Sitting with a strange man

Apologies! Happy New Year! I did say I get a bit distracted by dance.  After Christmas between going away, writing about dance and actually dancing I am afraid I forgot about the greeting.  I celebrated the New Year at the Sheffield Queer Tango Marathon and continued dancing immediately after midnight.  What a way to start 2019.   If my dances this year continue anything like the way they began, it augurs well.  May yours be as delightful.

To resume - how you arrive at a Buenos Aires milonga, alone or accompanied, determines whether you will be treated as single or not. 

Most immediately being treated as single means, as a woman, you will be seated in the women's section if there is one. Usually you share a small table with another woman or a slightly larger table with three or four women.  By being given a table with others you are already, in a sense, looked after, explicitly by the host and implicitly, sometimes, by those at your table.  The women's section always faces the men's except in El Beso, where I remember, in at least two of the milongas or practicas, the women's area filled both longer sides of the room, because there were so many of us. The advantages of this arrangement are that you have a seat which you keep, there are no visual barriers between the parties making the agreement to dance and everyone knows where to find you.  In a busy milonga, this is invaluable, especially where you are a stranger. 

One of the maddening things in many European milongas is not being able to see some partners because you are both sitting on the same side of the room and those sitting between inadvertently block your view of one another. Men can move to a better position to invite but not everyone likes to go on the prowl for dances.

The disadvantage of the Argentinian system is that if you are finding the milonga trying there is nowhere to break out to, nowhere  - bar the loos, or outside with the smokers - to go to regain your composure.  That said, if you are finding the milonga difficult it is no mean feat to, in that same environment, change a state of mind so you might as well leave.  But, because you sit, almost in solidarity, with other women there is a sense of mutual support.  In my nerve-wracking first week in Buenos Aires I remember being gently encouraged by kind, perceptive, understanding Argentinian women to smile, to look at the men.

In Britain and in Europe women and men can move around more easily.  Some milongas have areas that are more conducive to chat between men and women who arrive alone than in the traditional Buenos Aires milongas where this is virtually impossible. But those areas where you make your own way, socially, are useful given there is, currently, no substitute for the Argentine system which accommodates newcomers well.  Recently, I attended a busy English milonga in a church.  Finding the atmosphere oppressive, I moved between four different spots trying to find peace and composure, eventually discovering it next to a behemoth of a stone pillar from where I neither invited nor was invited but I suspect that was the subliminal point of that choice.  But when one has warm, Latin women at the table and for the evening, women with whom to share recommendations, successes and failures, composure comes more easily, with no need for perch and flight around the room.  

Men arriving alone at a traditional Buenos Aires milonga will be seated in the men's section unless they indicate they will join a mixed group of friends for, say, a birthday party.  If you arrive with a man, you will be seated at a table with him, in the couple's section if there is one, which in many milongas is a 'couples and friends', mixed area. 

The men do not face the women in all the milongas.  In this case there are tables for men and tables for women which may be adjacent to that of the opposite sex.  It is not as easy to invite or be invited but it still works.  A woman would not be seated with a strange man nor vice versa.  Only, that did happen to me once in Gricel. I was put at a large table with a youngish male tourist and felt most uncomfortable - thus do we quickly adapt to other ways of doing things.  Perhaps he felt awkward too.  I do not remember an acknowledgement.  To sit at a table with someone and not even recognise their existence - inevitably we only act thus towards people we care not one jot about or whom we actively dislike.  Only those with the toughest hides will congregate in such watering holes.  Wanting to change the dynamic I asked him some casual question about the environment, probably the kind of thing that I guessed a man might like to be thought to know.  His reply betrayed his own gaucheness. No surprise that this was the milonga with the shoddy music which I left early to José's confessed chagrin.  I have a vague memory of flowers that I do not have with any other milonga so there may have been a  tanda de la rosa.  If so, that is likely when I escaped.

At another, less traditional place: Milonga de los Zucca in Salon Leonesa, I arrived late. Much later still, perhaps because of the hour, a young man with whom I had danced but who turned out to have other designs, came to sit at my table. He tried to engage me in conversation that was not to him evidently unwanted and to eventually make his proposals for the short remainder of the evening about going on elsewhere.  Again, I felt uncomfortable as much just by the fact that he had come to sit at my table as anything else.

Those Europeans who don't like to be seated by a host in a milonga say much about the freedom they demand: to choose their seat, to sit where they wish and with whom. I found and still find this sort of 'freedom' overrated, in fact often detrimental. When you are new, to dance, to a new environment, a new milonga, a new city, it can be useful to be taken in hand, especially when alone.  It can be useful, helpful, less lonely and simply less nerve-wracking to be seated with people who are local and experienced but who have also come alone.  The way they do it in Buenos Aires is a way of being brought into an established community.  It is so different from the tough sink or swim approach with which newcomers and visitors are 'welcomed' in some UK milongas:  walk in alone, sit alone, find your level alone.  No wonder many people, especially beginners, think the milongas can be very tough.  The answer is not, as some do, to create 'beginner milongas'.  And beware adverts for milongas that call themselves 'warm and welcoming'.  Usually, that insistence belies the opposite.

So, supposed constraints regarding the way people are welcomed and seated in a Buenos Aires milonga can be usefully defining. Those who find that that long and naturally evolved system works well, fit into it, They see advantages of women sitting with women, of men with men, of couples together and friends together and the disadvantages of not so doing.