[Tango-L] milongas

[Crrtango@aol.com]

First, 
my apologies to Gulden. Since I am not on the list regularly, I failed to 
take note of her gender. 

But as to the other arguments, no, I was not talking about monthly milongas, 
but our regular weekly ones, and numbers are from the local attendees, not the 
out-of-town visitors. Since I have personally danced tango, taught here and 
ran milongas myself here for more than ten years, at least, I think I am 
familiar with the scene. I was just clarifying that your numbers are not typical of 
New York numbers, but maybe of other large cities. But having said that, we 
have small club milongas and we have large dance-school milongas and we have 
large dance-hall milongas but the attendance numbers are typical. There were a 
few milongas with more than 100 people attending long before the All-Night 
Milonga. Danel's and Maria's weekly milonga at Pierre Dulaine Studios often had 
80-100 people and that stopped two or three years ago. Attendance numbers are 
subject to the size of the space of course, but we have good turnouts because we 
have a large number of dancers.   We also go later into the night than most 
places. It was not unusual to see dancers ending the night to Pugliese at Danel 
and Maria's at 3:00 AM.
Again, New York is not typical, but my point was that it was not unusual to 
reach those numbers if the conditions are right. You also have to be patient 
and let it grow.   But be careful about having too many competing dances if you 
don't have enough dancers to sustain them.   We have a lot of tango 
aficionados here, lots of practicas, lots of milongas, and as many native Argentine 
dancers and teachers alone, as there are total dancers in some other smaller 
communities.   My numbers are not from isolated exceptions. Come for a couple of 
weeks and see for yourself. That's why we like it here.
We have also had many milongas come and go often for the reasons I outlined - 
bad music, bad venue, expensive food or drink prices, weird neighborhood to 
get to, maybe the place went out of business, etc.

But my larger point was about setting up a good venue and having good music 
and paying attention to other issues and not just the economics. Scale down if 
you don't have the numbers but provide a good dance.

cheers,
Charles


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