A useful guide to tango in Greater Buenos Aires is
maintained by the government. Among many web pages on the
site is one that lets you find milongas for any day and
locale. Clicking on a milonga name brings up a window with
info about it, including a link to the milonga's web page
if it has one.
http://www.tangodata.gov.ar/ingles/home_milongas.php
___
To hear some travelers to Buenos Aires every milonga is
alike. It's easy to understand why. It's natural for
people to seek out and continue going to just those
milongas which suit their tastes best.
But when I went I was looking for as much variety as I
could find, since my personal situation makes travel
difficult and I might not ever be able to go back to BsAs.
I went to noon-time practicas, matinee milongas, and late-
night milongas.
Each practica or milonga was as individual as their
organizers and their regulars and seemed to have its own
special atmosphere. On any weekend night in Greater BsAs
there are more than forty milongas to choose from, so some
organizers may work to make their milongas stand out from
the crowd.
I went to three young-peoples milongas, and each of them
was very different. One was a night club for twenty-
somethings with several hundred people packed together and
the bars doing very good business. Half the time a
Beatles-look-alike band played only Beatles music, the
other half a DJ played traditional tangos but without
cortinas. A second was for late-teens and early twenties
and had a traditional milonga organization. This seemed to
be more social- than dance-oriented.
The third was a milonga for teens, some of whom seemed as
young as thirteen and the oldest barely eighteen. The
dancers there seemed very serious about tango, had lots of
training in both traditional and show tango, and did
advanced figures very compactly and within the flow. I had
the weird feeling that the dancers at this third milonga
were all grownups despite being the youngest of them all.
I also went to the most expensive milonga I could find.
Everyone there seemed to be professionals and dressed
fashionably and well. They also seemed to be the tallest
dancers in the city! I saw a few men with short haircuts
who acted as if they were movers and shakers, possibly
government or military officials or business executives.
Each was with a trophy wife half his age. Or, more likely,
a high-class hooker. Each had that look that I'd seen so
often while a military policeman - I've seen everything
and I am not impressed.
I was presented with a hostess, very beautiful and well-
dressed, who the host said was an expert swing dancer.
(They were playing a swing set.) I told her I was sorry
but I only danced tango. Speaking of swing, one older man
in a beautiful grey suit and short white beard danced it
(and tango) so elegantly and with such enjoyment that I
wondered if he was a teacher or former professional or
milonguero de swing.
I also went to many of what one talky cab-driver called
old peoples' milongas though to me the age distributions
seemed to be all over the place. They were in all sorts of
venues. These included a former gymnasium with basketball
boundary markings on the floor, a thirties-style former
night club, a modern night club, a confiteria, and a large
convention hall. Some of these milongas had several
hundred guests. One crowd I estimated at well over a
thousand.
Several of the milongas had tandas of other kinds of
dancing interspersed among tango tandas. These included
tropical: cumbias, merengues, rumbas, and others but no
salsa. (Salsa and cumbia occupy almost the same dance
space, and salsa is popular enough in Argentina to have its
own salsa-only clubs.) Also swing dancing.
We tend to think of swing as an American dance and say only
Americans can really dance it. But swing has long been
popular in Argentina and some of the best swing dancing
I've ever seen were in Argentine milongas. (I began
dancing rock-n-roll as a teenager and have done other kinds
of swing.) The spirit of any dance refuses to be prisoned
within national boundaries. That's certainly true of the
wild exuberance of swing, which the Nazis suppressed in
Germany in the run-up to WW II.
What were your experiences with Argentine milongas? How
far from the stereotypes did some vary? What practices
seemed common?
Larry de Los Angeles
Need cash? Click to get a cash advance.
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2131/fc/Ioyw6iiekCoYKOgrWupzvODTTrrO6FrZQettUzCTKX1QGrVf1aqNl4/
___
Tango-L mailing list
Tango-L@mit.edu
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
