But the Argentinean tango holds a unique place in couple dancing. The body is closer, more intimate than in any other dance form. And yet the 2 legs move faster and with more deadly accuracy than in any other comparable dance. It is this combination of sensual, meditative, relaxed contact in the upper body and swift, almost martial arts-like repartee in the lower body that gives the tango its unique identity. You have a genuine participatory art form, which can express the most profound and complex longings that people can have about their lives, about each other, about the nature of existence itself.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the tango.
However, most researchers agree that the earliest tangos were danced in the streets, bars and brothels of Buenos Aires around the 1800s. The vocabulary of the dance and rhythms of the music that accompanied it echoed the ethnic origins of its proponents. African slaves in Argentina had brought with them the rhythmic patterns of the candombe and later black Cubans brought the habanera to Buenos Aires. A new dance evolved based on the steps of the candombe, the habanera, together with the polka and the mazurka and became known at the time as a milonga. Before long, this new dance had been taken up by the new European immigrants, and the tango, as we now know it, was born.