I’d first danced in Cheltenham in 2023, and immediately added it to my annual roster. Sadly I was out of action for the 2024 one, but signed up for this year the moment bookings went live.

Two days earlier, it had really looked like terrible timing. I’d had to say farewell to a much-loved furry friend of sixteen years (or 85 years, for her), and couldn’t imagine feeling like dancing a couple of days later. But that’s the thing about tango …

First, there’s the friendliness of the community. I had so many condolence hugs from people. As with my return to tango after my surgical adventures, you really couldn’t ask for a warmer and more caring bunch of friends.

Second, tango gives you the freedom to dance whatever you are feeling. You could be joyful or sad, celebratory or grieving, high energy or low – tango just shrugs, opens her arms, and accepts you as you are.

Third, what better healing power could there be than spending a weekend inside embraces?

And surrounding all this is the all-absorbing nature of the dance. When dancing, tango demands every ounce of our physical, mental and emotional attention, leaving no space for the outside world. And even between the dances, a milonga is an entire universe.

Not that there was much time between dances! I’d arrived almost for the start of the Friday afternoon milonga, and DJ Rob Jessop was pretty much playing Tango’s Greatest Hits volumes 1 to 4. There were so many times I returned to my table to sit out a tanda to rest my feet when the music pulled me back out of my chair to hit the floor again.

Speaking of hitting the floor …

The venue was supposed to cap all the cable ports, but there was one point in the outer ronda where, instead of using a solid one, they’d used one of the versions with a cable gap. A few of us pulled the tables forward to remove it from the ronda, and Adrian later arranged for it to be swapped out to retrieve the lost strip of dance floor – we were to later need every square millimetre of it!

That aside, the floor here really is perfect – and the hall has to be one of the most beautiful dancing venues in the UK.

It felt like the last tanda was called just an hour or two after it began, though my feet disagreed. Fortunately my AirBNB was literally five minutes’ walk away. I briefly toyed with the idea of a nap, especially given I’d slept poorly the previous couple of nights, but knew that would be a very bad idea.

Cheltenham-on-Sun

Ok, the Summer Feast still holds the record as the only festival held on the surface of the sun, but Cheltenham takes second place by being held on Venus. The temperature on the Friday and Sunday was around 500C.

Saturday was better, in part because the evening was not too packed. I think there may have been a self-denying prophecy in effect: lots of people thought it would be too hot and crowded, so stayed away, thus ensuring that it wasn’t too hot and crowded.

My usual approach is two shirts per milonga, plus a floating spare. That proved utterly inadequate here. I’m told one leader brought six shirts to the Sunday evening one!

Floorcraft

What, you expected a blog post without me mentioning it? While I’m of course well-known for being the very personification of boundless joy, I do have to have some outlet for my inner grumpy old man, and floorcraft is my chosen specialist subject. So let’s get this out of the way …

According to my calculations, 97% of the dancers on the floor had excellent floorcraft. The outer ronda was mostly a haven of civility. Leader cabeceo was the norm, couples were dancing within their own space and progressing in the ronda when a gap opened ahead of them. If there was even a hint of shoulders brushing together all four dancers would apologise to each other, the DJ, the organisers and the bemused town hall staff. It was a delight.

I can’t comment on the inner ronda for the simple reason that there wasn’t one. There were 40+ couples moving in at least 50 different directions at any given moment. But with a couple of exceptions I’ll get to in a moment, I know better than to venture into the badlands so that doesn’t concern me.

As for the other 3%, the organisers carefully placed diagrams on every single table:

But apparently arrows are too advanced a concept for the small but highly annoying minority. Perhaps next time we could try replacing the diagrams with a set of instructions?

• Use leader cabeceo to enter the floor, rather than walking blindly backwards onto it.
• See the space other couples are using to dance in? Try doing the same, rather than using up five times the space with your multiple back-steps and open-embrace giros the size of Gloucestershire.
• When you’re dancing in the outer ronda and see a gap the length of the M1 ahead of you, that’s a subtle clue that you are supposed to move into it. It takes exactly one leader like you to bring the entire ronda to a frustrated halt.
• You’ve chosen instead to dance in the inner ronda? Excellent, I commend your choice. But don’t then swing your follower out into the outer ronda, walk backwards into it yourself, or stagger randomly between the two like someone who’s taken full advantage of the Wetherspoons ‘£10 for all the beer you can drink by 10am’ special.
• Finally, non-stop talking while dancing. No. Your follower probably wishes you’d shut up, and all the couples around you most certainly do.

