Tuesday 2 April 2019

Closed events

Linlithgow Burgh Halls


I want to pick up on what MOCKBA said about the 'committee vote' issue regarding closed events.  I understand that objection to be that there is something distasteful about the selection of attendees to closed events like marathons or encuentros.  One argument against these is that milonga culture is traditionally open to all who understand how things work in a milonga.  Obviously if someone behaves in a way that is going to physically harm others they are likely to be ejected, as one would expect, but otherwise, milongas tend to be open. 

There are variations.  I have heard about milongas in Europe that are more or less homophobic or can be on certain days or when certain people turn up.  In Buenos Aires at least three years ago you were asking for a lot of trouble dancing with the same sex in a traditional milonga.  You can argue that view is old fashioned, politically incorrect, illegal, out of step, out of date.  But attendees in these places tend to be over fifty, often well over sixty. They are not going to be around forever and there is also a view that they are protecting a traditional cultural form.  Buenos Aires is not London.  It is culturally,  a very different experience.  

I have less tolerance, repulsion even, for what used to be a milonga in Sheffield in the north of England that wanted to say it was a little corner of Buenos Aires in Sheffield.  I thought it sounded lovely but what it meant in practice was that they wanted to run a milonga so traditional that women dancing together was in no way acceptable.  So said the very uptight organiser to me.   If it was that traditional they wouldn't have teachers over all the time, because traditionally, recall, people did not learn to dance tango from dance class teachers.  Even today young Argentinians will say that people learned to dance at home, with friends, in parties.   That milonga no longer runs for, I would imagine, obvious reasons and has become only a practica where same-sex dancing apparently is OK but I cannot now imagine going.

In Spain and in Argentina there is disbelief and disgust for the kinds of selection to closed events that you hear about in other parts of Europe. Some organisers demand that you have or open up your Facebook accounts so they can poke about among your friends, to see if you know the right people! You have to answer intrusive, ridiculous, questions about such as who is your favourite European milonguero, how many encuentros you have been to and so on.  It's horribly undignified and demeaning.

But in Europe, people say we do things differently here.  Tango, and dancing to it, emerged in Buenos Aires to fill a need.  I tend to view the emergence of encuentros and marathons as a response to a need.  Local dancers are not finding the music and dancing they want locally, or even when they travel to other local milongas.  So, they have made something different - something which seems to work and for which there is a market - at least for now.   But as Mockba's comment elicited, there is a world of difference between being invited to an event and applying to go to a closed event.  In one, you have the rigamarole, practical disadvantages and humiliation of selection and in the other, you don't.  Plenty of people though, don't like closed events and many  - probably the majority - can't afford that sort of trip.  I hope that encuentros and marathons are a stop-gap until there are more and better local milongas, especially in the cities where you would expect to find them.  But in Edinburgh, there are nearly half a million people, the tango scene has been going for over twenty years and it still doesn't have a regular Friday or Saturday night milonga so it is not a destination for a weekend of tourism and tango and there are as yet no signs that it will become so.

I made a brief foray to the Bristol (UK) encuentro in 2014 which ran I think twice.  I did not enjoy it. I felt trapped and stressed and out of place. It was a hothouse atmosphere with huge DJ egos and people stopped dancing to applaud songs I just thought it weird to applaud - weird to applaud at all actually. I never saw that happen after a tanda in Buenos Aires. It required registration but it was the first time they ran it so I doubt they were that fussy. After long delay I started going to events requiring registration last autumn for the reasons others do, outlined above. But a lot of these events struggle to find enough people to go. The Marbella event in November which required registration had a hard time attracting people. I was one of a scant handful of non-Spanish residents who went - we were possibly only two, me and a prickly Swede. The Murcia event was better but hardly packed to the gills. I had a random message recently on Facebook from a stranger inviting me to his festival in Spain. If people struggle to find attendees for open events it could be a warning about difficult it can be to get people to turn up. Similarly, the milonga weekend in Ramsbottom must have, sadly, left the organisers heavily out of pocket.

A view in favour of invitation-only events is that it is an opportunity to get your friends together -  to see and dance with the people you like and that you rarely do see or dance with. Who would censure a private party?  Milongas can be harsh, hurtful, toxic, stressful environments, especially I think for women and yet you can also find wonderful experiences.  So it would not be surprising if people wanted to create private, more intimate events with like-minded people where the atmosphere was more likely to be enjoyable and cherished as such.  You can rarely find though, enough people locally to make this viable.  A milonga is exciting partly because of the strangers, the friends of friends perhaps, hence the attraction of international, invitation-only events.

One thought against regular closed events is that there is an impact on the local dance community because a private milonga isn't quite the same as a private party among just friends.

Here is an illustrative example of a closed encuentro, Sueño de Escocia, that was run locally here in Linlithgow Burgh halls in central Scotland last year. The low-key website that there was, has gone but there is still video.  I was not invited. I knew the hosts before they moved to Scotland.

