Tango - earthiness and eternal yearning Chiori Santiago wrote in the Smithsonian Magazine (November 1993) that the tango is nothing if not “transformative.”  Some tango aficionados maintain that it can be danced with great emotional distance between its partners while others swear there must be intimacy to dance a good tango.  But all agree that tango is feeling.  One choreographer refers to the dance as four legs and ONE heart!   The tango was born among the working poor in the immigrant “barrios” of Argentina and Uruguay in the 1880’s, in bars as well as brothels.  Its content was not romantic in the popular sense.  The tone was often dark and bitter. Though its origins are uncertain, in its earliest forms in the 1890's, the tango was a derivation of the Cuban dance, the Habanera.   However, it was the people of the Rio de la Plata, with their distinctive speech cadences, that gave the music its pronounced patterns and rhythms -- a double beat, with a syncopated accent on the second.  The bandoneon was introduced to the tango in the early 1900's, most likely by the European immigrants from Italy and Spain.  It made the music, up until then played with piano, harp, flute, and guitars, more portable, as the musicians performed primarily in bordellos.   By the end of World War I, the tango was the hit of Europe’s finest salons.  Writer Santiago tells us that conservative upper class European women wore padded bumpers around their waists to prevent dangerously close contact with male partners!  Carlos Gardel popularized the tango song worldwide before he died in 1935, and today he maintains a cult stature in Argentina equal to that of Elvis Presley in the United States.   In spite of the inundation of pop music from the United States and Europe, Argentines still love their tango.  There is a nation-wide 24-hour radio station that plays only tango and a Tango University in Buenos Aires where students attend classes in tango history, dance and poetry.  Tango has its devotees in every part of the world, including a loyal, committed following in the United States.  Some major U.S. cities host annual tango competitions and new tango groups are continually being formed, such as the New York-Buenos Aires Connection, the only active nuevo tango group in the United States.  There is even an annual tango week at Stanford University every summer.  Although there are rivalries between the various schools of tango dance, the Argentine school vows to be the most authentic, with its violin and bandoneon and its ochos and ganchos that make up the slicing footwork of the dance.