London Hits Hard

I had the horror of being back in the UK, going to a milonga... and not being asked to dance much at all!

Which was good for any I've-Been-To-Buenos-Aires inflated ego I might have been sporting...but bad for general self-esteem...chances to practice...and chances to enjoy a good dance. I pretty quickly realised it was because here I'm not anything out of the ordinary here... no blokes want to show off with the young(ish) blonde foreign girl, because I'm not foreign, not that young in comparison to the age here, and there are lots of other actually good female blonde dancers out there on the floor.

I'm wondering though, if I seemed to make friends/compassionate dance partners, more easily in the milongas in BA. Again, that might have been because I was something different, and because as someone pointed out to me today, when you're on holiday/travelling, you seem to form those connections which would normally take weeks & months in a matter of hours. Of course it could also be that I'm generally an overly chatty bird who'll talk to anyone I've met once as if I've known them all my life. So if I met someone in a class, I'd always say hello to them when I saw them at a milonga later in the week. However that was also the attitude I was met with...people being really friendly and coming up to me and saying hello. Again, maybe it was the foreign bird thing, but some of them were female (and not lesbians as I quite often get), and maybe just because they were friendly...its a fine balance between cynicism and reality.

But I'm also wondering if there's a different attitude in Buenos Aires which made people more compassionate about dancing with beginners. It was the kind of thing I'd hear in a common exchange I'd have when I was asked to dance:

Leader: Would you like to dance?
M: Yes, but I'm a beginner/principiante...
L: We're all principiante.
M: Oh, how long have you danced?
L: 5/10/20/all my life/ years [delete as applicable but it was always a long time] but we all need to practice. We're all principiante.

I wonder how many people in London go back to the beginner's classes here to practice walking and standing? I think that people in BA really do that though. I certainly met enough people who were long time dancers but were in the same classes as me, all learning the same beginners techniques. Which if I'd heard the same technique points 20 times in just in 3 weeks, they must have heard them 100's of times over X years.

I also wonder how cliquey it is here in London (something I guess I'll be finding out soon enough). And then there's the other thing...that the guys in London are just not very good at the eye contact, or the walking around in order to get a dance. We are British after all.

And to cap it all, I really struggled. My goodness the dancing is different here then in BA...

What I initially noticed was people's postures. Both my private teachers and my group class teachers all banged on and on about a tight core, relaxed shoulders, open chests, and knew immediately when I'd relaxed my stomach. So I'm really working hard to try to maintain that as I'm dancing (this conscious whilst relaxed thing is not easy at all). But there were so many bad postures on the floor...admittedly that might have been early on when the less experienced dancers were there, but I've a feeling that even the bad dancers in BA have better postures then some of the technically advanced dancers I saw on Friday. However...as I was mentioning this to a friend I went with, he did point out to me that a) I should not become a Tango Snob (see second sentence of this post) and b) Tango is about enjoyment and at least people were enjoying themselves. So I do thank him for that kick in the arse I so richly deserved.

With my Tango Snob slightly in check, on to the second thing I noticed here that made me struggle. There's so much more showing off on the dance floor. In BA its a very simple style of dancing until the end when the really good dancers come, there's more room and the tango nuevo milonga down the road has closed for the night. The focus is more on the connection and the flow and the pleasure from that, then showing off and doing fancy moves.

Now I admit, I'm making all kinds of assumptions here about why people in London dance the way they do. Its not like I've been dancing here for long enough to really judge, and it will be interesting coming back to this in a few months time and potentially ridiculing myself for making outrageous assumptions and crass judgements... for example one simple reason could just be that there is more room on the floor here so people can make bigger moves. However, i do wonder if people do things in a milonga here, that in BA would be reserved for a practica. That people there work on something in a class and in practica until they were good at that particular move and then they start doing it on the dance floor in the milonga.

My final moan from that evening was finding out that the men here really don't use the first dance to work out what level you're at as a dance they just throw you straight in at the deep end and see if you can do it...which as an beginner/improver leads to lots of embarrassment on my side and boring explaination during the dancing of what they wanted, from their side. And if in that first dance you're so busy trying to think and understand what this whizz bang move is your partner is trying to get you to do, you don't actually get that key 3 minutes of music to feel each other properly...to become one movement together...to allow that connection to happen...and to learn to adapt to each other's style of dance.

Ok...so lots of things I didn't like. However I did enjoy the class before, and did have a couple of nice dances. And I have decided to stick to the resolution I'd made at the end of my holiday...once I'm tired and thinking of leaving, if I've had a nice dance, that's it. No more dances after that. Better to end on a good dance and go home a bit tired, then to end on a terrible dance because I'm too exhausted for my feet to connect to my brain and some poor person has to drag around a dancer with legs made of lead. I managed to stick to my resolution on Friday and although a very nice man asked me to dance I didn't want to risk a lovely end to a mostly tricky night.

All this seems to have just made me keener then ever to learn to lead. Its all very well me moaning about how the leaders lead, but I'm not having to be the one making the decisions about doing it all, having the responsibility of giving the follower a good dance, being the one in charge of keeping time to the music (there are decisions the followers can make about moves, timing, etc, but they're not that many tbh), etc. So I'm toying with idea of going back to 33 Portland Place this sunday and joining the beginners class to learn to lead... I think I'll be terrible at it, but I'm quite up for giving it a go...