Five or six years ago I started dancing occasionally at the special events at Eton, attended at the time by this couple and many of the better dancers in Britain.  This couple was very different when I met them there. They were in a set of confident, polished people who all knew one another and were very choosy.  Next to that set, I felt like the poor, visiting relation when, after one of these events, a large group of us went out for dinner.  I was ignored by that group and if spoken to, heavily patronised.  Some aspects of those events could be a bit like that, pretentious, monied, very southern, and it is why a lot of people from outside the area stayed away or did not return.  But those milongas were also very popular.  The floor was good, the floorcraft was generally good for the numbers, the ronda was slow but it was usually packed and the music could be good.  They were  - and still are, in a new location - open to everyone which brought criticism of gender imbalance but that didn't stop people coming.

Now that this couple who danced there  - Kiwi, not southerners - have moved here, I go to the occasional milongas they run.  It is the best around, bringing in people from Edinburgh, Glasgow  - the twain never usually will meet - and many other areas.  The floor is good, the venue fresh and nicely presented, the food is healthier and better than average and the hosting is warm.  I preferred it when the host DJd but I think he prefers to dance!





I know by sight probably most of the people in that video who dance in the UK.  I don't know why I wasn't invited and I didn't give it much thought at the time.  Perhaps because one of the hosts had spoken with me about closed events earlier in the year and they knew I was not that keen. Perhaps because I'm just not "in" with any of that group in the video - neither the Scottish lot nor the English group. It's a set, a group, an in-crowd.  You have to be part of it.   You could 'apply' on the website but the vibe and rumour were that attendance was by invitation - it was unusual that way.  Most advertised events are either straight up about it being invitation only, or they say you have to register (meaning apply and for many events, and in some countries more than others, go through a hidden selection process).  In this case it was not clear.  Perhaps they were hedging their bets in case not all of the people who were invited accepted and they needed a pool of applicants as a top-up.  But who wants to go where they are not invited?   And yet a lot of people do feel hurt. They hear about something, they are not invited, they don't know why, they feel hurt, excluded, not good enough. One feels for them but personally, I just find it usefully clarifying.  If a friend had behaved unpredictably, I might feel differently but that is not the case.

These hosts have used various venues for their local milongas, open to all, as they search for the right place.  Some might say it was slightly distasteful that they used a local milonga to do a dry run of the venue which they then used for the encuentro.  But perhaps it was nothing so calculating.  You could say they tested out the hall on the local oiks who in the overwhelming majority were not then invited to the special event. You could say that was elitist.  But then, testing the venue was a sensible thing to do and I can't say that I blame them. You could also quite plausibly say that the milonga was a standalone event and nothing to do with the encuentro.  And we, milonga-goers were fortunate it was in a particularly attractive venue. You would be hard pressed to say that the Linlithgow encuentro was flagrant, in your face and a kick in the teeth to the locals. You could not even call the website 'advertising'.  It was all very hush-hush; perhaps most locals did not know it was happening.

Sueño de Escocia was so quietly organised I only heard about it on its opening day, from a friend in England who was also not invited.  Later, I heard too from someone who was very keen to go, applied and didn't get in - a lovely dancer, also in England. And I heard from a so-called friend of the organisers, again in England, who also wasn't invited.  I only heard these stories at different times, by complete chance, from a handful of people but already you can see that a number were put out or upset. Equally, I'm sure that the 150 odd people or whatever it was that went, had a lovely time. What will undoubtedly be true is that things are clearer to those not invited.

I went to those hosts' next open milonga in December.  I was on my way back from Glasgow and wasn't really in the mood.  I peeped in to see if there was anyone I wanted to dance with, else I would have gone on to do some local tourism. There wasn't, but just as I had decided to go elsewhere, I was spotted and warmly hauled into the room by the laughing organisers.  It was as nice a welcome as I have always received in Scotland at their previous events. They are good hosts and good dancers. So, do I think there is something wrong with invitation-only events and this event, illustratively? No, I have no criticisms. The hosts ran a party for their friends, for the people they thought would gel and it looks like it went very well. I think that's to the good. The fact is these places have a limit on space. Why shouldn't they get their own friends together if they want to? It's the same in people's houses. You have a party. You can't fit everyone in who you wanted to come or you don't think person A would go so well with that mix of people so you see them in other places or have another party and invite them next time. I think that's just normal social life. I have friends I see in the milonga, friends  I see in restaurants, friends I email, friends I see just at sailing. I don't get upset because some of my sailing friends meet up privately because that would be weird.

There are obviously some issues with holding a private event and closing the doors to the locals or to say, that nice dancer and nice person who clearly wanted to go and couldn't. But in this case these people moved to Scotland and they had a lot of friends from the places they lived in or danced in before.  They wanted to invite them, see and host them in their new area.

An event where you have to apply and be selected according to hidden criteria is a very different creature compared to one to which you are invited.  Think of it in dance terms.  In the latter you know you are wanted, as with a dance where you are invited by look.  In the former you are asked to essentially walk up and beg....and still you may get turned down! Not very like milonga culture at all.


