Tango can sometimes be feast or famine for me these days. The last week or so has been very much feast – including literally. A four-day festival last weekend, Tango Secrets on Friday and Alma de Tango on Saturday.

I don’t often dance in London, but when I heard that Sonder Tango was going to be playing live at the Alma de Tango Festival, I couldn’t resist …

I think anyone who dances tango can relate to having had a truly wonderful experience and then feeling reluctant to risk diluting it afterwards. That can operate at a tanda level – when you’ve had a sublime dance and it feels like any other tanda afterwards would have a very hard act to follow – and also at an event level.

I said that for me, somehow, mysteriously, the Feast just gets better and better. Each of the last four editions were, for me, the best one yet. Sometimes I just want to continue enjoying the lingering high for a week or so.

At the same time, however, I felt desperate to continue dancing! Fortunately, my next opportunity was a very safe bet: Tango Secrets. That was indeed a wonderful evening.

Despite my views on London floorcraft, there were three compelling reasons to take a deep breath and risk attending the gala milonga at the Alma de Tango Festival the following night.

First, that feeling of needing another fix! Sometimes the more you get, the more you want. I found when I was dancing every day in BsAs that it felt like I was living inside a tango world, and that things like work were just brief interludes. I was feeling some of the same thing now.

Second, my one regret about dancing in London so infrequently is that there are lots of London followers with whom I love to dance. I get the chance to do so with some of them elsewhere, but there are others who I only ever see at London milongas.

Third, and decisively, Sonder Tango! I always adore dancing to live orchestras, and I’d first danced to this one in Sheffield last year. It was an absolutely magical experience.

I arrived at the start and initially had the pleasure of dancing to the recorded music on a deliciously empty floor.

This provided all the room needed to safely dance whatever style of tango anyone might prefer, from a big walk through nuevo acrobatics in open embrace to compact dancing. Of course, it didn’t last, and this shot shows the floor just a little later:

It was still comfortable to dance in these conditions, but once the live set began at around 11pm, things got very crowded indeed. I can’t show you a photo of the floor during the live set, as I of course danced all of it, but imagine three or four times as many people on the floor as seen above and you’ll get the idea. It really felt like the whole of London was in the rather compact room. It was a pista that could have worked very well indeed in BsAs, but was ‘interesting’ in London!

As is traditional, we didn’t dance to the first song as a sign of respect to the orchestra, so I was able to film this.

The room was so rammed that only short-range cabeceo was possible, and there was no chance at all of walking around the outside, but I was incredibly lucky: there was a great follower within sight range at the end of every live tanda!

Things were initially very dodgems-like, with lots of rapid evasive manoeuvres required. However, I managed to identify a pocket of safe leaders with good peripheral awareness and the ability to dance small, and remained mostly surrounded by those for the second half of the set, and that made a huge difference. A miniature version of the room dancing together.

Over the course of four hours, I got the chance to dance with followers I hadn’t seen for a very long time, as well as some regulars and some strangers. I very much enjoyed it, but nothing was going to beat the high of the live set, so I called it a night when the band did.

While I’m certainly not going to rush back to any London milongas, I’m really glad I went to this one, and I’ll definitely do the same for any other visiting orchestras. Sonder Tango, thank you!