HOT MILONGA > PLAYBOY DANCES THE TANGO

By Irene Amuchástegui

It is no secret that 1900 tango developed in the environment of brothels, as a prelude to sex. This explains the saucy titles of many arcaic tangos (La C… de la L…, Qué polvo con tanto viento, Dos sin sacarla …). In the early decades of the twentieth century, the sensual –sometimes overtly sexual- character of tango horrified the intellectual classes (Leopoldo Lugones called it “reptile from the whorehouse”). A hundred years later tango lands in Playboy TV, the erotic and soft-porn multimedia signal. Tango: Forbidden Dance is an Argentine production yearning for international projection, premiering on August 4 on the bunny’s cable channel.

They will consist in 12 self-contained stories, set at a milonga in the 1940s. The cast includes the Sans Souci Typical Orchestra, singer Walter Chino Laborde, ten professional dancing couples and as many other “talents”, as director Mario Ancewicz calls his “hot” actors, who trained several months to take to the dance floor to the beat of the classics of the 1940s, apart from being responsible for the high voltage scenes.

“The project arose a year and a half ago, inspired in the high erotic content of tango –Ansewicz told 10Tango-. We took characters who were archetypical of the genre, such as the “little seamstress girl” or the “King of the Milonga”, and we told stories of passion and love triangles.” The director –who started off in advertising- says in his defense: “It is not a triple X or anything like that. It has highly erotic scenes, but no penetration or anything which implies “crossing the threshold”. It is all carefully taken into account. In general, adult movies contain eighty percent of erotic content and twenty per cent of any given topic. People are going to love it.”

Well, tango certainly opens up endless possibilities. Might Hugh Hefner (founder of Playboy) have read Oliverio Girondo?: “The bandoneon magnetizes nipples, the pubic region, and the shoe points” (Milonga, 1921).