El Porteño at Beekman and Beekman in Deurne

Hetty (left) and Rian (right)

On Sun 1 January I went to a milonga in Deurne, Noord-Brabant near Eindhoven because I was staying nearby. It was run by Hetty and Paul of El Porteño. 

The milonga is held in the lovely setting  of Beekman & Beekman - a bar and restaurant. The building itself was on a little square that glowed festively with lights decorating the surrounding trees and buildings. 

I cannot say how much I liked the venue downstairs.  The bar here was a beautiful, long, curving affair.

The wood was warm and dark, there were cafe-style tables in various sections where people were eating quietly with friends and family. I did not like to photograph that area. This is another section:

If I ever went again with friends I might go here for a drink or some food beforehand.  On this occasion I went with Pieter who had invited me to stay with his family for New Year.  In the salon we met, as arranged, a girl friend of mine who had travelled across the Netherlands as she has before for TipoTango's Sylvester (New Year) dinner and milonga in Scala, Eindhoven.   She said it had been great.  I guessed she knew what she was about because she had fosaken several other New Year celebrations in much closer milongas. 

Illuminated panel on the landing

The milonga in Deurne is in an upstairs room.  The welcome was just wonderful. Hetty greeted me with the warmth you might reserve for a long-lost friend. I liked her instantly.  It was a "Come in, come in" kind of welcome where you are clasped by the hand and brought so to speak in to the body of the kirk. I cannot remember when I last found such a lovely welcome.  She reminded me of how I felt when Daniel welcomed me in Gricel in Buenos Aires or of the way Iain hosts his - hitherto free - occasional milongas in Edinburgh. In all of these your presence seems to be genuinely valued.  The sense is not of indifference to a passing stranger, still less the veiled hostility I have sensed in a few milongas where I am known and possibly might be thought difficult or too choosy but of being genuinely wanted.

The ladies room is very small upstairs so if one needed to change or make up downstairs would be better.

The El Porteño milonga also has a staffed bar upstairs The room is an odd triangular shape with a curved wall on which the blue frieze is painted which  I imagine is the other side of the illuminated panel shown above.

Looking towards the entrance.  What appears to be  a wall at the far end is in fact doors to make a larger room 

From the narrow end of the room towards the bar.  Entrance off to the left.

At the end of the milonga Hetty told me that when it is busier the doors at the shallow end of the room can be opened making one longer room, belted by the doors in the middle. She showed me.  It was lovely:

The "extension" room - the doors between the two rooms can be opened up

The floor was old but OK. There were tables and chairs around the room.

Music
In September last year I had contacted Paul because I heard the setting of a summer milonga he runs Tango in `t Groen was so nice as to make me consider the trip across the Netherlands to Venlo. It is apparently in the grounds of a hospital or retirement home but I heard is not easy to get to without a car though apparently train and bike might be possible. I wanted to know about the music so I wrote to ask him if the music was mainstream traditional. 

He seemed to play a mix and on request gave a few exmpales. He said he played "old staccato tango's" (his examples: El Pollo Ricardo by Di Sarli and No me lo digas (1940) by Rodriguez/Moreno [not great sound]. I suppose he meant the 1940 El Pollo Ricardo though he recorded it three times - they get progressively slower.  Here, by the way, is Ricardo Vidort (grey jacket, white hair with the girl in the black dress) dancing I think the 1940 version.  I watch this and what I notice is that here is a man whose body was not only  suffused with music but that the one body, four legs thing is not happening with them moving on the same legs.  His legs are doing something different to her legs but he is so attuned to her, and where she is that it is still as though they are one.

Paul said he also played Golden Age tangos then something he called "colt [old?] Nuevo".  His examples were Farolito de mi Barrio and Negracha of Pugliese which in my view  are tracks for:

a) people who love to dance a show
b) teachers - usually a  subset of a)
c) people to dance in the privacy of home
d) 3AM in the milonga when just about everyone has gone home
d) those who don't know any better.

He also plays, he said, "Orrillero" (his examples: the marvellous, wholly irresistible tracks by D'Arienzo El Flete and Felicia)to.  He said he just played one tanda of neo in the afternoon. He also said he played "Calo [sic], Tanturi, Malerba, Troilo, Di Sarli, D'Agostina [sic] Biagi and many more". Clarifying what he meant by these nuevo tracks of Pugliese and his distinction with neo tango he said "The Nuevo were then an new sound,( 70 jears ago) because of the change in ritme, Neo tango is in fact no tango, but sometimes its nice to here it, you can play all kinds of music in the Milonga, but it does'nt mean it is tango."

I was still pretty confused so I asked someone who knows about these things but they were not much the wiser.  Then I said:

F: That same day I wrote back to that DJ: "I have to ask though, "orillero" means from the suburbs, no? So what makes El flete and Felicia orillero for you?"  But never did hear back.

