[Tango-L] Early dancing in Argentina

[Sergio Vandekier]

Konstantin says,  "Numerous tango dancing manuals exist from the 1910-1925 
era - most of
it before Azucena ever stepped foot on a stage. They all assume a
man-woman dance."

They do but they did not touch each other.

Horacio Salas in "El Tango" page 27 writes :   " June 6, 1880, Benigno B. 
Lugones explained in the newspaper 'La Nacion" , that the Quadrille, the 
Lancers, the Contradanza, the Minuet, and in general all dance of couples 
dancing separated (without and embrace) could be accepted and were accepted 
even in the best places. "But The Polka, The Mazurka, The waltz, and other 
dances that are prohibited in the dancing halls of good customs, (habanera, 
schottische, danza) are abominations of the highest degree".

I would like to know what manuals are we talking about, last time I 
researched this topic (June of 2003) I wrote in tango-L about THE MANUAL  OF 
NICANOR LIMA.

I said then :   ***This is only my opinion.

Nicanor Lima wrote his method to learn Argentine tango in 1916.

He was obsessed with the idea of making this despicable, immoral dance
acceptable to the Argentinean society.

His book has two parts:

The first one is dedicated to an introduction of the dance in general terms
and also (this is important) has a long set of rules where he discussed the
healthy effects of the dance, the proper etiquette, and the pitfalls to
avoid in order not to fall pray of lewdness, immorality and disease.

He is forced to clean the real tango of everything that was objectionable to
society.   He had to ignore the people, the places, the form in which tango
was being danced. He new further, that tango had been fully accepted in
Paris in a sanitized form as danced by Argentinean boys of high society.
**He took this form of dancing to make it acceptable to Argentineans as
well.

The second part describes posture and choreographic figures.

The book which I had the chance to examine about three or four years ago has
illustrations.

The posture is erect, the bodies are close but do not touch each other. The
names of the figures are similar to the one we use today.
Ochos, sentada, media luna, etc. He introduces Paseos and other figures that
I do not know.

So he wrote his book with the main purpose to make tango acceptable to
society. He had to sell his soul to the devil to do so.
His tango was a foreign dance to the those that gathered in the suburbs to
dance it, it was sanitized, no cortes, no quebradas, danced erect and
somewhat rigidly, it had lost all the original vitality.

It was this book that fell in the hands of Richard Powers who was very happy
to see with his own eyes that the tango he knew correlated very well with
the original, authentic Argentinean version.

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