The Feast always feels like my tango home. It’s never been anything less than delicious, but this one was just … perfect.

Everyone in tango knows how fickle it can be. Sometimes the stars align and everything works wonderfully. Other times we can have a less happy experience for no obvious reason. This was one of those occasions when the tango gods were in the best and most generous of moods …

That was greatly appreciated because it’s been a bit of a relentless couple of weeks, with continued property stress and uncertainty part of the picture. Every time someone asked about my move, I had to tell them not to. (There was some more promising news on Monday, but after the previous debacle, I’ll believe it when I’m standing in my new home with the keys in one hand and the deeds in the other.)

The weekend kicked off with a couple of surprises, starting with the train journey. My outward train wasn’t cancelled, had the correct number of carriages, passengers were allowed to board, the seat reservations worked, the on-board catering was present, and we both departed and arrived on time!

(Normal GWR service was restored on the return journey: first they misplaced the entire train, listing it as cancelled; then they found five of the nine carriages and changed it to delayed; all seat reservations were cancelled; and one of the lost carriages was the one with the catering facilities. The staff were, however, absolute stars.)

I did have to wonder whether I’d got on the wrong train on the way there as the skies ahead were an uncharacteristic colour. When we did actually arrive in Paignton I had to give the cab driver an actual destination in place of the usual “Over there, where the rain is heaviest.”

I always describe myself as a sociable introvert. I like people, but socialising is an expenditure of energy – and when it comes to the short gaps between milongas, I really need a bit of solitude to recharge. For that reason, I always book a caravan to myself. On Thursday evening, however, there was a knock at the door from someone hoping to join me for dinner.

He hopped down when I opened the door and apologised for not bringing a bottle of wine.

Enterprising as this was, I had the feeling that if I rewarded this visit, he’d be back at some ungodly hour demanding breakfast. He apparently tried a friend’s caravan instead the following morning.

No one is more surprised than me by the length of my tango festival blog posts. At the time, events all feel like a blur, and when you add the usual sleep deprivation into the mix I’m frankly amazed that I can remember any of it. Plus, when it’s the Feast, what can I say that I haven’t said before?

I always start out feeling like a few sentences will cover it. A non-stop torrent of absolutely wonderful music by the DJ team. Followers so connected, sensitive and musical that dancing with them is just effortlessly joyful. The beautiful decoration of the hall, with lighting that is atmospheric yet easily permits cabeceo across the width of the floor. A level of friendliness and sociability that feels more like a group of friends meeting in an unusually large living room.

As it turned out, we were in fact at a birthday party – Fernando’s 50th.

There were cakes.

Though not for very long, as you might imagine.

That sense of being a group of friends was also evident when someone was taken ill on the dance floor. Everyone really rallied round to assist, which was heartwarming to see. Fortunately, he was given the all-clear by the paramedics.

The ronda

Floorcraft at the Feast is generally extremely good, but this year was almost Argentine! There was just one leader I didn’t want to be anywhere near. (I must confess that when he did one of his unpredictable lurches from inner to outer ronda and ended up in front of me doing his multiple back-steps, I feigned a shoelace issue so we could step off the floor for a moment until the couple behind us came past. Many apologies if you were the sacrificial couple concerned …)

But it was otherwise an absolutely beautiful experience. Literally everyone used leader cabeceo to enter the floor, and if there was even a hint of brushed shoulders then all involved would immediately begin drafting individual formal letters of apology to be delivered on engraved card by messenger at the end of the song.

Even the inner ronda was a delight! On my usual pista maps, the area inside the outer ronda is simply marked Here Be Dragons, but this time I actually spent a lot of time dancing in the centre. There wasn’t a second ronda as such, but everyone danced around each other in a way that very much felt like we were moving in sync.

Cabeceo comedy

Cabeceo can be an entertaining art-form at times – especially when there are three or four followers sat together, all of whom are on my dance card. Signalling which of them I’m inviting at any given moment can require so much back-and-forth non-verbal query-and-reponse that on one occasion we accidentally won the 2025 Marcel Marceau Memorial Mime Championship.

Ironically, long-distance cabeceo was often easier, simply waiting for the right person to scan the far side of the room. I think I set a new personal record for the number of successful cabeceos across the full width of the floor, probably issuing a solid 30% of my invitations that way.

At the other extreme, I was sat next to one of my favourite Pugliese partners when I saw the magic name being typed on the projector. Verbal invitations are obviously fine with people at the same table, but I do generally still cabeceo just as a bit of playfulness. Since she was looking elsewhere, I turned to her and said to think of this as an unsubtle cabeceo. She replied that she was not opposed to even a poke in the arm when it was the right partner!

What is ‘pacing yourself’?

The afternoon and evening milongas have their respective fans, and a few different people shared their own approaches to pacing themselves. Some do the whole of the afternoon milongas and a bit of the evening ones, some the opposite, some skip entire milongas.

This ‘pacing’ business is not really a tango skill I possess: I’m more of a ‘first tanda to last at every milonga’ kind of guy. I mean, I can’t even stay off the dance floor between tandas:

(There was another photo during a tanda. Between songs, the leader behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said something that sounded like “string.” I looked down at my feet, thinking I’d picked up a stray piece of debris, when he was actually telling me I was on the “screen.”)

Perhaps there’s some connection between my lack of pacing and spending the rest of the week feeling like a zombie who’s been dosed with horse tranquilliser and then hit by a truck, but hey, it’s worth it!

Admittedly there were times when I could easily have gone to bed instead of a milonga, and had to physically drag myself out of the caravan, but I know from experience that I’ll achieve 52% motivation by the time I’ve showered and dressed, and by the first song will be miraculously re-energised for the next five hours.

The joy of walking

One huge advantage of arriving in time for the first tanda is room to walk! This Feast was a bit less busy anyway, but I had one tanda where we were able to walk an entire lap of the ronda during the first song. It was divine!

Walking remains my first love, and I can happily walk an entire tanda. There was a time when I worried that too much walking wouldn’t be interesting for my follower, but I’ve had so many of them tell me how much they love it when a leader walks. Indeed, I’ve had followers I don’t know cabeceo me and tell me someone had recommended dancing with me for that reason.

I had to laugh when I cabeceod a follower I didn’t know and she hesitated, saying she had a foot injury and couldn’t pivot, and was I still happy to dance with her if all we could do was walk?

Feeling truly at home in my dance

More generally, I’ve never been happier with my own dance. By that, I of course don’t mean I’m blind to my current flaws and limitations – which is why I take regular privates – but rather that I feel like I’ve really found my own style, and have the confidence to dance it. That obviously has been and will be an ongoing process, but for now I feel truly at home in my dance, and that’s a huge thing.

One component here has been finding a way to enjoy the more ‘ploddy’ Guardia Vieja tandas. While it seems obvious to me that DJs should simply email me ahead of time to check my preferences, some of them have this weird idea that they should try to reflect all the tastes in the room, and those marching tunes definitely have their fanbase.

Sometimes it’s the smallest of things that make the difference in tango, and here it’s been a way to bring some smoothness to music that can feel like it was written solely for marching. There was one particular approach I used to add some texture, and I checked with Mabel during my private that this felt good. She confirmed this and said it was “very Buenos Aires.” It does require a follower sensitive enough to respond with a similar texture, but at the Feast that’s almost everyone.

Similarly, instead of feeling mildly grumpy that people aren’t walking during big Pugliese tandas, I’ve instead found ways to create a similar feel through a mix of circular walks and big rebounds.

I was also feeling very much at home in my bow-ties. I’ve gone from needing a YouTube tutorial to being able to tie them with my eyes closed, a required skill given my level of sleep deprivation during the Feast. I remain amazed at how many followers comment on them, many even keeping count. I currently have four, but apparently need to work my way up to one per milonga. Since I’m planning to attend all 10 milongas of the Etonathon, this could get expensive …

A feast of following

I don’t usually do much following at a Feast, but that definitely changed this time! I followed several milonga tandas in each session, and did a little intercambio dancing to some tango tandas too.

It’s only been in the last couple of months that I’ve felt reasonably competent following milonga, so long as my leader keeps it simple and sticks strictly to steps and rebounds – nothing as advanced as a cross or a pivot. I do still make mistakes, of course, but nothing that my leader can’t accommodate, and I just have so much fun following!

Many, many thanks to my leaders – one of whom was kind enough to say that I felt more like a woman than a man. I don’t think there’s any higher compliment to a male follower.

That wasn’t quite the case with my most extreme following challenge! I made the mistake of telling a dual-role dancer how much I admired her milonga leading – fast, subtle, and playful. Both she and her followers were always smiling. She later cabeceod me and didn’t hold back for a beginner! It was the most challenging following I’ve ever done, and there was precisely zero chance of her telling me I felt like a woman, but it was such a fun and laughter-filled tanda!

I got some more practice during a workshop, of which more in a moment. By the end of the weekend, I wasn’t about to rush out and sign-up for a dual-role event, but I have for sure made some real progress.

I’m still taking my uncharacteristically patient approach, but I feel like I’m on an upward spiral of being more competent at it and therefore more willing to follow in a milonga rather than just the practice floor, which in turn will mean more follower miles under my feet and hopefully more competence.

Lessons

Booking a private with Mabel is the very first thing I do when I receive my booking confirmation, and whether I go to her with a specific issue I want to resolve or take a ‘let’s just dance and you tell me what I need to work on’ approach, her lessons are always utterly transformative.

She excelled herself this time. My goal was to work on a particular pivot technique. She instantly diagnosed the issue, and we were only 20 minutes in by the time we both felt like it had been completely resolved!

She threw in a variation that felt like it opened up a whole new world, but we still had some time left, so I told her that my next goal as a follower was the cross. Whenever leaders flaunt my strict terms and conditions by including one, I either miss it altogether or feel slow and clunky on the rare occasions I catch it in time.

Mabel gave me an approach to help with this, and I immediately felt more stable when she led me in some crosses to try it. I also had to laugh at myself doing the standard beginner follower thing of anticipating a cross after the second step of the classic way it’s taught! Mabel varied the point at which she led it to cure me of that habit! I still have a lot of kitchen practice to do, but I do now feel at least 18% less incompetent at them.

Olivia and Fernando (the Brazilian variety) were teaching some workshops. I didn’t know them but signed up for a follower technique class on the basis that these are always good. However, Jowanna had kindly been giving me some following practice and persuaded me to switch instead to doing their milonga workshop as a follower. This turned out to be a very good idea!

My heart sometimes sinks when teachers start with a history lesson, but in this case it was the perfect context to make sense of how a milonga dance should feel. While the key takeout from this applied to leaders rather than followers so I couldn’t immediately try it during the class, it did make perfect sense – and I later did my best to apply it in the milonga. (I don’t think any written summary would make much sense without Olivia’s demos, unfortunately!)

They also addressed what I consider one of my biggest challenges in milonga: pausing! I of course dance pauses a lot in tango, but the relentless beat of a milonga always made me feel ‘Ok, I’m going to pause just he– Oh, damn, missed the moment. Ok, he– Ah.’

The guidance they offered here still didn’t seem easy to follow, but it did make a lot more sense to me. I also realised that, while I was following here, I could be an active follower and also propose some pauses to Jowanna.

Speaking of which, they also had some very enlightening advice for active following. They said that if a follower wants, for example, to do some double-time steps while the leader is taking single time steps, it’s important to isolate the movement of their feet from the embrace so they don’t transmit the movement to the leader’s shoulders. I realised the active followers I dance with do this really well. I’m aware that they’re doing something and can work out that it must be double-time steps, for example, but I don’t actually feel that through the embrace.

There was an extreme example of this when I was leading one dual-role dancer whose feet can move faster than the eye can see. When I led a sidestep and she did about a billion steps in the same beat, I enjoyed it so much I led the same thing several times and she responded each time. I told her I hoped anybody watching thought I was leading her individual steps.

Attempted Chacarera

On Sunday night, there was of course Attempted Chacarera. Each time this happens, I make a mental note to remind myself of the structure before the next Feast, and my brain always informs me that it is unable to take any mental notes until I cease withholding sleep from it.

Hector was ‘kind’ enough to provide video evidence of me ending up on the wrong side (thankfully not alone in this). As I said in response, what we lack in competence we make up for in enthusiasm.

Next time I really will do that YouTube refresher first …

Where did the time go?

Tango is, of course, its own time-zone. Because the Feast starts on a Thursday night, which feels like a Friday night, I always end up feeling like Friday is Saturday and then being really happy when I realise it’s not and there’s still much more Feasting to be done!

However, Sunday evening always arrives completely unannounced and way too early. There was also only about half an hour between the start at 8pm and the end at midnight.

Well, midnight-ish. What would have been the penultimate tanda was a milonga, and there was a near-riot at this blatant theft of tango time. Fernando apparently received the Notice of Intended Prosecution and offered us a bonus tango tanda after midnight.

After that, there was just the literal feasting to do. It’s amazing how good some very ordinary Tesco cheddar can taste at the end of an evening’s dancing! This was followed by all the goodbye hugs, which took most of the rest of the night. An outside observer might have thought we were never going to see each other again, rather than in seven weeks at the most.

I think it was Peter K who said to me while munching on cheese that it felt like a roomful of love; I can’t think of a better description. Even my smart ring knew just how tough it is to accept that it’s all over:

See you on 4th December.