When the International Olympic Committee announced the for the first time, not all athletes danced with joy. Indeed, some considered these street stylings to be an expression of anarchy: Michelle Martin, an Australian who dominated international squash in the 1990s, the move would make “a mockery” of these noble competitions. The flap brings to mind another curious Parisian panic around a new, upstart dance competition—one that, more than a century ago, agitated everyone from nobility to church elders.
The rebellious dance was called the tango, and it originated in the brothels and streets of Buenos Aires in the late 1800s. Though the Argentine upper classes associated the tango with violence and illicit sex, their more rakish sons encountered it in downtown cafés and dance halls and carried it abroad during their obligatory European travels. When the tango arrived in Paris, in the early 1900s, it created a sensation.
“The chests are touching, and the legs are going in between each other’s legs,” says , author of . “And that’s very suggestive and naughty.” According to Gabriel-Louis Pringué, a chronicler of Parisian society, the evocative moves led one French countess to remark, “Don’t you have to be lying down to dance that?” Despite or perhaps because of its bawdiness, the tango soon caught on in working-class clubs in the Montmartre section of Paris, where handsome men offered lessons to swooning young women, helping launch the craze Dance impre.
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