This wasn’t the case about ten years ago in Buenos Aires. The deejay was the key to good dancers attending a milonga. Those who know the best recordings for dancing go where Daniel Borelli handles the music. In my opinion, he’s the best deejay in Buenos Aires.

People profess love of tango music and love of tango (or even try to DJ tango music!) but only a very few bother to do the research, talk to the DJs and talk to the milongueros about how music is selected and played for the milonga. If people will do the legwork instead of “relying on their own intuitive genius” about the music or buying pre-set tandas from the Buenos Aires DJs with the biggest names (but not necessarily the best music) and playing them again and again ad nauseum (”It’s from Buenos Aires, it must be good!”), maybe the quality of the music in the milongas outside of Buenos Aires will improve. Perhaps people will also start dancing better when they learn to appreciate the better music - is it too much to hope?

Thanks for all your advice about music and for posting this. Looking forward to reading more about music from you soon.

Irene

I agree with you that it would be enriching for the North American tango community to learn directly from the milongueros like Beto. However, this is almost never possible. Rarely do we see any of the good traditional dancers teaching outside of Buenos Aires - instead, we see plenty of the dancers with the most publicity and hype touring. But publicity and hype does not necessarily translate to good teaching or good dancing.

Organizers outside of Buenos Aires either don’t know enough about the milongueros to risk bringing them to teach in their community, or, even if they are knowledgeable about the milongueros, they don’t think that their students will know enough to attend the classes and make the endeavour financially worthwhile for the milongueros. It breaks my heart knowing that the truly great traditional dancers, who know how to dance and how to teach, are disappearing without getting their knowledge out there just because they have no part of the huge tango publicity machine.

The only solution seems to be to travel to Buenos Aires to learn from the milongueros directly, which is what Man Yung and I are trying to do before it is too late to benefit from their knowledge. However, we’d still be interested to know what suggestions you have about convincing local organizers to bring milongueros to teach in our local tango communities!

Thanks for your comments.

Musicality and music interpretation take years and years to develop…

I know so many who have wasted years studying tango with Argentines who never go to the milongas unless they go for an exhibition.

We don’t have to ask why the level of dancing is so bad in the milongas in any city in the world. It comes down to the teaching and what dancers haven’t learned about dance floor etiquette.

Janis

Thanks for your post on Learning the dance. Man Yung and I went through the same experience as yourself - when we started learning tango from two elegant young teachers, we were often quite upset that we weren’t able to do the moves they were doing so expertly and so elegantly. We were also perplexed why using their moves we were disasters at navigation on the dance floor - it took us months of classes before we could even finish going around once on the dance floor.

There’s a lot of information out there these days, much more than there was five, ten or fifteen years ago, and nowadays we think that it only takes a little bit of diligence, research, and common sense in discerning what is good and what is bad in order not to fall into the wrong path. You are quite right, most of us learn to dance tango because we want to learn how to dance socially - if we don’t lose sight of this fact, and that we learn tango to enjoy ourselves and to connect with our partners in the music, and not to become the next biggest tango stage star or the next nuevo tango guru, things will become a lot clearer.

And we totally agree with you - studying with the milongueros is a must! The milongueros are the ones who really know the dance, all the fanciest and flashiest marketing from the “professionals” will not take away from this fact.

Cheers,

Irene and Man Yung

Thanks for your post on Club Almagro - it is one of those places in Tango that existed before we started dancing that we would have loved to experience. You are quite right about learning by immersion. All the diagrams, essays in the world, or endless debate on Tango-L won’t teach you as quickly and thoroughly as one tanda with a milonguero in Buenos Aires!

I will certainly pass on your regards and best wishes to Osvaldo.

Janis