Milongueros del barrio

[JournalInTime]

I explained here why I prefer partners who want to dance with me, personally: I am a leader who dances almost exclusively in his local milongas (two of them, less than 10 minutes' walk from his front door) – in part due to having no budget for tango travel, in part due to his life and dance partner having serious medical issues that preclude travel for dance – and I like to dance with tangueras who are regulars like me, who know who I am and how I dance, and who want to dance with me as a result.

I would like to discuss the tango experiences of others in similar situations, so I am creating a new thread for this to avoid hijacking the previous one. If you don't travel much or at all for tango (I don't care what your reasons are, but by all means feel free to share them!), and have built your tango life around one or a small number of local milongas that you can actually get to easily – say, on foot or by bus, or with a short trip by car – then let's talk about the realities of that situation, and how you feel about discussions that assume that travel is necessary to improve or to be a "real" tanguer@.

Ideally, like me, you take regular lessons and practice locally to be as good as your resources allow. I have nothing against beginners, but my primary goal is to trade notes with people with many years of mostly local experience. While I can (and do) do that with other locals in similar situations to mine, I'm hoping to discuss "What is it like to be a local milonguer@?" with people in other areas, to find out what it's like to be an advanced, experienced, but non-traveling dancer elsewhere.

I don't want to gatekeep, and I intend no slight to anyone who travels . . . you're welcome, too, provided that your input is positive. If you want to say, "More power to you!", talk about how you dance with locals whenever you travel, or, heck, PayPal travel money to people without it, then by all means chime in. All I ask is that if your opinion is essentially negative – "You can't call yourself advanced or experienced if you stay local," "Tango doesn't need 'poors,'" "Dancers who stay in their barrio are a thing of the past," etc. – then please exercise discretion and say nothing. I can get those comments to my face any day of the week.

—

To present myself:

I started dancing tango 13 years ago. For whatever reason, the studio where I started adopted me first as a class accompanier, then as a barman, and finally as a very junior instructor. Consequently, I worked on tango for 20+hours/week for roughly 4 years. When the studio closed, I continued weekly (and sometimes more frequent) private coaching. Shortly after the studio closed, I divorced and lost everything, so I had to content myself with staying in my city. I now live and dance with a new partner, but she has medical issues that make it unrealistic for her to dance more than 1-2 hours at a time, meaning that flying off to a tango event to dance for days would make no sense even if I could afford it.

Despite that, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that after my day job, tango is my life. I attend 2-4 milongas and 2 prácticas a week, I work weekly to twice weekly with one or more coaches, and I assist teaching tango. I cannot read minds, so I cannot say for sure that I am "advanced." I can say that more than one tango teacher from away has danced with me and then arranged to come back here to dance with me again. That suggests that I'm not a trash dancer, at least.

Which said, my entire tango experience has been dented and bruised by people who've said, to my face, that unless I travel and see tango in other places, I'm not much of a dancer. This has been difficult for me, because I am a highly sensitive person. I sometimes struggle to make myself understood here and in other discussions of tango.

 

[Reuven Thetanguero]

I have been dancing Tango close to 30 years. We are social dancers. I danced with my wife on five continents, in several Tango festivals and similar gathering. Yet just like you most of our dancing is pretty local. We live in a suburb of NYC and after the pandemic we hardly ever dance in Manhattan - mostly in the surrounding counties of NY and NJ.
The reality is simple: we dance, socialize with our Tango friends (who are simply our friends), drink a little, eat a little "schmooze" a little - simply enjoying our lives. We are not comparing ourselves to any other dancers, as we dance not to be seen or rated, just to have fun.
I hope this few words give you enough information to see that you and us are the typical and normal Tangueros.

 

[opendoor]

..If you don't travel much or at all for tango (I don't care what your reasons are, but by all means feel free to share them!), and have built your tango life around one or a small number of local milongas that you can actually get to easily – say, on foot or by bu...

