The Tango Revival of the 1980s: Trottoirs de Buenos Aires and Tango Argentino

The show Tango Argentino is usually credited with bringing tango back in the 1980s, but one of the founders of a small Paris tango café argued in 1996 that the revival began two years earlier, on his stage.

At a glance

  • Trottoirs de Buenos Aires opened in Paris on 19 November 1981 with the Sexteto Mayor, according to Tomás Barna and Nélida Rouchetto
  • Tango Argentino, created by Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli, premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in November 1983
  • On Broadway the show ran at the Mark Hellinger Theatre from 9 October 1985 to 30 March 1986, for 199 performances

Fuente original: «La verdad sobre el origen del auge actual del tango» (Tomás Barna, Revista Club de Tango, 1996) · Resumen en español ↓

In the 1980s tango came back to the big stages of Paris and New York. The usual explanation is a single stage show, Tango Argentino. In 1996 Tomás Barna, one of the founders of a small Paris tango café called Trottoirs de Buenos Aires, wrote in Revista Club de Tango that this explanation was only half true. This page follows his account and checks it against independent sources. Barna’s opinions are marked as his.

A half-truth, according to Barna

Barna wrote with mixed feelings, he says: joy at remembering the nights at Trottoirs, sadness at seeing its role forgotten. Newspapers kept crediting Tango Argentino alone with the revival. He quotes Héctor Negro, who had written in Clarín on 10 August 1996 that the show opened the world’s stages to tango in the 1980s. For Barna, nobody had asked how the show itself came about.

His answer rests on two dates. Trottoirs de Buenos Aires opened on 19 November 1981. Tango Argentino was first performed on 11 November 1983 at the old Théâtre du Châtelet, then renamed Théâtre Musical de Paris, almost exactly two years later.

A café in Les Halles

The idea, Barna writes, went back to the early 1970s, when he, Benjamín Kruk and the musician Edgardo Cantón dreamt of a place in Paris devoted to the best of tango music and poetry, but lacked the money. Ten years later Cantón gathered a group of partners, French, Argentine and other South Americans, until they were 23. Among them were the painters Antonio Seguí, Pérez Celis and Leopoldo Presas and the singer Susana Rinaldi. Their hope, in Barna’s words, was that history would repeat itself: Paris had embraced tango in 1913 and Buenos Aires had followed (a moment described in our article on tango in 1913), so a new success in Paris might make tango reborn at home.

They found premises at 37 rue des Lombards, in the Les Halles quarter, and Barna calls Trottoirs the first tango venue in Europe. In a 2020 review of the documentary Un sueño en París by Sergio Costantino, Ezequiel Boetti describes the founders as Cantón and 23 other artists, a slightly different count.

The writer Julio Cortázar was the café’s spiritual godfather. According to Barna, at the end of the 1970s Cortázar had presented a record of tangos with his lyrics, music by Cantón, sung by Juan Cedrón.

The Sexteto Mayor opens

To start with a strong group, Barna travelled to Buenos Aires in July 1981 and proposed the opening to José Libertella, who led the Sexteto Mayor with Luis Stazo. Both agreed. The sextet had made its debut at La Casa de Carlos Gardel in 1973 (on 29 April according to Nélida Rouchetto on Todotango, on 23 April according to Miguel Frías on the same site).

Rouchetto confirms that the Sexteto Mayor played at Trottoirs on 19 November 1981 and names Barna, Cantón and Susana Rinaldi among its founders. Frías writes that this Paris opening brought the sextet its first standing ovation, with Cortázar, Yves Montand and Paloma Picasso in the audience. A 2004 report in La Nación also states that the sextet opened the café in 1981.

Who played at Trottoirs

According to Barna, the Sexteto Mayor played the first three weeks to great success. The singer Rubén Juárez followed, seeing in the new year of 1982 on stage, then the duo of Horacio Salgán and Ubaldo De Lío with the bandoneonist Oscar Pareta, and the singer Josefina. Barna also lists the singers Guillermo Galvé, Raúl Funes, Hernán Salinas, Reynaldo Anselmi, Susana Rinaldi and María Garay; the groups of Osvaldo Piro, the Sexteto Tango, the trio of Juan José Mosalini, Orlando Trípodi, the Cuarteto del Centenario and the avant-garde duo Gubitsch-Caló; the bandoneonists Arturo Penón and Walter Ríos; and two Uruguayans, the guitarist Ciro Pérez and the pianist Enrique Pascual. Among the visitors he names Osvaldo Pugliese and Cortázar. Through the café, he adds, Pugliese’s orchestra gave a single concert at the Bataclan in Paris in 1984. We could not confirm that concert independently.

From the café to the Châtelet

The heart of Barna’s argument is this: the success of Trottoirs led Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli, two Argentine designers and directors, to create a tango show, and they brought the managers of the Châtelet to the café several times. He also points out that the backbone of the show’s orchestra was nine musicians who had played at Trottoirs: the Sexteto Mayor, Salgán, De Lío and Pareta. He quotes, in Spanish, a review in Libération of 14 November 1983 that credits the Sexteto Mayor, two years after its Trottoirs debut, with bringing tango back to Paris, and praises Salgán.

Independent sources support part of this. Rouchetto writes that Stazo and Libertella wrote the arrangements and assembled the large orchestra for Tango Argentino, which toured Europe, North America and Asia from 1983 to 1992; La Nación gives 1983 to 1991 for the sextet’s time with the show. They do not say whether the café inspired the show; that is Barna’s view.

Tango Argentino

The show’s premiere is confirmed by Tiempo Argentino in its obituary of Segovia (December 2025): Tango Argentino opened at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1983 as part of the Paris autumn festival, was an immediate success and began more than a decade of touring. Segovia and Orezzoli had met in 1972. The cast included the dancers Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves and the singers Roberto Goyeneche and Raúl Lavié. The Argentine Secretariat of Culture, announcing Segovia’s death on 21 December 2025, called the show his most emblematic work.

On Broadway, according to Playbill, Tango Argentino opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on 9 October 1985 and closed on 30 March 1986 after 199 performances.

Barna’s verdict

Barna’s conclusion is a rhetorical question: would Tango Argentino have existed without Trottoirs? He clearly thought not. His account is that of an interested party, written to correct the record, and the independent sources confirm the dates, the people and the Sexteto Mayor’s path from the café to the show, without settling the question of cause. What his article adds is a reminder that the revival had a small room behind it, as well as a big stage. More in our tango history section.

Sources