And breathe.

The badlands

Oh, the two exceptions to my avoidance of the inner ronda area. One was deliberate, the other very definitely was not …

The deliberate occasion was when it was completely empty, so my follower and I claimed it for an entire tanda of walking. There really is nothing better in tango than great music, a follower who shares my love-affair with walking, and has the skill to allow any size of step at any speed. I was in heaven.

The accidental occasion was when I was joining the floor at exactly the wrong place: the start of the short side where everyone joins the floor. It can take many weeks to advance the length of one table there, but since my partner and I were pretty much first onto the floor, I had the bright idea of us striding across it to a point halfway down the far long side. We almost made it. But by the time we got there, there was a solid wall of dancers in the outer ronda and we were trapped in the inner one. I was in hell. I tried not to have any more bright ideas after that.

Winning the DJ lottery

I know nobody will believe me, but I do take occasional gaps in my dancing during festivals. I plan a provisional schedule based mostly around the DJs. With my favourites, I don’t want to miss a minute, while I might tentatively schedule some rest time during the sets by DJs further down my rankings database.

Nothing as radical as missing an entire milonga, you understand – just aiming to arrive a little later to allow time to catch up on sleep. This plan does, however, get completely thrown off when there are DJs new to me, and this was the case for most of them this time. Only Deya Sanchez and (of course!) Diego Doigneau were familiar to me. So with the unknown-to-me ones, I just had to turn up at the start to see.

I’ve already described how Rob Jessop denied me much rest on the Friday afternoon, and the same was even more true of Jens-Ingo Brodesser that evening. Most of you will know my love of lyrical and dramatic music, with rhythmic tandas taking second place in my affections (though I have become something of a Biagi addict over the past six months or so), and Jens-Ingo delivered on that big-time. But he also kept the energy building throughout the night, and the flow of the evening was just incredible.

I’d first enjoyed Deya Sanchez’ DJing at Tango by the Sea a couple of years ago, and her set here was utterly sublime. She’s established herself as a firm favourite for a huge number of dancers, and with very good reason. Her set wasn’t just magical, it seemed almost telepathic – seemingly knowing exactly what I’d like to dance next, time after time.

Max Stasi was new to me, and although I thought Deya had given him an impossible act to follow, how little I knew! I felt like I was carried on waves of energy, rising and falling, giving energetic dancing interspersed by calm, somehow too always seeming to be in perfect sync with my needs at the time. Amusingly, I was dancing with a follower who asked the name of the DJ, and she was quite taken aback when I told her; she was German.

I must have danced the vast, vast majority of the tango and vals tandas on the Saturday, and the pair of them are under investigation for attempted murder through exhaustion – and actual murder of my feet.

Diego Doigneau has long been one of my favourite DJs, and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve danced to his amazing musical choices over the years. I didn’t want to miss a second, so was at my table with my shoes on a good 15 minutes before the start of the Sunday afternoon milonga. He once again lived up to his reputation, and I danced right through to the last tanda.

It was back to new-to-me DJ time on the Sunday night. There was not a chance I would have missed a minute of the final milonga in any case since the weekend seemed to have zipped by faster than GWR will deny your Delay Repay claim for a cancelled train. (To be fair, they did on this occasion manage to get me both there and back, on time, on trains that weren’t cancelled, with the promised number of carriages, and reserved seats that were actually reserved!) But we’ll get to Osvaldo and Graciela at the end …

Less of a lottery with followers

With tango friends who haven’t yet ventured outside the capital, I always tell them the London and rest-of-UK scenes have one thing in common: they’re a small world. After the first year you can walk into any festival or special milonga event anywhere in the UK and you’ll already know half the people in the room.

