Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about why the role imbalance in tango is bad for leaders and followers alike.

It’s pretty obvious why it can be miserable for followers, but I also highlighted three ways in which it’s not ideal for leaders …

Tango doesn’t like to be defined. Pick any topic you like, ask ten different dancers about it, and you’ll likely end up with eleven different views. Twelve if they are teachers.

This apparently includes naming conventions for tango festivals, making it hard for potential participants to know what they may be getting. But there’s one term that seems to be gaining favour that I think helps …

A friend recently referenced sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s concept of ‘third places,’ supplementing our home and workplace. These are other places we visit and which play an important role in our lives.

I’d thought of milongas as a good example of a third place, but Bonny* reminded me of Oldenburg’s seven criteria, and it got me thinking about which tests Tango passes and fails …

*You’ll hear from her before too long, as she’s the second guest in my occasional video interview series.

There’s a tango forum I’m on which raised the question of what might be considered selfish versus altruistic dancing: to what extent do we dance with the partners who give us the best dance experience, versus others who might not?

In particular, how do we resolve the apparent contradiction between the idea that nobody owes anyone a dance, and tango as a social dance. Someone in the forum asked whether we should all be making an effort to dance with strangers, beginners, those not dancing, those we didn’t connect with in the past, and so on – or is it ok to simply dance with the partners whose dance we love … ?

I’ve long felt that the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi applies perfectly to tango: an appreciation of the beauty in things which are imperfect and impermanent.

The impermanent part is obvious. A tanda is something you experience in the moment, and then it’s gone. While I’ve often wished I could bottle that feeling, it would remain impossible even if we could crack the chemistry – because the fleeting nature of dance is part of the very essence of the experience …

I’ve said before that I’ve never really understood how some tango DJs can (for my tastes) prove consistently amazing. While I’m sure they have a few tandas which they play frequently, for the most part their musical selection is different each time. And yet, somehow, I almost always love their choices.

I wrote this blog post a while back now, but had to delay publishing it to protect the guilty – which you’ll understand when reading the end of it … !

Arguably the biggest problem in tango is the imbalance between leaders and followers. That’s clearly an issue for followers, but it’s also less than ideal for leaders.

A solution attempted by most festival/marathon/encuentro organisers is to have an event be role-balanced – but it appears that the theory and the reality may differ somewhat …

Anyone who knows me in tango will know that I’m a huge fan of cabeceo, using it even with good friends I know like to dance with me. But I’d like to talk here about an aspect which sometimes seems to be overlooked in UK tango: cabeceo by followers.

In my previous post, I mentioned a follower friend who was feeling too shy to cabeceo a leader she felt was too far above her tango pay-grade. I tried to persuade her, based on my own experience of having many more acceptances than declines from far more advanced followers, but ended up having to take executive action …

There’s a magic to the cabeceo. To make eye contact across a room, with a woman I’ve never met before, whose name I do not know, whose language I may not speak, and be able to invite her to dance – and have my invitation accepted – without a single word being exchanged.

Cabeceo is, for me, one of the most beautiful things about tango. I love it for its practicality, but also for its poetry. For me, it’s the first step in the dance …

In part one of this series of thoughts on how we make London milongas a friendlier and more welcoming place, I invited leaders to make a habit of dancing one tanda with a stranger.

The reason I made this suggestion to leaders specifically is, of course, due to the imbalance between leaders and followers. So part three comprises my thoughts on how we might change this …

Some London milongas are perceived to be ‘cliquey.’ That may be one of those irregular verbs, depending on one’s relationship to the milonga in question, from first-time visitor to fixture: I have good friends; you’re a bit snobby about dance partners; they are a clique.

What I’m going to do here is look at what might lead people to feel that way, and some steps we can take to address it. There are a couple of things I think we can all do, and three steps I think milonga organisers can take …

There’s a blog post I’ve been struggling to write for some weeks now, communicating some thoughts about issues on the London tango scene, and how we might address them.

The reason for the struggle is two-fold. First, and more trivially, it might be felt presumptuous for a three-year dancer to think he understands the problems, let alone has any idea how to solve them …