The tango in the first decades of the 20th century. Practices and representations in motion: Buenos Aires, Paris, Buenos Aires.

Abstract

Before the World War one the tango was developing itself as a fashion in Paris: in this presentation I propose myself to review that fact as a social and cultural phenomenon, with it's actors and conflicts, it's products, practics and it's particular representations, the relation with it's own context. I seek to inscribe that parisian experience in a agenda of social and cultural history that shows the caracteristics and the senses of the cultural products with a wide range of circulation,the social relations that are intertwined and their ways of appropriation and resignification in every context. With this in mind I recapitulate some debates about the origin of tango and how it came to Paris taking note of the actors and processes that made it posible;then, I analize the state of the city at the moment of the arrival of the tango and the particularities that the dance took to explain it's succes, it's critics and the counterpoint that it provoked with what was considered as tango porteño.