Tango program classes in Buenos Aires Argentina
You can immerse into the culture of Argentina while meeting local people and enjoying the highest standard of Tango. Classes are held at one of the best tango academies in town, 99 % of the Tango students/dancers are argentinian, hence standards are high for us. The Tango Academy is located in the same building of our school. Tango classes are offered from Monday to Friday on the evening, 5 classes per week. Add 5 Tango classes per week to your Spanish language program. Just choose your Spanish language Program (A, B or C) and add this program. Our Tango program includes 5 Tango classes per week, Monday to Friday, after the Spanish classes. This includes traditional Tango lessons and also classes of Tango posture (special gymnastics exercises to dance Tango). It is a complete and intensive program. Price: US$80 a week.

You will learn the gorgeous and elegant movements of the Tango. Easy to follow, our classes are for those who want to feel the Emotion and the Romanticism that makes the Tango a unique experience.

HISTORY OF TANGO

The great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges was a tango enthusiast and something of a historian of the music. "My informants all agree on one fact," he wrote, "the Tango was born in the brothels." The tango's birthplace certainly developed amongst the Porteños – the people of the port area of Buenos Aires – and its bordellos and bars. It was a definitively urban music: a product of the melting pot of European immigrants, criollos, blacks and natives, drawn together when the city became the capital of Argentina in 1880. Tango was thus forged from a range of musical influences that included Andalucían flamenco, southern Italian melodies, Cuban habanera, African candombé and percussion, European polkas and mazurkas, Spanish contradanse, and, closer to home, the milonga – the rural song of the Argentine gaucho. It was a music imbued with immigrant history.

The original tango ensembles were trios of violin, guitar and flute, but around the end of the nineteenth century the bandoneón, the tango accordion, arrived from Germany, and the classic tango orchestra was born. The box-shaped button accordion, which is now inextricably linked with Argentine tango, was invented around 1860 in Germany to play religious music in organless churches. One Heinrich Band reworked an older portable instrument nicknamed the "asthmatic worm", which was used for funeral processions as well as lively regional dances, and gave his new instrument the name "Band-Union", a combination of his and his company's names. Mispronounced as it traveled the world, it became the bandoneón. As an expression of the working classes, the fortunes of the tango have inevitably been linked with social and political developments in Argentina and the social classes they empowered. The figure of Juan D'Arienzo, violinist and bandleader, looms large from the 1930s on. With a sharp, staccato rhythm, and prominent piano, the Juan D'Arienzo orchestra was the flavour of those years. His recording of "La cumparsita" at the end of 1937 is a classic and considered one of the greatest of all time. Tango fortunes revived again in the 1940s, and the music enjoyed a second golden age with the rise of Perón in 1946 and his emphasis on nationalism and popular culture to win mass support. This was the era of a new generation of bandleaders. At the top, alongside Juan D'Arienzo were Osváldo Pugliese, Hector Varela and the innovative Aníbal Troilo. Of all bandoneón players, it was Troilo who expressed most vividly, deeply and powerfully, and so tenderly, the nostalgic sound of what is now regarded as a noble instrument. When he died a few years ago half a million people followed his funeral procession to the cemetery. Buenos Aires in the late 1940s was a city of five or six million and each barrio would have ten or fifteen amateur tango orchestras, while the established orchestras would play in the cabarets and nightclubs in the center of the city. Somehow in this era, however, tango began to move away from working class to middle class and intellectual milieus. Tango became a sort of collective reminiscence of a world that no longer existed – essentially nostalgia. CARLOS GARDEL The extraordinary figure of Carlos Gardel (1887–1935) was – and still is – a legend in Argentina, and he was a huge influence in spreading the popularity of tango round the world. He was born in Toulouse, France, but taken to Buenos Aires at the age of four by his single mother. He came to be seen as an icon of Arrabal culture, and a symbol of the fulfillment of the dreams of the poor porteño workers. In Argentina, it was Gardel above all who transformed tango from an essentially low-down dance form to a song style popular among Argentines of widely differing social classes. His career coincided with the first period of tango's golden age and the development of tango-canción (tango song) in the 1920s and 30s. The advent of radio, recording and film all helped his career, but nothing helped him more than his own voice – a voice that was born to sing tango and which became the model for all future singers of the genre. In the 1920s, like most tango singers, Gardel sang to guitar rather than orchestral accompaniment. Everything about Gardel, his voice, his image, his suavity, his posture, his arrogance and his natural machismo spelled tango. Interestingly enough he started out as a variety act singing traditional folk and country music in a duo with José Razzano. During his career, Gardel recorded some nine hundred songs and starred in numerous films, notably The Tango on Broadway in 1934. He was tragically killed in an air crash in Colombia at the height of his fame, and his legendary status was confirmed. His image is still everywhere in Buenos Aires, on plaques and huge murals, and in record-store windows, while admirers pay homage to his life-sized, bronze statue in the Chacarita cemetery, placing a lighted cigarette between his fingers or a red carnation in his buttonhole. back to Spanish language Programs