Edinburgh Festivalito with the Costas

Friday night

On Friday I went to hear Adrian Costa DJ at the new (for a milonga) venue at Lutton Place, Edinburgh.

This was the Edinburgh festivalito hosted by El Tango Club. This event was run it said for the Edinburgh Tango Society and the hosts, who run (at least) the DJing of the Edinburgh Tango Society are also the hosts of El Tango Club. All detailed information about the weekend was on the latter’s website. There doesn't seem to me to be much difference at the moment between the management of the two outfits.

I was quite tired and happily ensconced on the sofa reading The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to my son. I decided to go mostly through curiosity about Adrian Costa's DJing and the hope of a good turnout for dancing, though for Scotland I felt a Friday night - as opposed to say a Sunday afternoon - to be inauspicious. This is partly because the milonga finishing at midnight is past the hour of much public transport to the surrounding area. Also, if only staying over one night I suspect people prefer to stay over on a Saturday than a Friday night. But really I think the classes were supposed to be the main draw here and they were running on Saturday and Sunday.

Venue

The milongas ran between 2000-0000. I arrived about 2020 both days. Entrada was £8, £10 on Saturday.

On Friday, outside the main room I heard cortina-type music which continued to different tracks while I got ready and changed my shoes. I was surprised at what seemed to be the late start. 

There were snacks in the entrance hall: sweets, crisps, olives, and fruit. Water was always available. The following day there were some cakes.

The hall was large and rather spartan. It appears cosier in the photo.  I have danced more festively here many times at ceilidhs. Red tablecloths and on Saturday night, clothes for sale - looking more typically from the swing rather than the tango scene - were displayed on the stage and helped give warmth and to brighten the space. Inside the hall there were sufficient (on Friday) tables and chairs. Lighting was fine for invitation by look even across the relatively big room. The floor was old but I found it fine. One woman said she found it slightly uneven, which, the few times I danced as the girl I found to be the case in only one spot. 

On Friday it was cold.  I danced a lot else I think I would have been cold and it took three tandas for me to warm up. Women seemed to be in excess and many sat without dancing. People were leaving from about 2230, though whether from cold, from not dancing or something else I am not sure. The majority had gone when I left at the start of the penultimate tanda (Gobbi). An announcement had said the last tanda would be Pugliese.  I had felt the direction of the music for a while.

People and dancing

I had wondered to myself if the atmosphere had been a bit flat on Friday.  Someone voiced that thought the next night. On the Friday forty to fifty people rattled around the hall, rather too big for those numbers. There were quite a few I had expected might be there but who were not. Someone told me they had avoided the first night because even in a smaller venue last year it had not been particularly well attended. 

There was a contingent from Aberdeen despite that there was also a milonga in that city on the same Friday. On Saturday there were a few people from St Andrews. Of visitors from outside Scotland I saw few. One  I met was here for work that weekend and one was visiting friends. 

The music was great for half a dozen tandas.  Probably because of that I found myself in a remarkably good mood and somehow stayed that way even after the music started to slide into drama. 

Sometimes a few people stayed on the floor between tandas, a habit in Edinburgh that I rarely see elsewhere but that seems persistent. It was nothing like as bad though as at the Edinburgh International Tango Festiva (EITF). It is the legacy of Counting House DJs who used to play - and some still do play - silent cortinas though happily I believe the current head DJ no longer does this. 

I danced mostly with women and with five guys over two milongas somehow managing on Friday to avoid the tracks I found most troublesome. One guy was clearly an experienced dancer but he didn't embrace, did "stuff" more at me than with me and I felt gripped in my back. As ever, much is about compatibility. 

One of the guys was so quiet and dances with such sensitivity that it was a pleasure for me to stay in the woman’s role. It is not so much what he does as what he doesn’t do. That and just his attitude. Because this dance for me, is a lot to do with that.  I asked if he danced with guys in his town where he has a milonga and was delighted to hear that he does, in both roles. His girlfriend is a lovely dancer too. He is quite new to the dance and - wonderfully - he doesn’t teach, he just dances with people. This is one of the nicest guy dancers in Scotland for me but what is so patent in the milongas is how everyone likes different things.

