I mentioned that I’d solved one problem with my following journey – how to get some practice – but a couple of tango festivals uncovered a more fundamental one: when am I actually going to get the chance to follow in milongas?

The role imbalance already makes it impractical at ordinary milongas: I’m not going to add to the problem by simultaneously removing two leaders from the pool available to followers. But role-balanced festivals had, for a time, felt like the solution …

If there’s an even number of leaders and followers, and over 100 dancers in the room, then I’m not going to feel guilty borrowing a leader/dual-role dancer for the occasional tanda here are there over the course of a few days, or doing some intercambio dancing.

But I’ve come to see that these opportunities may be rather rarer than I’d imagined. Even if a festival is theoretically role-balanced, that doesn’t mean it is in reality, despite the best efforts of organisers.

Sheffield was one example, where I led several dual-role dancers who suggested leading me later in the event, but I never felt able to take them up on the offer because there were so many followers looking for leaders each tanda.

Knowing that the Feast is my idea of heaven, there was much surprise when followers learned I wasn’t going to the summer edition this year. That’s partly because the ballroom is always a furnace, and the hotel has been claiming it will fix the air-conditioning since the dawn of time, but mostly because – unlike the other three editions – the gap between role balance theory and practice is vast (which isn’t great for either leaders or followers).

That mystery was solved for me last year when the coffee station ran out of coffee, and I had to make an emergency run to the bar. I walked in to find two table’s worth of leaders drinking rather than dancing– with an accumulation of beer glasses suggestive of having their very own day-long beer festival.

So, despite my enthusiasm for the idea of dual-role dancing, and very much enjoying following when a leader has been sufficiently talented to accommodate my fledgling following skills, I think I may be back to mostly using it in the way I did in my earliest days of tango: to help my lead.

That’s no small thing, of course. I danced with one incredibly skilled follower at Tango Secrets last night, and at the end of the first song she said “You’re very musical.” I told her that mostly I was following her, and it was true. I led the phrases, she led the steps. “But you listen,” she said.

A much more experienced leader later said she was the best follower in the room, but I hadn’t felt out of my depth with her for exactly that reason: I was able to follow as much as lead, so she was able to fully express herself.

I’d love to be able to follow in milongas, and if the growing trend of women learning to lead continues long enough to address the role balance problem, then hopefully that time will come. In the meantime, though, I’m happy with where my following journey has taken me so far.

Image: Milad Fakurian