I think I'm kindred spirits.
Our cities have comparable scenes. So we have ideal tango conditions. There's a milonga somewhere every day. Currently, I try to dance at my regular milonga once a week. But during my wilder days, I visited almost all the milongas in my town. I also took lessons from most of the staff and visiting maestros.
Already early on, I wondered why dancers in my circle also traveled weekly to a milonga 170 km away. My city actually offers every style and every sociological niche.
Of course I've also attended a festival, an encuentro, a marathon, and a tango vacation. Mostly at the initiative of a woman. I was always more interested in the tourist side; complete immersion in tango dancing was (is) foreign to me.
On all my travels as asingle, I also incorporated tango, but only if it happened. And I was always more interested in personal connections than in dancing together.
The tango scene in my city is part of my personal history. I love being greeted with besitos everywhere I go. During the pandemic, I even made a donation to an unpopular teacher couple. What my town offers now already is to much for me. I love going weekly to my regular ancient milonga, where it all begann, and which I can walk to.

 

[Bailango]

Your experience is normal for most dancers in North America. Traveling is expensive and distances are very far. Without proper planning most cannot take a weekend off for a festival. I have seen increased trend of the dancers in North America attending festivals in past ten years. It is minuscule. At most one festival in a year or two. A much smaller minority might go to two or three festivals in year of which two would be in close by cities (one to two hour flight time).

I explained why I prefer partners who want to dance with me, personally:

How many of those do you prefer to dance with. Prefer as in you dance with them because it is a really good dancing experience, not because they are friends. Over the years there have been many followers that preferred dancing with me, but I didn’t prefer with some of them.

I have fun dancing milonga tanda with a very few followers. Not to brag but saying as a matter of fact am very good at milonga. Milonga tanda tends to empty the floor (relatively speaking). So there are always eyes watching. There have been times where follower I don’t only or barely know have tapped me on the shoulder and said they would like to dance Milonga tanda. Basically tellling me to ask then when the tanda comes up.

I am a leader who dances almost exclusively in his local milongas (two of them, less than 10 minutes' walk from his front door) – in part due to having no budget for tango travel, in part due to his life and dance partner having serious medical issues that preclude travel for dance – and I like to dance with tangueras who are regulars like me, who know who I am and how I dance, and who want to dance with me as a result.

So do I and many others I know. I was dancing almost as long as you have or longer before I had my first experience of a non-local festivals. At local festivals too I ever attended only the opening night milonga or closing night milonga. I never attended a local festival or marathon.

So your experience is not unique. It is mainstream.

Unlike you though I am not integrated in the local community. I have always danced 3 or 4 milongas a month on an average. You probably dance those many in a week.

I would like to discuss the tango experiences of others in similar situations, so I am creating a new thread for this to avoid hijacking the previous one. If you don't travel much or at all for tango (I don't care what your reasons are, but by all means feel free to share them!), and have built your tango life around one or a small number of local milongas that you can actually get to easily – say, on foot or by bus, or with a short trip by car – then let's talk about the realities of that situation,

Last night I went to my preferred Milonga after months of absence. 30% of the followers were someone I never seen before. Because the music got uninspiring (one of worst choice of music by the DJ that I can recall), I danced first 7 or 8 tandas and then quit. Almost all were either followers new to me.

My point which I have made earlier is that, it is not easy to have a stable of good followers you know that will be at the milonga. It is a big community. Many followers I know or prefer don’t go out dancing as much. However over the years there must be at least 50 to 60 followers where the preference was mutual or I liked dancing with them, who no longer are in the area. They moved out or stopped dancing. Majority moved out. I am sure you don’t face so much attrition of loss of followers you prefer to dance.

On the flip side there are always new faces to dance with. As many followers that leave the area, there is some compensation from the ones who move into the area.

It is very hard to have enduring dancers that you can depend on to be out regularly dancing year after year. I would perhaps go out more often if that was not the case.

