100 Milongas in 100 days.

"So where have you actually seen woman lead in tango?" I ask the lady sitting infront of me. She leans towards me, looks around to make sure no one is listening and then say in a low voice... "the thing is....there exist Milongas for gays".


I have so far been out almost every day or night dancing at milongas, taken technique classes, taken private classes. I have danced with old smelly men, young girls, big ladies, and handsome guys. I think I got addicted now - to tango.


It´s a weird disease actually, this tango addiction. It can be very unpleasent sometimes. A person take you in its arms, it smell of bad breath and sweat. Then suddenly it moves and I have to follow, if not it will look reproachfully at you, embrace you more severely so you have to get even closer and gets its sweat on your shoulder and stomach. That´s the moment when you think: What the H... am I doing here? I just wanna get away from this person telling me that the woman doesn´t really have to learn the steps, she just have to be a good follower to the man.
But just then, you can´t help your self, you try just another time and this is were the real disease sets in! It´s in this specific moment where the drug runs through your blod and you forget everything around you. You have falling into the perfect embrace of another person and is floating around on the dancefloor. If only I can give this feeling to another person I can make everyone smile, make them feel like flying. Wouldn´t that be something?


The story tells us, that in the birth of Tango men would dance with eachother in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. They would practice with eachother to be able to leed the ladies into the perfect embrace. Story also tells us that this stopped as the tango got more popular and more woman started to dance it. After this the best way to learn to dance was from a couple teaching both roles. Woman showing woman how to dance, men showed men and together they showed how to dance together.
It seems to me though, that it was always allowed for the man to know the steps of the woman. It simply made him a better dancer if he knew how the woman would react to his leading. Also it made him more atractive as a teacher. Instead of paying two people to teach tango you had to pay only one that knew both roles.
This fact have made a lot of female teachers learn how to dance the mans role. Living of being a dance teacher they had to be able to compete with the other teachers on the tango marked.


This is what I experience now. The teachers of traditional Milongas knows the steps from both roles, though few will actually dance both in public. Being able to dance the opposite role from your gender seems a world apart from actually using it in public. Public change of roles has to do with something totally different than the teachers reason to learn both roles.  


I will continue with this in my next blog.

Until next time a small picture from my last milonga. What you see is the H for Hombre (man) meaning that this table is for men only. Then you have tables for woman, for singles and couples. Me and my male dance partner had to move 2 times before we got it right. We finally got seated at a couples table :)