A Latin man said he was still “trying” with his tango. “Why don’t you just swap?” I said. “I don’t know any way faster or better for guys to learn to dance well.” “It’s my pride”, he said, sheepishly. That way is a very long, slow and hard road and while it may attract sympathy, a guy, especially a guy citing that reason is not likely to want to dance with women who feel that way towards him. A guy who puts his pride first may realise that good dancing is making women feel good but this attitude is pretty much guaranteed to prevent that happening. It is quite a bind.

I watched Amanda Costa dancing with a local teacher. It was astonishing. You simply could not have told this was a well known tango performer. She danced just like a regular social dancer, without a jot of show or affectation like an ordinary woman. It was nice to see but boy did it show up how there is not "one tango (dance)" but that performance and social dancing are two entirely different creatures. I did not see Adrian Costa dance socially.

There were announcements both nights. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention but I remember a sales pitch for women to fill up the classes. I thought it was good that smart women are forsaking the classes where they pay to, at worst, be mere props for guys to learn to “think dance” in terms of steps, where the girls get hang-ups about all the things supposedly “wrong” with their dance that they “should” improve and where they learn things like embellishments and how to be self-conscious and stiff which in my experience only hamper dancing. 

On Friday I left at 2345 when Gobbi and Pugliese were announced as the last tracks. On Saturday I left much earlier mostly because of the sound but also because of the ronda. 

On the second night (DJ Ewa) there more people though quite a number went to either one or other night, not both. Seating ran out at the tables but there was a bench running all the way round the hall. I lost and regained my seat several times. So did the polite and friendly girl and nice dancer sitting next to me who had asked to join us. She was another five-months-new dancer who eventually seemed to give up trying to keep her seat.

Saturday

Invitation

A DJ well known for doing the predatory. walk-up hand-offering thing to women half his age did this to to her.  Knowing no better she accepted him but when you are a beginner many can be so grateful to get any dance. This would change if more guys danced with beginners and invited them by look. Some excuse this behaviour as “friendliness” or “helpfulness” but in some cases there is an undertone that experienced milonga-goers who know the scene feel is sleazy. Another excuse is “beginners don’t know about invitation by look” but they cotton on quick in the real conditions of the milonga, especially when they choose to sit next to women who do know. Such new women are regularly exploited by unscrupulous experienced men who cannot get the dances other guys can. 

As we watched this, the experienced, choosy dancer next to me and I looked at each other and shuddered at the man’s behaviour. We decried the fact that many women will dance with anything. She had been to Istanbul, a city often cited for its good embraces and dancing. She said there and in some Latin countries invitation is by cabeceo and mirada and that the women there are much tougher on guys than the pushover some women are in the UK. They refuse guys if they are not good dancers and they refuse guys who walk up. This means the men have to work much harder to get the women they want and the dance standard of the men is correspondingly higher. There is a much-needed point of learning there I felt for women in the UK. 

Things were helped along for me on Friday in that I met the kind of woman I just love to dance with. I invited her from my seat on the other side of the hall from her, exactly as I like invitation to be. I had not seen her dance but had a good feeling.  She stayed sitting quietly until I arrived to the part of the floor nearest her. It was with her a particularly conscious thing that reminds me of some dancers in the south of England, different, somehow to the more casual way people accept here. There is something lovely about the formality of invitation and acceptance between dancers, the staying seated until the partner who should, comes over. 

There is something nice about the lack of presumption, the “Of course you must have meant me” that a girl can signal when she stands up too early. Like “toast”. That’s the humiliating nickname a girl was given by Argentinians in a Buenos Aires milonga. There is just something nice about that seated poise. 