I would actually prefer to go to multiple festivals. Like I said I have never been to any tango festival in this continent. I have been to a few in Europe because I happened to be there at the same time (except one and it was great experience. I needed an excuse to be in that part of the world and it had nothing to do with tango. Signing up for tango festival was a good excuse).

and how you feel about discussions that assume that travel is necessary to improve or to be a "real" tanguer@.

Neither here in the dance forums, nor in real life, has any one ever expressed anything like above. Unless there are discussions like these irl where you are, it is like a strawman to me

Ideally, like me, you take regular lessons and practice locally to be as good as your resources allow. I have nothing against beginners, but my primary goal is to trade notes with people with many years of mostly local experience.

You probably have 10x mileage in terms of lessons and 5x mileage in social dancing at milonga, compared to me, though I have been dancing far longer than you have.

what it's like to be an advanced, experienced, but non-traveling dancer elsewhere.

This differ scene to scenes. How big is it (as big as yours?) - there are less than 10 cities that have as much tango as yours. with comparable population or more - LA, Portland (unless it has declined), SF, NYC, Chicago (?), Paris, Berlin, Hamburg (?) Tokyo, Seoul (?), Moscow, BsAS. I don’t where to place London, because all from there on the dance forums are critical about London milongas.

There are several that I now don’t know about - Seattle, Warsaw, Kiev, Toronto, etc. There are vibrant scenes in some of the USA metros, Amsterdam, Milan, Zagreb, Prague, Lisbon, St Petersburg, Bucharest, etc.

It will also differ based on what average skill level, whether follower heavy or leader heavy, and other factors.

who've said, to my face, that unless I travel and see tango in other places, I'm not much of a dancer.

Whoa! Honestly in all these years I have not heard anyone express such a sentiment towards anyone else. You certainly are surrounded by some very unique characters. Almost all advance dancers learn and build their skills locally.

Very few have means to travel to increase their skills and fly to take lessons and reach advance skills. I have known some dancers who could afford that but they never moved beyond intermediate skill level.

 

[opendoor]

post scriptum (see above)
Being a "milonguero local" has one major drawback: people know your beginnings. I'm considered musical and discerning. That's why I never get the chance to DJ in my hometown. Organizers think I'm confusing their students. To play music, I have no choice but to get in my car.

 

[Bailango]

post scriptum (see above)
Being a "milonguero local" has one major drawback: people know your beginnings. I'm considered musical and discerning. That's why I never get the chance to DJ in my hometown. Organizers think I'm confusing their students. To play music, I have no choice but to get in my car.

That’s one reason to travel for tango. As a DJ

 

[Brummbaer]

It depends on the situation where you live. I don't live in a metropolitan area. AT exists, but is sparse. It also depends on your teachers and their talents, and then on milongas, or perhaps opportunities to dance, which are readily accessible.

Visiting maestros for workshops can be good (if they teach well), but then you realise your own shortcomings, those of your teachers, and needs for improvement - so, if you can afford it, you go to longer, more intensive, 'courses'. You gain a 'coach' rather than a teacher. Nowadays, of course, other online options are readily available - it's just about finding that appropriate 'teacher', and space and partner(s) for practice.

Nothing wrong with dancing locally - if that's possible. In fact it's great since you have a local social scene with people you can meet shopping (except the supermarket might nean a good drive into town). But, I guess, you also develop Fernweh (even if you didn't previously). You want to improve your dancing by dancing with 'advanced' (beyond intermediate - but, relatively, we're all 'intermediate') dancers. Not that you look down on locals! You gain the skills to dance with many levels and enjoy the experience.

Milongas are not homogenous! Their objectives differ from that early 'tradition', excepy, maybe, in a metropolis. Everyone thinks they're copying the BsAs 'tradition' and they're the only ones keeping that alive in its true format. But they're not (and a few unpleasantly). Some forget the 'social' aspect. Códigos are stretched and adapted to the local culture, so it's necessary to be observant and aware.

 

[JournalInTime]

We are social dancers [...] We are not comparing ourselves to any other dancers, as we dance not to be seen or rated, just to have fun [...] I hope this few words give you enough information to see that you and us are the typical and normal Tangueros.

