I heard a few things lately - they seem to have a Nordic slant whereas I am looking south this time of year! Reportedly:
Harrogate tango festival had a good turn-out of about 100 people on the main night. They were mostly people who attended the classes. The DJs were unadvertised, the request on Facebook about who the DJs were was ignored. The DJs were actually the teachers. Things were reportedly traditional including invitation, as was music with a few alternative tracks.
The Great Yarmouth milonga weekend looked nice pic but completely different to the room size that was advertised pic. Be sure to check the hotel's TripAdvisor reviews. Graham Harrad and Rob Barba reportedly played nice sets.
The Ramsbottom milonga weekend was to my knowledge the first milonga weekend in the north. Good foodie destination! Numbers were tops about 30 on the Saturday night, and disappointingly low for the other milongas despite good turn out for a class-heavy festival by the same organisers using the same venue the previous year. Moral and sad hypothesis (?): dancers in the north currently prefer classes to milongas. Northern dancers who don’t might do well to get some decent class and show-free milongas going up there.
Leamington spa festival weekend had a poor room layout and a difficult ronda with a big mix of ages and abilities.
As for the marathons and encuentros, reportedly:
Krakow was not good - poor venue, layout and not great dancing.
Lodz - a guy who went said it was great. A girl who went said there were too many girls!
I asked someone who travels why there are so few milonga weekends in UK. The person said people can go abroad for them and was not alone in remarking how cheap Poland is. It is a question of value for money: Poland: £150 for 5 day in a flat in the city centre. 12 DJs, good breakfast on site, soup in the evening, 90 euros for 3 days + inexpensive travel to get there with far better dancers than the general UK standard. Compare to Bristol: a more expensive encuentro, no food, and no change on £150 for three nights accommodation. I could see the compelling side but also the conflation of milonga weekends with marathons.
Mallorca was great.
It has to be said that when you're stuck in some local UK tango scenes where classes tend to rule, you don't necesarily tend to quibble about the things you go to outside it.
Oslo’s Thursday night regular milonga is very nice in a gorgeous venue. The night can change to Fri/Sat which is deliberate to allow people with fixed weekly commitments the chance to come, but it is always in the same venue. Very pleasant people. Tall men :)
La Mirada encuentro in Tenerife was one I looked into for the space between Christmas and over the New Year, the chance of sun and warmer temperatures weakening my customary fussiness about DJs and resolve against events requiring pre-registration. Last week there was a website note saying - typical of these things - you have to book as a couple or a single guy because they want to gender balance and they’d run out of single women places. My irritation at these things inclines me at these moments to claim a gender-blurred identity. I think it’s a real thing but I forget the proper name. I’d claim minority rights and wrongful discrimination only I think they might push me off to a Queer Tango group where I might not feel queer enough to fit in but I’m pretty sure they’d be more welcoming. On the strength of that, maybe I really am gender-confused. Any chance of an encuentro for that?
Roll on the day when they do show-free, class-free, no pre-registration milongas in different venues between Christmas and New Year on one of the Canary islands. Sun, sea, good seafood and, good music & venue permitting - maybe even some dancing too. What’s not to like? Best of all, no need to beg single guys who don’t need single girls to get in with. I don’t think I’d like to go with the kind of single guy that was happy to register with a girl as a security blanket - which is probably why I don’t know any..
Apparently, most encuentros seem to want you to open up your friends section on Facebook (if locked down) so they can poke about your friends. I even heard one guy had to get a (presumably friendless) facebook account to apply for an encuentro.
La Colmena in Denmark even wants you to say who your top 5 milongueros are, Milongueros on Youtube? Oh no, ones you’ve danced with apparently...
These sorts of places vet you with such flagrant indignity that it reminds me of the intrusive medical checks to which an elderly female Italian friend told me she was subjected to upon application for a job here, post-war. And then although they vet you, they still list their rules, as if to say “we well and truly checked you out, only our process of sniffing round your friends isn't really enough or we're not very good at doing it so you’re only here on sufferance...."
It's important to keep calm and recall like attracts like, in dance, life, thought process and this is a helpful thing:
"In case in your general "tanguero" life you somehow missed that encuentros are Not For Everyone and you missed it also in the application an vetting process.... let us remind you There Are Rules” (usually on the website)
The Embrace photos from Riga were nice. Standard gender balanced stuff, encuentro standard creepy “we investigate who you are to keep out the riff raff”. The funny thing about these sorts of events is that even if you register as a couple, there can be rules to keep you apart..
A: When will one of these things resist the rules section? Too bad about "don't dance several tandas in a row with one person".
B: Wow. Never seen that as a prohibition.
A: Oh I've seen it before, more than once.
B: I'm tempted to write a spoof tragedy comic strip in which a guy and girl meet, dance, fall in love... only to be torn apart by encuentro rules.
Finally, from Stockholm based The DecaVitas, I saw this video today and thought too fun not to share!
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