Agringado

Joan Acocella

• Flamenco Deep Song by Timothy Mitchell
  Yale, 232 pp, £18.95, January 1995, ISBN 0 300 06001 7
• ¡Tango! The Dance, the Song, the Story by Simon Collier, Artemis Cooper, María Susana Azzi and Richard Martin
  Thames and Hudson, 208 pp, £24.95, October 1995, ISBN 0 500 01671 2
• Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba by Yvonne Daniel
  Open University, 196 pp, £27.50, August 1995, ISBN 0 253 31605 7

‘In France, we do it lying down,’ a French minister is reported to have said on first seeing the tango. He was not far wrong. The tango crystallised at the end of the 19th century in the brothels of Buenos Aires. It was a dance of prostitutes and pimps, and in its ineluctable rhythms, its belly-to-belly stance, its interlacing of legs, it reflected their professional concerns. Yet by the 1910s, it was the newest Parisian dance craze. Argentine whores were no doubt still doing it, but so was the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre.