Tango Goes East, Juliette Bretan traces the musical adventure of the tango and its interwar explosion eastwards in colder climes like Warsaw.

Tango was created by Argentina’s immigrant communities in Buenos Aires & Montevideo to incite passion and musical obsession. But you could argue it got a compelling, if brief, makeover in the far less sunnier climes of Warsaw, Krakow, Berlin and Moscow. Immigrant music remade by a multi-ethnic community on the cusp of seismic change and unforeseen destruction.

With Poland’s independence after 1918, a wildly talented group of mostly Jewish Polish musicians and lyricists took the Tango and made it their own. They even created global hits with Oh Donna Clara, originally Tango Milonga & The Last Sunday, both still performed around the world. Tango’s eastern journey took it to Odessa, Moscow, Kaunas, Riga & way beyond, but it was in Poland that it enjoyed it’s most sustained creative dance – in less than two decades 1000s of ineffably Polish tangos were created. Polish/Jewish/Polish-a möbius strip of identity. But this was never one way traffic as Juliette discovers, tango’s song & dance has moved between South & East since its earliest days.

With the voices of: Olga Avigail, Piotr Flatau, Beth Holmgren, Michael Lavocah, Marcin Masecki, Jan Emil Mlynarski, Dmitry Pruss, Amalia Ran, Noam Sylberberg, Bret Werb, Katarzyna Zimek

Producer: Mark Burman

Listen to a podcast: HERE