to the Tango d`Oro of the 40th. As this hegemonic, retrogressive claim demands exclusively all the form vocabulary of the tango - from dance through fashion to music - this position can be labeled as Retro Tango. »The concept denotes a cultural phenomenon which produces pieces of art or cultural achievements in general neither based on contemporary style codes nor as their creative advancements or as original new creations, but by recourse to concepts or styles of past periods.«(cf. http://de.wikipedia.org) The Retro Tango assimilated to a curious position…

History

Invented Tradition

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»An invented tradition is realized by choosing a certain point in the past, repeating language, gestures and objects so often until you can no longer imagine that it was any different.«

by Volker Marschhausen (German version below) »An invented tradition is realized by choosing a certain point in the past, repeating language, gestures and objects so often until you can no longer imagine that it was any different.«1 Traditional Tango and Epoca de Oro In the everyday experience of many tango dancers, the »traditional« milonga is a rather harmless dance event full of glamour and crackling exoticism. On closer inspection, however, the perception of the glittering surface gives way to a disturbing ambivalence of intimacy and anonymity, inclusion and exclusion, passion and commerce. A few glimpses into the history of tango are enough to reveal the »traditional« tango as an emperor without clothes, as an »invented tradition« with tabooed dark sides. The so-called Epoca de Oro forms the common historical reference point of the Traditional Tango and its codes, even if its temporal definition mostly follows subjective standards (Marta Savigliano: 1918 – 1935, Donald S. Castro: 1917 – 1943, Michael Lavocah:

1935 – 1945, Christian Tobler: 1938 – 1947). Either one believes »that the essence of the tango lies in its spirit of rebellion and spontaneity of the 1920s« 2 or that »the 1940s and 1950s represented a peak in terms of orchestral complexity.« 3 Even determined advocates of the traditional tango must soberly state: »It seems obvious that the »traditional tango« cannot exist at all; the views of music and dance have been too different in the course of historical development«. 4 The hierarchical staging of the classical tango as a golden celestial throne thus exposes itself as a classical »invented tradition«. Instead of this horizontally layered epochal picture, it is much more plausible to start from parallel, diachronic lines of development of the tango. Through this view, tango acquires a deep historical dimension with radical, even violent leaps, ranging from Tango Criolo to contemporary Tango Nuevo and NeoTango. Tango Codes & Rituals Tango codes are also part of the…