A Great First Dance

Dec 22 2008

Taxi drivers here are flipping brilliant. Aside from being wonderously cheap they also wait for you to be inside your destination before buggering off. Last night as some youths walked past whilst I was sorting out cash for the driver, he locked the doors...just in case. Then he made me wait until they were sufficiently further up the road before letting me out and waiting for me to be safely inside. They really are a credit to client services.

Today I had my 3rd private lesson with my fantastic teacher, Mariana Falcon. She knew immediately I was tired, and I wasn´t arguing with her. Last night I went for a class and milonga at La Calesita - a lovely outdoor milonga on the other side of town, where everyone dances around a fountain and there´s steak sandwiches and boozes available. The only thing was the floor to dance on was horrible because it was stone, rather then wood or marble which you can slide on. Trying to pivot for an ocho or a turn was so hard. I was probably being slightly workman blaming tools, as everyone else managed it much better then I, but I will say that I can understand the snootyness around different venues when its related to the state of the dancefloor. A friend I´ve met here wants to go with me again next week to La Calesita, and I just don´t think I can face another struggle with the ground.

I got in from it around 4am - standard time it seems - and was up at 11am to wash my clothes and go out to an out of town market. Only I washed my clothes and then it started to chuck it down. By the time it had finished it was too late to really go anywhere, and I didn´t want to walk far as I´m trying to save my feet. So I bumbled into San Telmo and hired a bike for a couple of hours. Had a great cycle along the docks and then into Boca - where all the pictures of the pretty multicoloured wooden slated houses are from. Boca is really though, properly flavela. There are 3 roads with the coloured houses from the pictures, tourist bars with bad displays of showy tango, and shops that sell tat. The rest of it is run down, poor, shabby though still beautiful in that run down way, and devoid of tourists cos you´re not supposed to roam around there. Obviously I blended in to the background on my bright orange hire bike, with extremely unusual short blonde hair. No problemo.

So by the time my lesson started at 8pm I was pooped. And hungry. But we struggled through with me getting it wrong, not understanding what I was supposed to do (at one point she got almost exasperated with me), failing to do fairly basic things, the lot. At the end Mariana told me to go out tonight and enjoy myself and not to think about what I was doing. And that I was a great dancer...because the secret of tango is to feel like a great dancer even if you´re not. And that´s the leader´s job as well, to make you feel like the best dancer on the floor.

So after a FAT steak and chips I persuaded my friend to come with me to La Viruta. Again on the other side of town. We got there at 11.30pm and they were still teaching a class, so we waited it out in a nearby bar with some large g´n´ts. At 1am we went in (when it also conveniently becomes free and all the good people turn up), only to find it was heaving because there was a Rock and Roll show happening, as well as the tango. The show was pretty good, and the crowd RnR dancing was good. Tho I realised that even if its something like a 50´s jive playing, people still don´t dance alone here, they only dance in couples. Finally they started to play tango music. And I got a dance. And it was a great dance.

I was so pleased, cos it really could have gone either way. And I was so fortunate to have been asked by someone who was a good dancer, and that it worked well between the two of us. Because if it had been a bad dancer I would probably have thought the whole time it was my fault.

After that I had some so-so dances and made lots of mistakes. However, the stuff that I did right I think I did better then a week ago, which pleased me much more then any frustration at the stuff I got wrong. And the lovely thing here is the community. Now that I´ve been to quite a few milongas, taken classes at them and had classes at a dance school, I´m getting to know people. And they´re stopping me and saying hello to me. Which is SO nice. And some of the good ones, who know I´m a beginner, are still asking me to dance. Which is very great.

Today I decided that the first thing I´m going to do when I´m back in London is buy a flight to BA for the same time next year. Although I´ll have no English friends here then, its more likely the same argentinian and international tango dancers will be around. And fingers crossed they´ll still remember me and want to dance with me again.