Technically where my tango began was in my living-room, since my introduction to the dance was with Mariano in privates at home – followed by some group classes at Tango Garden. It was also at Tango Garden where I technically first danced in a milonga, after all of five lessons!

But it was at Tango Space where I found my first tango home, made a great many tango friends, discovered several amazing teachers, and where I first danced in a milonga with fellow beginners …

The innocence of (tango) youth

I had all of six weeks’ tango experience when I began dancing in the Shield milonga, and I’m forever grateful that I took this courageous/foolhardy step. I know leaders who waited six months, even a year, before first dancing in a milonga – and the longer you leave it, the more intimidating it becomes. I instead stepped innocently onto the dance floor, too new to know how much I didn’t know.

That approach meant that I discovered one problem at a time, and could accordingly seek one solution at a time. For example, when I discovered that walking is often not a realistic option in a milonga, and that my beginner-style pivots needed too much space, I threw that problem at my tango engineer, Diego, and he taught me how to walk in a tight circle, and reshape ochos so that they are around me rather than out to the side.

Each time I hit a new problem in a milonga, I could address that in my next lesson. In contrast, someone who waits a long time before entering a milonga faces 99 problems all at once.

Happy memories

One of the reasons I’d been happy to jump in with both feet was that the Tuesday lessons and milonga were in the same place, so one kind of morphed into the other. That made it a very unintimidating place because half the people there – at least at the start – were fellow students from the class.

The fellow students who became friends had one thing in common: they too were willing to take a chance, and venture out onto the dance floor – and they joined me in laughing at our varied and numerous mistakes.

So for me it was a joyous time, and it wasn’t until quite a long time later that I realised just how far from the norm this was: to have one’s first milonga be a relaxed and playful place. It was one of the genius elements of the Tango Space pre-pandemic setup.

Tango Space ran various other milongas at various other venues, but none of them felt the same. Browns, for example, felt super-intimidating as a beginner. So the Shield will always have a special place in my heart.

Revisiting a lifetime or two later

Tango Space recently restarted the Tuesday milonga at the Shield, and it was a few weeks before I got the chance to visit.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. A very long time had passed since those early days; my last visit had been in March 2020, just days before lockdown. People have moved on. Other Tango Space milongas, like El Boliche, don’t have the same atmosphere. It seemed too much to hope that the flame of those ancient civilisations of 2019 and 2020 might still be burning today.

Yet it very much was!

A strange kind of nostalgia

One definition of nostalgia is ‘a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to some past period.’

It would be odd indeed to wish for a return to the days of so much struggle and frustration, even amid the many laughs!

But another definition is simply a feeling of fondness for a time filled with happy memories, and that one fits.

It also, of course, emphasised how much has changed since then. Not every change has been for the better – though the murky and seemingly universal world of broken tango friendships and awkward alliances is perhaps better suited to a wine-fuelled evening chat than a blog post!

But overwhelmingly, the changes have been hugely for the better – both personally, and for my tango world.

Even during my most obsessive early times, I simply couldn’t have imagined how much joy and fulfilment tango would bring me. I’d find it hard to believe how completely immersed I feel in such a wide variety of music. And if you’d told me in my first year that BsAs would come to feel like my second home – or maybe even my first – I’d have laughed aloud.

So it was a deliciously nostalgic feeling, but also one of huge appreciation for all the advances made since then.

A dozen different embraces

There’s no question that my favourite embrace is now the Argentine one, but at the same time, you have to have a flexible attitude when dancing in London.

Well, I mean, technically you don’t: you can decide it’s full-on close embrace or nothing. But since I subscribe to the idea that the leader proposes the embrace, but the follower chooses it, that would massively limit your choices of partner in London.

I decided to partly view the evening as an interesting experiment in the effects of different embraces. Fortunately that didn’t include anyone with a preference for a fully-open embrace – which I can’t relate to at all – but it did prove fascinating to understand the different preferences of different followers.

For example, there was one follower who likes a fully-closed embrace in the walk, but a very open one in the pivot. That’s actually an incredibly easy way to lead, since you have the connectedness needed for a beautiful walk, but the space that allows you to easily lead anything at all in the pivots.

Another had what felt almost like a contradictory preference. She wanted more space in the walk, but a closer one in pivots. Her frame was good enough that we could walk well, while she relaxed more into ochos and giros.

Yet another follower danced with quite a rigid, semi-open embrace for the first part of the first song, then the first time I led a pause and opened and closed my arm, she sank fully into a close embrace and remained there.

With a friend who really enjoys the walk, and now has a much more compact approach to pivoting, I feel like we now have so many more possibilities in terms of how much we turn.

I won’t bore you with all the variations, but by treating it as as an opportunity to experience the feel and effect of different embraces, it meant I was never left wishing for an Argentine embrace, but could enjoy each embrace for its unique qualities.

A joyful evening

I couldn’t have asked for a better return.

The DJ for the evening was one I personally find unpredictable! Sometimes I love her music, sometimes … not so much. But tonight’s music was absolutely wonderful.

We were also treated to a live singer and guitar player, in the form of Juan Presedo and Oscar Acebras. They only sang four songs, I think, but it was beautiful, and I was fortunate enough to dance it with an equally beautiful dancer – though we did both run for the hills when they announced that the last song would be a milonga, and boy am I glad I did! It was nice to listen to, but I would not have wanted to (attempt to) dance milonga to it …

Here they are performing at The Light a few years ago:

It was so wonderful to dance with friends from those early days; I felt very grown-up, remembering how we were back then! Enjoying how my dance has evolved, how theirs has, and how ours has.

There were also a couple of people whose faces I didn’t recognise but who recognised me. One follower told me that she remembered me from The Old Days, and I was surprised I didn’t recognise her dance, as it was quite distinctive – but she went on to say she’d watched me dance, so I don’t think we’d danced before.

In one case, I didn’t recognise the face, but did recognise the embrace and the dance; I still have no idea where we’ve danced before, but it was a wonderful tanda.

There was a visitor I first danced with at the Sheffield Tango Festival, and who I did succeed in recognising! We’d had beautiful dances there, and this evening lived up to expectations.

I also danced with a number of followers I didn’t know. Including one who was hanging out after the beginner’s class just to watch, with no intention of dancing, but she responded to my cabeceo and we both enjoyed ourselves. That was like the perfect blend of old and new times!

Also present was a leader I knew only from a tango forum. Always great to put a face to a name, and he turned out to be very much as I’d imagined him. We had an interesting chat about the music afterwards.

I think I easily danced the majority of the tandas across the evening. Fittingly, the last tanda was with a friend from the good(ish!) old days – and it was a lovely way to end a wonderful evening.

One lesson I like to think I’ve learned is that every milonga is different. Just because you have an amazing evening one week doesn’t mean that it will be the same the following week. Which is, in any case, in a different venue while the Shield apparently does some ceiling work.

But of all the times to return to my beginnings, I certainly picked a good one!