Reading, Paignton, Cambridge, Sheffield, Cheltenham, or any number of small villages you’ve never heard of and couldn’t have located on a map were there cash prizes on offer, it’s all the same.

That means you arrive anywhere with your dance card already packed, and despite dancing until the final tanda in the opening afternoon milonga, had still barely put a dent in mine. There were so many absolutely incredible followers there, it was very much kid in a sweet-shop time.

But there’s also the joy of discovering new followers, and there were quite a few of those too. I know I’m far from alone in having certain followers mentally assigned to specific orchestras since they dance them so perfectly, and the most exclusive club comprises my Pugliese partners. I got to issue another membership card this time – I just have to hope I somehow recognize her whenever I next see her.

(Actually, if you’ll permit me one more floorcraft grump: how can people not walk during those sections of a Pugliese tanda when the man has all but risen out of his grave to stand at the side of the pista yelling “WALK!”?)

Long-distance cabeceos

I experimented with a couple of different tables before deciding that the centre of the room on the short side opposite the stage was the ideal position. This was close to the entrance, letting followers see where I was sitting; was the most crowded seating section; but also turned out to be a highly effective position for cabeceo across and along the room. (I managed to resist the additional temptation of swapping the positions of the many pairs of glasses left there.)

I duly ensured I was waiting at the door before the start at the Sunday afternoon milonga to secure my seat, and did the same again in the evening.

I always feel a particular sense of satisfaction at long-distance cabeceos, and I think I may have notched up a festival record for the number of these. I found that fan signals were particularly effective in sealing the deal: when a follower did a ‘Me?’ check by waving her fan, I’d wave my fan in confirmation. Semaphor signals are alive and well in the 21st century.

A wafer-thin following experience

The only downside here is that although the event is very strict in accepting role-balanced registrations, somehow that never appears to work out in practice. It seems that most leaders want to dance less than most followers, so I did hear from a number of followers that they hadn’t been able to dance as much as they wanted to. (One tip here.)

That being the case, it didn’t seem very fair to further upset the balance, so I limited my following to a single milonga tanda.

I always warn leaders that I’m only really capable of following steps and rebounds in real-time (pivots require written notice), but I’d found it harder to recognise the lead for the outside rock step. Sue turned the dial up to 15 on this, and I finally succeeded in following it. I had a great time!

But with my uncharacteristically patient approach to following, I didn’t feel too deprived.

The unofficial afterparty

A lot of people leave after the Sunday afternoon milonga so they can travel home the same day, so the final one has a more intimate feel to it. That was even more true this time as Osvaldo and Graciela made it feel more like an afterparty.

With the Sunday night survivors clinging rather precariously to life, they kindly took pity on us with three-song tandas and very lengthy cortinas. Given that I seem to wake at the same time no matter how late I go to bed, this was appreciated.

It was a very, very special experience.

When not singing, he kept the party feeling coming, clapping and cheering us on during the more energetic tandas (which was most of them).

There was also a chacarera tanda. When I invited a follower friend onto the floor for it, she said she didn’t know the dance, but I assured her that only put her about 4% behind the rest of us.

When I know it’s coming, I do give myself a quick refresher on the structure from my tango notes, but this time it was unexpected, so I was leaning even more heavily on my ‘make vaguely convincing impersonations of the arm position while furtively glancing at my neighbours left and right to follow their lead’ tactic. No-one cares, and everyone has fun.

There was one downside to the emptier room: the echo. All the speakers are at the stage end of the room, which isn’t an issue when the room is full as the dancers absorb a lot of it. But with a half-empty room, the sound travels the full length of the hall to the far wall and then echoes back into it, causing a really unpleasant effect, almost like the speakers are out of phase. Next time I think we should all bring the mattresses from our rooms to line the wall.

The evening whizzed by at an alarming rate, before it was time to say my goodbyes.

The continued healing power of tango

I’ve talked before about the physical healing power of tango, but it also has an amazing ability to soothe the soul. My advice to anyone debating whether or not to dance when you don’t much feel like it for life-related reasons is: go.

Thanks as always to the organisers, helpers, DJs, and of course the followers who made it such a wonderful weekend. Is registration for next year open yet?