[Tango-L] Tango in Toulouse--Part 1

[randy cook]

Tango in Toulouse--Part 1
July 1, 2009
5:00 PM

We register for Tangopostale, the Argentine tango festival that will be opening shortly with a milonga on the banks of the river Garonne.  The festival reception is at Cercle Duranti, which turns out to be a ten minute walk from our hotel.  The milonga by the Garonne is another ten minute walk--it would have been even less if the streets weren't so twisty.  And later in the evening, we walk to a tango concert at St. Pierre des Cuisines, an ancient church converted into a very modern performance space.  In urban planning circles, Toulouse is what is called "pedestrian friendly."

Tangopostale is unlike any other tango festival I've been to.  It is not confined to some five-star hotel, as these festivals often are.  It is spread all over the old part of the city, with dances, performances, classes, lectures, and movies in cultural centers, parks, bandstands, squares, and streets.  It is not organized by a small group of people, but is a cooperative effort on the part of the Ville de Toulouse and the twenty local tango associations, which claim a collective membership of nearly a thousand.  Finally, Tangopostale is not so much an effort to attract international visitors (such as Janet, Robert, and me--we are the exception, it turns out), but to promote tango in Toulouse, and to showcase local tango teachers and their students.

That said, Tangopostale has arranged for two Argentine tango orchestras of considerable renown to perform evening concert-dances at a rock club south of town, with local tango groups as warm up bands.  I find this very interesting.  There are no famous Argentine dance teachers on the guest list, yet here is Orquesta Tipica Color Tango and Sexteto Stazo Mayor.  Why have the festival organizers invested a large part of what must be a limited budget on musicians, but not on dancers?  Clearly, they must value tango-as-music at least as much as tango-as-dance.  In that, they are like the Argentines themselves, who listen to it all the time--not just when they go out to dance at a milonga.

The name of the festival is a word play on "Aeropostale," the first transatlantic airmail system, which linked Toulouse with the city of Buenos Aires some eighty years ago.  Carlos Gardel, the most famous of all tango singers,  was born in Toulouse in 1895, and was brought to Buenos Aires three years later by his mother.  They were fairly typical of the immigration trends of the late 19th century.  The French were among the largest immigrant groups to Argentina during the period when tango was born.  One would presume that--along with the Italians, the Spanish, and the native gauchos and Afro-Argentines--they had a role in tango's formation.   One of the festival lecturers even associates Gardel, in a general way, with the troubadour tradition of southern France, which goes back to the Middle Ages.   Toulouse has a long musical and cultural link to tango.

But Tangopostale isn't the only arts festival in Toulouse this summer.  There are music and art festivals scheduled for every week from May through September.  Part of the reason for this rush to culture seems to be intercity rivalry.  The European Union sponsors a competition for the title of "European Capital of Culture," and France's turn is coming up.  The four contenders?  Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, and Marseille (Paris was honored in years past).  As my guidebook says, "When was the last time four American cities battled it out for whose museums truly kick butt?" 

Or whose milongas?

More to come...