Ronda

On Saturday I watched some visitors dance in a way quite alien to the local scene. It was fascinating, nothing like the social dance I recognise. I can't remember when I saw so much reach and stretch in a woman’s leg.   I learnt later this is the Villa Urquiza style of dance in action. I am sure they felt us rather hick. It wasn’t that they did not stay in the ronda and I do not remember much danger from dagger-heels (though I didn’t like to watch long) but in that it looked like a show, it was quite the most anti-social dancing I have seen since my partner was kicked in the Counting House on...Sunday.  They did not seem connected to anyone else in the ronda, but then I felt that generally on Saturday night. Early on, the same guy covered several metres of space to come up right behind me with such a blank expression that I thought we had become a sort of blind spot in front of him and that he was going to crash into us; yet there was no blind spot: I could see his eyes, vacant. I am used in the ronda most everywhere to guys giving me a nod or a wink or a smile or just an acknowledgement especially if we happen to come too close and I like it like that.  How they are in the ronda tells me just about everything I need to know about a guy especially for future dance in regular roles.

This couple dance in central London where I think it not coincidence that DJ Ewa teaches and DJs. 

Someone who had been in Negracha recently told me the etiquette had been poor. “In the London scene, surely not?” I thought stifling a choke, but asked,

- “In what way?” 

- “Oh, walking across the floor, that kind of thing.”

- “Walking across the floor when?”

- “While people are dancing.”

As at the EITF I thought. And Things have improved then (!) since I was last in London.

Later I asked where the couple liked to dance in Buenos Aires. They mentioned Sunderland, which I had skipped, not liking the look on video nor the sound of it. They named several barrio milongas I had never heard of. I asked what they thought of the central milongas. They said it wasn’t their style. Why was that? They preferred the Costa's style which they find more in the barrio milongas where there is more space. Things had become much clearer for me.

The trouble is, if as DJ Ewa did, you play that strongly and that loudly when people who dance more by thinking class moves than they just dance the music are in the majority, or for whom a ronda is more a notion than a concrete reality then the results are going to be messy.  The ronda was - less in terms of weaving and more because of this sense of people doing their thing regardless of others. I was tailgated including by experienced dancers more times than I can remember.  The good effect of this is that by reminding one how very unpleasant this is I was confirmed each time it happened in my resolve to try never to do it myself. I remember reading an ordinance this year to the general dancing public I think from on high in ETS/El Tango Club: “Don't you ever tailgate!”. It occurred to me that perhaps this is a particular problem for the scene here.

About dancing moves, I was dancing swapped with a guy who said "Do that again!".  I laughed.  "Do what again?" I never know what I do.

I became aware of how crammed the ronda was on the outside. It became packed nose to tail in one big circle with very few people using the inside space. I sensed the feeling among those trying to be very correct (what a plague that is in the UK just now), that only the poorest dancers leave the edge. It is true, the more erratic dancers were in the middle but I danced there because it struck me as absurd to have so much space and not use it. Between the random dancers inside and the cramped space with tailgating outside the inside won by a margin. Tellingly, I did not see the hosts dancing much or at all.

So it was sad on Saturday: good tracks, largely good hall conditions, lots of people to dance with, unpleasant ronda and much too loud. 

I danced a vals with the serene visitor initially regretting inviting her as we had danced quietly and also to a tanda with high energy and I felt she preferred the former. Vals can, I find - in the wrong circumstances - be a bit crazy in a ronda and I wished I had waited for a quiet tango. The ronda was the most frenetic I felt it that weekend - uneven, disconnected, people doing all kinds of fast, wild stunts.  But we danced very small and quietly in what felt like a still, small pool of our own. For safety there really was no choice.  Sometimes I find a woman who I feel is happy to be quiet and connected and who doesn't mind, who likes even, if things are small and simple because these have their own power. At such times I feel we are deep inside the music, in the centre of it all and any eddying chaos around falls away, blurs out.

I thought about staying until numbers thinned out and the ronda became less unpleasant but figured the volume was unlikely to come down. I quit dancing at 10pm while I went outside the hall to scan through a book I had been lent. I got caught there by the show with my things still inside the room but left directly after that. I had planned to stay til the end but the milonga was scheduled to finish too late for a train so I had driven. Still, in comparison to what I know the Saturday night last train from Edinburgh to be like, after that raw evening, the silence of that hour driving home was like balm.