Canyengue (cañiegue) is a very old way of dancing the tango or the milonga, own of the compadrito or of the orillero (suburbs), style 1890-1920. The music from this era had a faster or peppier 2/4 tempo (some say it's 4/8) so the dance had a rhythmic flavor similar to that of a speedy milonga.
Canyengue is a lunfardo word with several meanings. It refers to somebody or something from the slums, low class. It also describes a gathering where people from the slums dance. It is also a certain way to perform or dance the tango with a slum attitude. Canyengue describes a streetwise quality from the end of the Nineteenth Century, and originally meant lower class, compadrito, the dance done by the immigrants and the poor who were creating Tango in the earliest period, the lower class (canyengue) people who lived at the edge of the city (in the orillas).
Canyengue also means caminar cadencioso, cadencia, marked rhythm walking, typical is bending the knees, afro influence.
Also: A musical effect , hand impact on the instrument. Leopoldo Thompson (Buenos Aires 1890-1925), Afro creador del efecto canyengue: hitting the string of the contrabass with the free left hand , and the "baqueta", the arch of the bow, with the right hand.
Canyengue dance is almost without figures, freely from choreographic signal element sequences, but with fast play of the feet, with playing, elastic legs. A dance in which rhythm is everything.
The rapid tango movements, cortes (the introduction of figures to interrupt the forward walk of the dance) and quebradas (bending or breaking the line of the spine backbone). Men held women close and they danced head to head, perhaps because they needed to see what their feet were doing, and move your butt back and downward and continue downwards, by bending the knees. The couple danced lifting their feet off the ground, because of the dirt floor at the slaughterhouse district, which is very different to the polished parquet dancefloor. Also a unique posture, couple more side by side and man's left arm mostly much lower.
As it is an very old way of dancing and because of the dark tango period which starts at 1955 till recently, there is much discussion about the true thing. Yet, the influences can be detected and they tell us much about the true tango source, and there are still canyengue teachers.
So, canyengue has an african mark. The tangueros with "Sangre Negra" or the "negros porteños" were coming for the most part from the Congo and Angola. In 1693 the first reference appears on the slavery in the Río de la Plata (el tráfico de negros para venderlos como esclavos). In 1810 nearly 30% of the Buenos Aires population has black ancestry. The black inhabitants had their own dances. These Africans recently freed from slavery, had achieved a more supportive community, forming mutual-aid societies largely financed by street processions and gatherings, called tangos.
They would move to the rhythm of candombe, a loose dance in which couples didn’t touch each other, to the intense beat of tambourine percussion that overcame the melody. The music, drumming and dancing at these functions attracted onlookers, the compadritos and foreign newcomers looking for amusement, mischief, escape. They borrowed the uninhibited movements and insistent rhythms to add to their own contemporary dances, the milonga, mazurka, and waltz, adding a close upper-body embrace and simulating drums with staccato footbeats on the dirt floors.
Musicians of those days, mostly Creole guitarists and payadores (popular troubadours), began to adapt their music to changes in population and the pulse of the city. It is know that the process ended up generating the milonga and, eventually, tango.
So tango grew from a fusion of the emotional, slow rhythm of habanera with the strength of candombe and the choreography of milonga. The habanera comes from the Flamenco guajira, which was transferred to Cuba, where it became a dance in which the dancers intertwine with each other. Changed in this way, it returned to Spain. Passing through the Canary Island, it was named habanera. From there would evolve tango, which, from its beginnings, contributed its own rhythm and a different structure. In the year 1902 and in the successive ones, the Theater Operates organizes dances with tangos and when the record industry appeared, there is a development of all music and especially of tango.
The coloring palette of all this is the suburb, orillero. Between 1853 and 1930 Argentina gets 6.000.000 immigrants. As 70% of the immigrants are masculine, a demographic imbalance is produced.
The street barrel-organs (organitos callejeros) spread and it was very common to see dancing in the streets, often between men. There were musicians in the theatres, in which musicals were performed, and there was also music in the bars near the harbor and at the bordellos (piringundines), where the huge male population looked for sex, entertainment and companionship. European prostitutes were imported, Franchuchas and there was also a women-traffic from Warsaw, from the ghetto de Varsovie et les villages juifs de la Pologne, but this is the port-story of La Boca.
For being places of permanent conflicts, a certain repression was exercised on the lupanares (burdeles, bordels, lupanars) and gambling houses where also was danced.
Some years later, with a more permissive government, there is a boom of dance academies, academias de baile with reasonable prices and with the best serviceability, comfort and decency.
So, dances are organized: They begin at five o'clock in the afternoon and are not finishing before three o'clock in the morning. Each man pays five pesos to an Italian "Maestro de Ceremonias", the woman gets a payment of fifteen pesos for one night (paid beforehand for the company) and a pair of shoes for dancing the whole night.
Some places with the appearance of places of dance, were offering the double service. And, there were not only tangos for touching each other, also polkas, milongas, waltzes and any rhythm that was encouraging the ambience. The Viennese Waltz was the world's first popular dance to use the actual "closed hold", what is now accepted as the standard Ballroom hold. The Polka was the second dance in Europe to use this scandalous new close hold embrace, an "immoral" way of dancing during the early 19th century. This form of dance was brought by emigrants as they moved to Argentina.
Looking at origines, click here for thoughts
DANCECLIPS :
Canyengue: click here for video-clip 01
Canyengue Orillera video-clip 02
More tangoclips (modern)03
More contemporary tangoperformance-clips 04
More milonga + tango clips 05
Contemporary tangoritual Chicho Frumboli clip 06
* More Canyengue click here: Martha Antón
