6:05 pm Confiteria La Ideal. All the photographs in this post are by Adriana Groisman and have been used with her permission. These and many others may be found in her stunning book, Tango: Nunca Antes de la Media Noche and on her website.
Buenos Aires. Monday. 5:54 PM. Rush hour. At the corner of Corrientes Avenue and Suipacha, crowds elbow their way to the Subte. Buses screech to a stop, diesel fumes clog the air. Traffic is in gridlock.
But a few steps away, it’s utterly quiet. Inside Confiteria La Ideal, we find an ocean of empty tables and chairs. A half-drunk bottle of beer sits abandoned on the seat of a chair. Bored waiters loiter in the back. One flicks his white napkin at a fly.
The sound of tango music, muffled but alluring, floats from the second floor.
A woman rushes past us, running lightly up the marble stairs. She’s 40-ish and slender, with short red hair and a swan’s neck, wearing a black leotard, clingy skirt and leggings. A dancer, with all the grace and poise you’d expect. A little smile plays across her lips.
We pay 20 pesos for tickets, and follow her…
1:30 am El Juvenil. Photograph by Adriana Groisman in Tango: Nunca Antes de la Media Noche.
...into another world. One of high ceilings and marble columns, blotched mirrors and cracked marble floors. Vintage fans mounted on the columns revolve languidly. The dance floor is suffused with golden light from glass chandeliers with burnt out bulbs. A smell like incense hangs in the air.
On one wall the clock has stopped permanently at 9:20.
We're at an old-fashioned milonga, or tango session, at Confiteria La Ideal. Once an elegant venue where politicians, artists and celebrities came to dance, this faded 1912 cafe now hosts daily afternoon classes and evening milongas.
The redhead pauses at a table just long enough to slip on her tango shoes—black with four-inch heels—and buckles the ankle straps.
A middle-aged man, hair slicked back, wearing black shirt and pants, walks towards her. They lock eyes. Their chemistry is palpable, the space between them suddenly electrified. Eagerly she floats into his arms, surrendering--there is no other word for it--to his embrace. Their cheeks touch, their eyes close, his arm encircles her, pressing her breast to his. Gracefully they enter the flow.
5:10 am Salon Canning. Photograph: Adriana Groisman in Tango: Nunca Antes de la Media Noche.
They’ve danced together often, it’s clear. But do they know each other in the real world? I can’t tell, but this afternoon this man and this woman are lost in an intimate, sensuous universe where life outside has no meaning. Locked in an embrace both rapturous and proper—posture erect, no body contact below the chest—for the moment they have only each other.
Hips swivel, a skirt flutters, one leg kicks back, a foot is planted neatly between the partner’s legs. The footwork is intricate, almost indescribable, the movement fluid but precise. The man communicates with his partner by infinitesimally changing the pressure of his hand on her back.
This is neither the splashy tango of the hotel shows or sexy movie tango. It is a graceful, you could almost say, stately, dance, with a sensual edge. The music is recorded. Some of the scratchy numbers sound as if they date back to the 30’s or 40’s, but it is romantic and urgent, the kind of music that transports the milongueros--and the rest of us-- to another time and place. Isn’t that Carlos Gardel, Argentina’s most famous tango artist, singing “Volver?”
I’m struck by how plainly dressed the dancers are. There is a blonde in silvery mini-skirt, and a movie-perfect lounge lizard in a shiny tuxedo with dyed hair and mustache. But most of the milongueros might have come from work, the men in shirts and slacks, the women in skirts and blouses. Mostly they are middle aged, though eventually a younger crowd trickles in.
A geeky guy invites Serendipity to dance, but she avoids his gaze. It would take months—no, years—of practice to join the dancers. Even longer perhaps to understand the rules of the game.
7:45 pm Osvaldo en su departamento. Photograph: Adriana Groisman in Tango: Nunca Antes de la Media Noche.
Before she ever took a single photograph for her book Tango: Nunca Antes de la Medianoche [Tango: Never Before Midnight], Adriana Groisman spent two years immersed in the subculture of the milonga.
On the website of German photographer Thomas Kellner, Groisman writes that the milonga’s “highly encoded rules of behaviour” reflect “a certain street-smart, bitter, melancholic yet passionate view of the world, with its particular ethical and aesthetic values. [These rules] are the result of tango’s history as the expression of marginalized and displaced people that was subsequently co-opted by the upper classes and glamorized by the Europeans, but never lost its presence in the poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires….”
At the milonga, Groisman discovered, “fleeting relationships, alliances, rivalries, jealousies and games of seduction occur, leading to the encounters on the dance floor. These negotiations are carried out through furtive glances and minute gestures, parts of a ritual that can go completely unnoticed by outsiders. Milongueros tend to speak very little; even if they have been dancing with each other for years they never ask each other’s last names, addresses or professions. This is one of the unspoken rules of the “real” milongueros. At the milonga, class, age and physical appearance recede. The dancing is what counts, the connection between body and body, the feeling for the music…”
4:00 pm Confiteria La Ideal. Photograph: Adriana Groisman in Tango: Nunca Antes de la Media Noche.
All the photographs in this post can be found on Groisman’s website and in her stunning book, Tango: Nunca Antes de la Medianoche, now sadly out of print. (If you're interested, new and used copies can be found at on-line booksellers such as abe.com.) Her shadowy, almost excruciatingly private photos of the dancers, taken with black and white 400 ASA film, often in the early hours of the morning, are punctuated with observations about the world of the milonga.
Here is one of my favorites:
“En la milonga los hombres logran tener en sus brazos a mujeres a las que nunca podrian acceder en otro lugar. Y las mujeres aceptan ese abrazo que nunca dejarian que sucediera en otro lugar o en tras circunstancias.”
[At the milonga men manage to hold in their arms women whom they could never approach in another place. And the women accept this embrace which they would never permit in another place or in other circumstances.]
And this:
“Nadie sabe lo que pasa entre dos personas que bailan. Lo que los dos lograron, hacia donde se transportaron. Es algo muy personal, unico y irrepetible. “
[No one knows what happens between two people who are dancing. What the two achieve, is the place to which they are transported. It is something personal, unique, and cannot be repeated.]
And finally this:
“El gran desafio del tango es tratar de entender al otro en tres minutos.”
[The great challenge of the tango to try to understand the other person in three minutes.]
I could watch this milonga forever. And why not? Here at Confiteria La Ideal, it’s always 9:20 PM.