The specific words I left in the quote help a lot – thank you! They make me pause and notice that, where I live, an unusually large number of dancers aspire to be "more" than social dancers, and dance for reasons other than fun. Whether that's an absolute number or just an unusually large number among the people I know is unclear to me, but I'm not going to stop having fun to investigate it.

There's a milonga somewhere every day [...] I wondered why dancers in my circle also traveled weekly to a milonga 170 km away.

This feels very familiar to me: I could dance with dozens of people daily and sometimes twice daily, if my body and budget were up to it, without having to spend more than 30 minutes on foot or aboard public transit. This is also true for many of my peers, but they travel instead . . . yet, at the risk of sounding like I'm full of myself, they don't dance better than I do. Perhaps it's about what you said:

I was always more interested in the tourist side

Anyway, for me, another thing you said rings true:

I love being greeted with besitos everywhere I go. During the pandemic, I even made a donation to an unpopular teacher couple.

I like being greeted by name and with hugs everywhere; to me, having an acknowledged "tango persona" is a core apect of dancing tango. And during the pandemic, I returned the love – in my case by sending funds to support one of our most cash-poor studios. I don't like their pedagogy, but they have always been very kind to me.

A much smaller minority might go to two or three festivals in year of which two would be in close by cities (one to two hour flight time).

I think I just know strange people. Without even trying, I could name at least 10 social (not professional) dancers here who travel by plane to dance at least once a month.

How many of those do you prefer to dance with. Prefer as in you dance with them because it is a really good dancing experience, not because they are friends.

Quite a few, to be totally honest. I often find myself thinking stuff like, "A is good at D'Arienzo tangos, B is great at anything lyric, C is a pleasure for vals, D hits it out of the park with milonga, and, oh, E has that abrazo!" I can have really good dancing experiences all evening, if I match invitations to the music and my mood.

I have always danced 3 or 4 milongas a month on an average. You probably dance those many in a week.

You probably have 10x mileage in terms of lessons and 5x mileage in social dancing at milonga, compared to me

That's entirely possible. There have been many stretches of my life where all aspects of tango – prácticas, milongas, working with a coach, helping organize and even teach – eclipsed my day job in terms of hours per week.

I am sure you don’t face so much attrition of loss of followers you prefer to dance.

Montréal is a "collector city": a city people move to and stay in. Moreover, it's by far the biggest city in a francophone region (Québec), and many francophones prefer to stay in that region, because moving to an equally big place means moving to an anglophone city. Thus, there's relatively little attrition, save due to the loss of people who'd give up tango anywhere.

Neither here in the dance forums, nor in real life, has any one ever expressed anything like above. Unless there are discussions like these irl where you are, it is like a strawman to me

Whoa! Honestly in all these years I have not heard anyone express such a sentiment towards anyone else.

It has been said to my face as recently as this week, even by people I consider(ed) friends. I'll leave it at that, but no, it isn't an invention or a figment of my fevered imagination.

Very few have means to travel to increase their skills and fly to take lessons and reach advance skills. I have known some dancers who could afford that but they never moved beyond intermediate skill level.

This is part of my puzzling: The world-travelers aren't more or less likely than the stay-locals to be good dancers.

Being a "milonguero local" has one major drawback: people know your beginnings.

For sure they know that! Whether it's a drawback depends on who's talking to whom, and whether it's talking or more like gossiping.

Organizers think I'm confusing their students.

I get this as a dancer at prácticas: Newer dancers see me dance, ask to dance with me, and start posing questions about how and why I do things – and I answer frankly. My answers are not always those of the resident teaching staff, because all of my most influential teachers and coaches were trained differently (at academies), in a different era. And the local teaching staff don't always like that.

Just yesterday, a teacher at the place I supported during the pandemic was telling new dancers to sit back on their heels and to step flat-footed. A young lady asked why I carry my weight over my metatarsals and roll through my foot when I step. I told her about generating forward intention (or "moving hearts closer together," if you prefer) and about fluid weight transfers being a better default than sharp ones, outside of deliberate sharpness for expression. She understood . . . but her nearby teacher really glared at me.

