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 [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
