Regular readers will know that I mostly dance outside London these days, but when a new milonga opens, and it’s just 20 minutes away, it seems reasonable to at least give it a chance. Wednesday night, then, saw me at the opening night of the city’s latest addition, Milonga Abrazáme.

It could easily have been a very bad idea. I’ve danced once before at the same venue, and the combination of a very sticky floor and a wall of lights that makes it impossible to cabeceo across the room was enough to deter me from a repeat visit. Both issues were still very much present …

The room also has awkwardly-placed pillars, and although the framegrab above makes it look empty, just half an hour later most of London tango had turned up. When you consider the usual standard of London floorcraft, there might well have been fatalities – and there were indeed a few stupidly-dangerous leaders with zero floorcraft skills and a penchant for blind back-steps.

One of the challenges when you’re stuck next to one of these ‘leaders’ is how to keep an eye on them, so you can see where & when they are moving (and especially the idiotic places they are leading their follower’s heels) – while at the same time trying to keep your body, rather than that of your follower, in the live ammunition zone. That requires some interesting dynamics, as you want to be simultaneously facing them and keeping your back to them.

There was a time when one of these loose cannons was between myself and another leader I know, each of us trying to pull off the same protective gymnastics. After about the third time one of us had to evade him, followed immediately by the other having to do the same on the opposite side, we had an amusing moment of synchronicity when he rolled his eyes just as I shook my head – connected dancing of another kind!

But despite these tribulations, I found myself staying right to the end – for four reasons.

First, while I’ve mentioned the exceptions, the general standard of dance was really good, with close-embrace dancing the norm, and the majority of couples able to dance within their own space. The pista was still hazardous for sure, but the overall quality of dance was the reason nobody actually died, and everyone left the floor with approximately the same number of limbs they’d had when entering it.

Second, the atmosphere was joyful! The hosts, Letitia and Andrés, were super-friendly, and clearly very keen to ensure that everyone felt welcome. Not every milonga organiser knows how to be active BsAs-style hosts, but these two absolutely do, and it really made a huge difference.

Third, it was wonderful to meet up with some London tango friends I hadn’t seen for a long time! While I’ve made a great many friends on the outside-London circuit, the one downside of rarely dancing in my home town is that there are friends from my very early tango days I see only very occasionally, so that was a lovely treat.

Which brings me to the fourth piece of good news. It can sometimes be difficult to assess the development of our own dance skills, and to see the progress made by those we dance with regularly. But when there are lengthy gaps between meetings, it really drives home the differences. There were two follower friends I first met in beginner or improver classes, when we could hardly do anything. To be on a hazardous floor with them, and be able to smoothly and cooperatively adapt to whatever intrusions were made into our space without breaking the flow of the dance, was just a delight!

Mostly I treated the event as a party. A lot of chat, with half a dozen or so tandas with followers I knew could be trusted to dance small and cope with rapid evasive action when required.

This is, I think, my approach now to London tango. Treat it as a social occasion, where any dancing is merely a bonus. With that attitude, I can have a good time no matter the state of the pista – adhesion-wise, or floorcraft-wise.