Visiting maestros for workshops can be good (if they teach well), but then you realise your own shortcomings, those of your teachers, and needs for improvement - so, if you can afford it, you go to longer, more intensive, 'courses'. You gain a 'coach' rather than a teacher.

I'm blessed to be in a city with dozens of legitimate teachers, many educated at dance academies, with 20 or 30 years of tango-teaching experience. This is probably why my city has so much tango. In the context of being able to have a regular mentor-mentee relationship with such a person for more than a decade, with personally adapted follow-up on every aspect of the dance (posture, embrace, technique, vocabulary, musicality, shoes, heartbreak, . . .), traveling to spend a few hours with a famous person who won't even remember me next week seems financially and pedagogically inefficient.

 

[brujo]

My distance limit is around a 90 minute drive to tango because of family circumstances and that is as far as I can travel realistically. Luckily Portland is in that range and I have been able to drive back and forth to events like Valentango every day from Wednesday on.

But it’s weird because I’m far enough away that making it to the practicas is super hard but close enough to know all the guys and beginners at my level and chat with them and compare journeys. Or identify the new beginners that are at milongas and have a friend group in three different cities that have tango within that range. I have a list of folks I love dancing with but am also pretty sure they don’t go out of their way to dance with me. Not being in the same city and only being seen at milongas is probably treated more harshly as not traveling to dance as you just seem to others that you don’t care enough about your dance to work on it.

It’s also weird talking to folks that say “oh, you made me feel so welcome at this community practica when I first came out and it made me think of Portland as welcoming” when you don’t live in Portland.

 

[Tangogal]

You all get to dance a lot more than me! Nearest regular milongas are a two hour drive away which is not ideal on the return leg. Weeknights are obviously out since I work 9-5 and I also have many commitments on weekends. I probably could travel more but only managed it once in 2025.

I do attend weekly classes and luckily there are some really good dancers there. They’re in similar circumstances to myself in that life is local and dance has to take a backseat. We stumble along together. Our current teacher is very good but our student numbers are low. There hasn’t been a return to pre-COVID levels.

We do have somewhat irregular practilongas.

I used to travel to festivals and have taken workshops with many of the big names. I also lived in a bigger city that had tango classes, practicas or milongas near daily.

My level is advanced social dancer with room for improvement. Illness and injury kept me from dancing for a while and my stamina is not where it was 20 years ago. It’s hard to imagine what the more could be. More travel and more dancing would still leave me at the level of advanced social dancer.

The people who do get to travel more aren’t any better than advanced social dancers. They are probably even less skilled since they rely on their own repertoire in different locales. They’d probably benefit from a short course of lessons with a skilled instructor.

 

[fiesta0618]

Which said, my entire tango experience has been dented and bruised by people who've said, to my face, that unless I travel and see tango in other places, I'm not much of a dancer.

A barrio dancer like you does have a certain disadvantage. But it has nothing to do with skill--the people who say so are 100% wrong. Rather, the disadvantage barrio dancers face is one of perspective. They have had limited opportunities to observe multiple cultures, and so may have built their skills and knowledge upon some local axioms that go unquestioned in their environment but are far from universal.

But even that limitation probably doesn't fully apply to you, because there is an alternative way to gain perspective. See, there is no need to travel the world to experience different cultures, if representatives of these cultures regularly travel to you where you live. Based on the things you've posted, that sounds like a feature of your scene.

Some people are always looking for ways to inflate their own sense of self-importance, and frequently do so by sneering at others. Don't let the haters get you down!

 

[Tango Distance]

I used to be in a very small community, with little turnover. Then I moved to the big city. There are 36 milongas in 4 weeks, all within about a 90 minute drive of my home, and about half of those are within about 30 minutes. We get festivals of 200, 500, and 500 people each year. A 4th one used to be huge, 600 people, but has struggled since COVID. These events are close to one of the world's busiest airports.

