Tango is the national dance of Uruguay. It began directly across the Rio Uruguay in Argentina, and developed simultaneously in both countries. Although it is internationally famous for being a dance infused with sexual meaning, its beginnings had nothing to do with romance.
It began in the heated night scene of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the last quarter of the 1800’s. The country experienced an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe due to promise of work in the meat industry in a time when many people from Eastern Europe were looking for work. Men would arrive either as bachelors or to set up a life before their families’ eventual arrival. The public spaces were filled with men who worked together, lived together, ate together, drank together and danced together. This wild time pumped to the gills with testosterone was when tango started as a dance between two men, linked arm in arm who oftentimes ended the rough dance with a fight!
As one can imagine, brothels were popular among this crowd. Word has it that there was so much demand men would commonly have to wait their turn. The owners of the brothels hired musicians and dancers to keep the waiting patrons entertained and thus the tango morphed into a dance between both sexes. The musical scene of Buenos Aires and Montevideo incorporated indigenous, African, and European music as well as the longing of the immigrant population. As our host at JovenTango told us: it’s not just a form of entertainment, it’s a form of expression.
After that point in Tango’s history, it gained popularity in Europe when the first generation of Argentineans made exceptionally wealthy by the meat industry began traveling en masse to pinnacles of fashion like Paris and brought the tango with them. There, its style changed once more before being reimported to Uruguay and Argentina.
My first experiences of Tango were at Ines Camou’s dance studio, two blocks from my house. I miraculously found the place without a store-front and rang the buzzer to be let in through the courtyard, inside and down a flight of stairs. Ines teaches primarily ballet and over half the tango students are also her ballet students and members of the Montevideo Ballet Company. 
The other people are middle-aged to mature couples. The basic tango step every gal should know is: left-forward, right-together, right-right, left-together, left-back, right-back, left-cross-over-right, right-swing-out-to-the-right. It’s eight steps, but in practice dancers more often than not don’t start the sequence from the first step. In fact, when I visited a venue that offers tango on Sunday, JovenTango, I didn’t complete the sequence a single time because tango in Uruguay is different from the better known Argentinean tango.
When I searched for places offering tango on domingo, I could only find one other place which I thought would have a more mature crowd due to the picture on the website. Although “joven” means “young” in Spanish, the venue still had a very mature crowd but that didn’t stop younger lovers of tango from showing up later on in the night. I learned from a couple sitting at a table next to us that the majority of the patrons used to frequent another tango venue that closed down about a decade ago.
