[Tango-L] Milongas of Buenos Aires

[larrynla@juno.com]

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
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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


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