Most blog posts are a joy to write, because they are either, well, describing a joyous experience, or at least documenting learning points for me, and learning is also a joy.

There are others which are harder to write, and where I hesitate before doing so. This is going to be one of those …

The best of Tuesday tango

Revisiting the past can be one of life’s more dangerous activities; sometimes happy memories of past times are best left as just that. But if we’re very lucky, we can pick up right where we left off.

I recently wrote about my nostalgic return to the milonga where it all began: Tango Space at The Shield. My fondness for the milonga was in large part driven by its place in my personal tango history.

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.

It was a place where I made many friends. Some drifted away, as is the nature of life, but more than a few remain friends to this day.

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.

The space itself was unassuming – though Pablo and his team always to do an amazing job with the lighting, turning a student union cafe by day into much more of a (civilised!) nightclub feel by night. One of the things it had going for it as a dance venue was quite simply the space: the room was large enough to comfortably accommodate a sizeable group of dancers, even if two or three of the leaders are seemingly entirely unfamiliar with the concept of a ronda.

Pablo was intending the return to The Shield to be a permanent one. Sadly, that was not to be: the venue is pulling out of the hire market, so the milonga got to return to its original home for just a few short weeks, and I only made it there twice.

The worst of Tuesday tango

The replacement milonga was Re, in the upstairs room of the Prince of Wales pub in Covent Garden.

At 8pm, the venue was very nice indeed. The room had a warm and intimate feel to it, there were a number of followers I love, and the DJ was again Ornella Simonetto as she continues her stay in the UK. I’d first experienced her wonderful DJing at Parakultural back in March, and she’d lived up to expectations at The Shield the previous week.

A lot can change in two hours, however! By 10pm, the music was still fantastic, but there were now at least as many people as go to The Shield – on a dance floor about one quarter of the size.

Combine the general standard of London floorcraft with one or two leaders who seemed to think the floor was their own personal stage, lunging from one side of the room to the other and back like other dancers didn’t exist for them, and it was a recipe for disaster. I’m honestly surprised there weren’t fatalities. And don’t get me started on the two guys who decided that the perfect place to have an animated discussion was in the outer ronda (for London values of same) of a hugely packed dance floor.

There were three followers I love to dance with who I deliberately didn’t cabeceo after 10pm because I simply wasn’t willing to subject them to the risks of that floor. I decided to find somewhere safer to be, like the North Ridge of K2, or the Central Line at pub kicking-out time.

Suffice it to say that will be my one and only visit to that particular venue.

This stuff is hard!

I was so unsure about writing this blog post, that I ran it past a few friends – including one who was there.

My hesitancy is because I don’t want it to be misinterpreted. All the London tango organisers I know – Pablo very much included – are lovely people who care deeply about tango, and do their very best to deliver a great experience to London dancers. That’s especially tricky when different people want very different things.

In theory, organisers can cater for different wishes by differentiating their milongas. For example, you wouldn’t go to I Love Mondays if you wanted traditional milonguero-style dancing in a beautiful ronda, and you wouldn’t go to Tango Garden if you wanted to show off your latest cool nuevo moves to your mates.

But in practice it’s not always so clear-cut. Not all milongas have such a homogeneous clientele – and organisers don’t get to choose who attends, nor how their attendees behave.

They also don’t have as much control or freedom as we might imagine when it comes to certain factors. For example, Pablo had no say in the availability of the Shield, and there are vanishingly few affordable venues in central London which offer anything like that kind of space.

Additionally, much as we might wish that persistently dangerous dancers, sexual harassers, and the like, would be politely shown the door, the financial precariousness of milongas can lead organisers to worry about losing all of that person’s mates too. In my view, the number of people gained or retained by such measures would outweigh the number lost, but that’s easy for me to say as someone whose income doesn’t depend on my guess being right.

So why write this post?

I’ve always tried to be discreet in the blog when it comes to what might be perceived as criticisms or complaints, for all the reasons listed: organisers do their very best, they have limited options, and anything which pleases some people will displease others. (Oh, plus a friend tells me I’m in danger of turning into a grumpy old man with this sort of stuff, so there’s that too …)

But I write anyway for three reasons.

First, in this case, I’m not the only person to have decided that the opening night would be my first and last visit to that venue. At least two others reached the same conclusion, and that’s just the ones who happened to tell me about it. If a significant number of people vote with their feet, but none of us explain why, then that makes it even harder for organisers, as they don’t even know what problems need to be solved. I remember a restaurant owner saying that the worst thing an unhappy diner could do was the classic British thing of saying everything was fine, and then never going there again.

Second, the more dancing I do outside London, the more dancers I have from those places asking me for London milonga recommendations when they visit the city. I’ve come to realise that this puts me in a tricky situation: in giving them my honest advice in private, it highlights that my discretion in public may be doing others a disservice.

Third, because while this particular Tale of Two Tuesdays may be specific to one particular change of venue, there are bigger, systemic issues in London tango. I’ve had a part-written post in my drafts folder for months now, called The Trouble with London Tango. It was initially prompted by a native Argentine dancer I know who visited London for the first time, and was truly horrified at what he saw. The peacocking, the lack of respect for the ronda, the lack of respect for the music, the lack of embrace, the lack of understanding that tango is a social dance …

I felt that was too scary a blog post to publish! But I guess in a way this is that post. Because this is not really about that one milonga and that one venue and that one pair of Tuesdays; it’s more broadly about the trouble with London tango. For those who wonder why I dance more outside London than inside it these days, this is why.