I have done around 20 events in other states, one festival in another state (good number of local ones), and a handful of foreign milongas.

I could be JiT's ideal respondent.

Here's my jumble of thoughts, opinions are my own:

• Someone who says you have to travel to be good is wrong.
• In my mind, travel is a proxy for this: Dancing with someone new-to-you. There is a benefit to doing this. I don't feel I have really conquered something until I can lead it with several people I have never danced with before. Travel is good for that, but festivals that bring in outside people are also good.
• In my old little town, there was a figure I could not, for the life of me, get to work. My teacher covered it -- of course as a choreographed thing it worked in class. I went to an out-of-state festival, and it worked every time, with tens of ladies, on the 1st try! I returned home, and asked the instructor about it. He said people weren't doing it right in the little local town. We were so small doing it wrong had become inbred. The checkpoint of outsiders can be a good thing.
• The dancers in my old little town were good, but the dancers in the big city are generally better IMHO.
• In addition to having a lot of tango, we are also near one of the world's busiest airports. It surprises me at my regular events, how many people I don't recognize, sometimes even half the attendees at a 100+ person event! Many will be visitors, some just back after a gap. I'm fortunate to have a pretty steady flux of new-to-me dancers.

 

[Brummbaer]

traveling to spend a few hours with a famous person who won't even remember me next week seems financially and pedagogically inefficient.

See, there is no need to travel the world to experience different cultures, if representatives of these cultures regularly travel to you where you live.

And maybe that's the point if you live soomewhere more AT isolated. It's about 'legitimate' teachers. Locally there may be little choice, or it's a 'style' of AT you don't like, or their skills (dance and/or teaching) may be limited.

You're correct that some who pass by are just after your money - but maybe it also depends on your needs at the time (and your discernment). Maybe it's vocabulary; maybe some improved explanation of something basic (e.g. actually 'leading' the cross where you'd done the 8CB previously).

So, whilst I agree, if these facilities are on your doorstep, you may have to exercise some wisdom in your choices if they're not.

And, I guess as with another language, you never know your own until you know another (cf. Goethe). If that's on your doorstep, great! It's always good travel with dance shoes to meet locals.

 

[opendoor]

A barrio dancer like you does have a certain disadvantage..

But isn't JournalInTime also a counterexample? Despite his limited radius, he's at home in the world. And on the other hand, there's a type of personality who learns to dance amidst the greatest diversity around, but remains trapped in the same style, substyle, trainer, coach, or school of thought for their entire lives. Even when these people travel physically, they don't take the opportunity to expose themselves to the unfamiliar and the foreign. And of course, the influence of authorities shouldn't be underestimated. I know many tango dancers who simply believe that the milonguero style is the only true religion. And there is the fear of failure and the next greasy pole that holds many people back to develope further.

 

[brujo]

Hate to bring role into this discussion but it also feels that being a lead that travels is less beneficial than being a follow that travels. Was recently at Valentango and we had a lady from our smaller nearby community that went. She had a month of tango classes but a very strong dance background. I danced with her at the start of the first Milonga and when we did it again in three days she was doing beautiful boleos and following super well. Just a night and day difference because of the intensity of the festival followed by how many tips and different leads she danced with.

As a lead, it feels like you just have your own little toolbox of moves and carry those from event to event and city to city. So even though the festivals are great you just get a list of stuff to work over time with.

But then for the follows in the smaller scenes they have the opposite problem. They can learn to follow amazing things like volcadas and do them well in private classes, but the leads in their small places don’t do them at all and they then feel their skills and practice slowly atrophy for that move. Going to places like Instanbul that have a festival every week allows them to grow in their following skill.

Just at the festival I felt the same way, with my lead I just kept identifying more and more things I was doing wrong and needed improving, but following a bunch of different people at both the open role practicas and milongas made a lot of it make more sense. And some of the female leads did mention that it was good to see more men follows that they normally wouldn’t get at home.