You know you’re having an odd tango weekend when 90% of the experience is like being in BsAs – and 10% of it is like being in London.

Perhaps we should get the London-like bit out of the way first: the post-10pm floorcraft in the evening milongas …

The London part

Any floorcraft crime you could name was committed in the late evenings/early mornings.

Barging onto the floor without so much as a glance at the couples already dancing? Check. Zig-zagging randomly between what would have been inner and outer rondas, had either existed? Yep. High voleos on a crowded floor? You bet. Leaders taking multiple blind back-steps against what would have been the line of dance, had there been one?* Oh yes.

*In one tanda, we progressed – in the course of 12 minutes – from one table to the next.

I hear that the A&E department of Cheltenham General Hospital declared a major incident.

What made it all the more astonishing was that the CITF organisers had even printed diagrams!

The BsAs experience

The floorcraft in the afternoons

The afternoon milongas, in contrast, were havens of civility. I had couples use leader cabeceo to enter the floor ahead of me even when the floor was almost empty and I could barely see the tops of their heads over the horizon. When another leader and I slightly brushed elbows, we both pivoted our couples as one so that we could each offer a waved apology and a smile to the other.

Admittedly the BsAs-standard ronda seen in the main photo was of one particular moment, and I wouldn’t claim the floor was quite that geometrically perfect the whole time, but it was truly a delight to dance in that ronda.

On multiple occasions, we ended the tanda almost exactly where we began it (and not for the reason the same would have been true post-10pm!).

The venue

I’ve danced in a few very grand venues over the years, from Salon Canning to the Argentine Ambassador’s Residence, and this was well up among them!

The hall is not just beautiful, but huge! There’s always something special about dancing with so many people (well, when you do so before 10pm, in this case).

The floor was lovely too. The humidity of more than 300 dancers did leave it a bit sticky at times, but the organisers provided beeswax as an alternative to talc, and followers who used it told me it was great! Top tip: a very little goes a long way.

The sound system was excellent (apart from that one song when eardrum-bursting volumes of drumbeat from the alternative room managed to drown out the sound close to the stage – I’m guessing the volume control in that room got jammed at 11).

The fabulous orchestra

I love, love, love dancing to live orchestras, and Cadenero Tango were absolutely incredible!

I was too busy dancing to them to shoot any video, but here’s a sample from another event:

They played their own arrangements of everything from D’Arienzo to Pugliese, with equally phenomenal results!

I even danced their milonga songs! That’s how good they were.

Oh, and they played tandas! Not of the same orchestra, but four songs with an identifiable gap between them, to avoid that awkward ‘when do we change partners’ question. Please, all other live bands, do the same!

The DJs

We didn’t make it for the Friday afternoon, (logistics), and didn’t stay for the Sunday evening (danced out!), so I didn’t get to experience the two DJs who would have been new to me: Rob Jessop and Jimi Chimchurri. Nor can I comment on the alternative music DJs, as I spent every second of dancing in the main hall.

But the other DJs were all well-known to me, and all delivered truly amazing sets! Diego Doigneau, Hubert Voignier, Ewa Zbrzeska and David Thomas – thank you!

The beautiful followers (and leader)

Of course, you could have the most stunning venue, the most incredible music, and the most courteous of leaders – but none of it would mean anything without beautiful dancers.

Fortunately, the level of dance was also BsAs-like: all about the partner and the music.

There were (even for me!) plenty of familiar faces, from the Feast, from Tango by the Sea, from Cambridge, and yes, from BsAs. But I also had some truly gorgeous dances with followers I didn’t know.

One thing that struck me about the amazing dances I enjoyed is that followers can have completely different ideas about their role in the dance, and yet be equally wonderful to dance with.

First, there are those who want absolute division in the roles. They want the leader to make every decision, and see their role as following every step to the millimetre, every pivot to the tenth of a degree, every aspect of the timing to the microsecond. Even if I offer a clear invitation to initiate something, they simply wait. They are 100% musical; they are simply dancing my interpretation of the music. 

I imagine this is what it must feel like for a violinist to play a Stradivarius, or a pianist to play a Steinway concert grand. It’s an utterly sublime experience.

Second, there are those who – to their chosen degree – see the interpretation of the music as a joint enterprise. At one end of the scale, it might simply be decorating when I extend an invitation. At the other, we are constantly handing the lead back-and-forth throughout the dance. She follows me for this phrase, I follow her for that one. I propose one thing, she suggests a variation on it.

I adore these musical conversations. Indeed, in the very best of these tandas, there are times when we are simply moving and I have no idea which of us initiated it.

As regular readers will know, I’m not a fan of watching performances. Imagine the tanguero equivalent of the farmer shouting ‘Gerroff moi laaaand’ and that’s me: gerroff my floor!

So as soon as one was announced, I headed out of the room to get some tea and find some fellow performance refuseniks to chat with. One conversation was with a dual-role dancer I hadn’t met before, about the joys of collaborative dance.

She later cabeceod me, and fortunately the tanda completely lived up to our earlier conversation! I didn’t want to risk spoiling a good thing with my attempted following, but I did chance it with another dual-role dancer who is fully aware of my baby follower status. I won’t say it was pretty, but it worked, and was fun!

The role balance actually worked!

Throughout the entire time I was there, I don’t think I sat out more than one tanda in four. I did mostly hide during the milonga tandas, and chatted during the less interesting tango ones, but did a ridiculous amount of dancing

Even better, Tina said that she too got to dance as much as she wanted, and other followers told me the same thing. While there are many festivals which try to keep things role-balanced, they don’t always succeed. But somehow Cheltenham did – and that makes for a better experience for everyone.

One element of this may have been that the organisers emphasised that, while they welcomed registrations as dual-role dancers, they did then expect that those people would split their time roughly equally between the two roles.

Already planning 2024

I generally prefer to travel by train, but we’d chosen to drive on this occasion in order to have timing flexibility on the Sunday.

As things worked out, I was completely danced-out by the end of the afternoon milonga at 7pm, and doubted that my feet could carry me much further than the car, two streets away. Tina had also run out of feet.

There seem to be two different attitudes to afternoon milongas at festivals: some consider them merely a warm-up to the main event in the evening, while other prefer them. I’ve always been in the former category, but I’m definitely thinking of prioritising the afternoon milongas next year – even though the organisers do have plans to address the evening floorcraft (I’m assuming this involves electric fences between the rondas, and a substantial tango police force issued with cattle-prods).

So yes, this was my first CITF, but it certainly won’t be my last!