A: Good question. A good answer is: nothing does.
Orillero refers to a kind of dancing, not a kind of music.

I decided against going to the milonga in Venlo that weekend.

Here in Deurne strangely, tangos were in threes. Vals and milonga in fours though that said I seem to remember a Caló tanda of four tracks.  The music was a hodge-podge.  There were some classic tracks, a lot of tracks unknown to me, some electro-tango, some non-tango and some of these were mixed together.

Pieter danced the alternative tracks with Hetty in a non-tango way which made sense.  It was like seeing people dance the tropical tanda in Buenos Aires.  There they don't tend to dance movements you see in tango to rock and roll or jazz.  Seeing people dancing typically tango movements to music that is not tango reminds me of adulterating one thing with another, to the disadvantage of both,  like putting coke in your rum without any of the finesse of a cocktail which makes adulteration into a new art.

At the end I danced a great Donato track with a local guy thinking it would be a tanda. It turned into two nuevo tracks so I sat down. He tried to persuade me from the floor for the second time that night to dance electrotango.  I knew the guy from a previous trip and he did it all by look and gesture and,  knowing what I think of this kind of music in the milonga, an "I'll take care of it" expression.  Conveying so much silently he made me laugh which is what a guy who once gave me sound dating advice would have called the mistake of "leaving a chink" meaning "a chink of hope to a guy you are trying to say no to, politely".  But although I have, exceptionally, danced that kind of music with him before I did not want to now and said no again firmly but in silent disappointment and frustration at the unexpected change in the music.  He left the salon and I did not see him again.

From what Paul said about music in that correspondence it sounds as though at Tango in `t Groen he might play more traditional music than at Beekman & Beekman.

Attendance and dancing

The numbers were fair there.  We arrived probably after 7pm.  The milonga had been going since five.  By 8pm there were about thirty-five, which for a small rural place on New Year's day I found surprising.  All the tables were taken, the place did not look sparsely attended and felt intimate. People had been leaving from 9pm and at the end we were only six which is when some of my photos were taken.

Yet no-one I spoke to in other places had heard of this milonga, never mind been. Where? said a young class-going couple I spoke to at Arnhem. They lived in Nijmegen only forty-five minutes away.  I was puzzled because Hetty is such a warm and welcoming host I could not understand why people did not seem to know about the milonga. Asking about I heard that  "Arnhem people merely dance in Arnhem and Nijmegen and especially or exclusively with people who regularly visit their milongas. It is a bit of a clique.  "I wondered if Hetty ever got in other DJs because a milonga hosted by her with a DJ who plays more mainstream ought to be a winner.

The dancing was poor as you can probably tell from the website's cover photo.  The imbalance of women seemed to incline the extra women to accept a lot of what was there, which does nothing to improve the standard of guy dancing. Among the men there was a self-aggrandising showy, guy who reminded me of a teacher who can't dance, there was a lot of class-style dancing and "There was a quite gross ageing Casanova type in braces who leched at the women, held up the ronda, and did anything he could to be noticed which only made me determined not to see him. He stamped a sort of paso doble twice during the music." It was embarrassing. I said to my friend later  "How come he isn't banned?" "I said the same elsewhere" she said, "...but it isn't the way people do things around here."

This guy made the ronda an absolute pain because, especially at the point in the room with the shallow angle, the ronda has to keep moving but he did just what he felt like. He also taught in the middle of the floor. I'm not sure he ever acknowledged the existence of a ronda it being irrelevant compared to the centre of the world which was himself.  He was an degenerate, pitiable, disruptive sight. I could not believe it when women accepted his proferred hand and lascivious grin. I have never so much wanted to try to save women but realised anyone accepting that was probably past saving.

The ronda looked worse than it was.  Even so I quit on a track I did not like at the point where one of the best dancers there needlessly overtook me.  Between the room shape and the dancing my recollection of being in the ronda (in guide role) was that in general it wasn't great.

There was one older, quiet dancer whose dancing I liked and I danced with him.

I would have tried inviting some of the ladies there and I would have tried to see about an invitation from another guy but I was dancing with my friends and there wasn't time or good musical opportunity. 

Return?

I had a nice time here because the warmth of that welcome lingered, because I was with friends with whom I danced and just because of that lovely bar and the novelty of the place and the people.  But I would only go with friends on a spare evening for social reasons and with the expectation of jumping off and on the floor because of the music.

El Porteño also run, in the summer, that milonga I mentioned Salon Tango in `t Groen in the grounds of a hospital or retirement home in Venlo. I heard the setting is quite beautiful but that it is not easy to get to without a car though apparently train and bike might be possible.  From what he said about music it sounds as though there Paul plays more traditional, mainstream music than at Beekman & Beekman.