"Confido nella speranza,
già troppe volte soddisfatta,
di non avere ragione"
Jorge Luis Borges,
Storia universale dell'infamia
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"Confido nella speranza, Jorge Luis Borges, |
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Tango, you were and you will be.
Tango: a music of a country that becomes a universal message, a way of being,
of thinking, of acting, of moving; a music which crosses men's borders all over
the world. A unique dance for its inventiveness and its complexity, but also
for its physical movements and its eroticism, a mixture of different kinds of
music which, nonetheless reveals its own identity. The tango knows how to bewitch
with its energy, but also with its slight melancholy derived from the precariousness
of the "neighbouring men", as Catullo Castillo, one of the most famous Lyricists,
once defined the people living on the outskirts. The music of Buenos Aires started
around 1880 in the suburbs of the capital during an irrepetible process of urbanization.
The people from which the tango originated were the nomadic farmers, the impoverished
gauchos and the Europeans of the so called "migratory flood", as Meri Lao writes
in his song T for Tango. This was a world of the borders, of half-caste
people, of people gathered by the notes of a violin, of a bandonéon; they got
there on a ship from Germany, the original cradle. Tango was to be the name
of that music that shakes the limbs, a words coming from far away, perhaps originating
from the word "tambor", the drum of the black culture, or from
"Shangò", the god of the storm and of lightning who extended his
dominion on this dance. In Buenos Aires, at the end of last century, one inhabitant
out of two is of Italian origins: the people from Liguria settled in the south,
in the place called La Boca; the people from Sicily created a new Palermo in
the north. They took with them their language and their songs, the lunfardo,
the jargon of the slums started and developed, life started again and their
cultural identity was restored. Also gangsters and tradesmen settled there together
with really gifted musicians, with poets and versifiers, singers like Carlos
Gardel, Charlo, Ignacio Corsini, Ada Falcon, legendary ballet dancers like Tetè
and Pepito. The tango sends its message in a bottle and it was picked up on
the various beaches of the planet and was destined to get legs and hearts of
thousands of people to move. Today as then.
PHOTO BY MARIO CHIODETTI