6 comments:

  1. Well since you shout out to me, I guess I need to respond. I touch on the paradigm "only mean dancers are great" in my piece on "Soy mendigo", trying to explain that there is nothing about being nosy or poison-spirited which would make your dancing better. All there is is what the statisticians know as Berkson's Fallacy (aka "all handsome blokes are jerks"). As to the inner workings of the invitation process, I don't know if you really want to know all. I am not Upton Sinclair and an encuentro isn't a sausage but the process of making either may scare the uninitiated. People are mostly invited because of their perceived influence. The few single followers are invited because of the away they hold with leaders. The lists are supposedly secret but they are secretly shared with the key opinion leaders who ensure that their friends get in and their supposed enemies are downvoted (if you once turned down dances with someone who grew in technique and social standing later, then beware). And then everyone from regular participants to the committee members advocates for a friend or two, with mixed results which depend on hard one is willing to push. The less well-off locals get the worst results, unfortunately, because they can't brag about travel to Argentina or to select out-of-town events, and they know fewer influential dancer who'd push on their behalf, so they just get a weekend without any milonga (as local milongas are canceled because there is an Encuentro in town). If I am an out of town guest, I may still like the outcome, but the sausage wasn't made with some blood, some stink, and some scurrying rats :)

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  2. That's an interesting theory. I think it's useful though to look at the simplest explanation as to why people are invited. If you were to run a private dance party who would you invite and why? I would invite the people I like and like dancing with - nothing more complicated. I wouldn't even have thought of "influencers" or know who they are. I think there are networks of friends though.

    I don't for a moment imagine I was invited as an 'influencer' to the marathon I went to. I think it was simply that I knew the hosts, we got on, I had danced with one of them several times, I had travelled to their milonga, they knew me to be pro-queer tango and that I danced both roles. I was about to book something else but decided to go because it's nice to feel wanted, I liked the hosts, a friend was thinking of going, it was an easy drive (or would have been if I hadn't made it into another mega road trip), I was curious about a queer tango weekend and this one had the advantage that at least I would know two or three people. So I think it had nothing to do with 'influencers' on the inviting or accepting side. The people who went meet each other regularly at similar events.

    A circulated list is pretty distasteful. What makes you think there are such things? I think that would put off plenty of people and more likely backfire than attract. And if there had been some such thing going round, given that it was an intimate event, I think I'd've heard about it. But then I recently learned that many in my town are vehemently against making it a greener, healthier and more people-friendly place so what do I know of human nature!

    Thanks for the reminders about Soy Mendigo. An English translation is here.

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  3. What makes you think there are such things?
    I am an event organizer (and a co-organizer of closed events) and I only speak from my personal experience.Of course it is not "just influencers" who get invited, but it starts from them and from the members of their inner circle.

    It's great and to a large extent necessary to invite people you personally like (as well as to invite as few abusive / manipulative / toxic people as possible) but it is by no means sufficient. Most dancers will not come just because they were invited by someone who likes them. Most people need an assurance that they will have great experience. It's the venue, the DJs, food and drink, but first of all - who else is going there. The list of dancers themselves is the strongest assurance of their great experience. So the role of key opinion leaders can't be underestimated. If a respected dancer N is going, and telling it to others, that's great (good people without social media presence lose out, because their decisions to attend aren't as motivating). But if an influential organizer X feels slighted (maybe not comped, maybe some of X's friends didn't get invited) then X will tell people that the event is subpar and neither Y nor Z are going, that's bad.

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  4. "Most dancers will not come just because they were invited by someone who likes them." [and likes dancing with them]. I guess that's why I don't organise events :)

    "Most people need an assurance that they will have great experience. It's the venue, the DJs, food and drink, but first of all - who else is going there. "
    I find a good experience is very unassurable but the fact that you know you are wanted there has high feelgood factor. In assuring a good time through other things, there are so many factors and taste is very variable, most obviously in music and dance style. That is why I have tried a lot of different things, because there just aren't many places where you are likely to get a repeat good experience. So much is down to chance and usually my best experiences and those of many friends has been when they have encountered a stranger - not someone they knew was going to be there. In fact invariably, when I travel for dance, my best experience is the beach I found or the art gallery or the museum. More rarely it's a guy I danced with, even less so an event itself. Good times in tango are elusive. It's like the music - you seek, you seek and you so rarely find. The quest for good dancing is largely, like the music, a lament.

    There are plenty of good dancers who dance to bad music and I just can't do that, so for me it used to be the music first. I find that does a job by itself of selection, though in Europe, I wish it did a better job. Now if I travel it's usually for other things like tourism, to catch up with friends or curiosity about an event and the milonga is an extra. Now I don't bother asking for a sample set list as so few give it and I just take my chances with the music because most of the time (unless in e.g. Buenos Aires) you take your chances with it anyway. So in short my commitment to the milongas, psychologially and just going at all, has slipped considerably.

    As for social media, I have to disagree. Some of the people I like dancing with most aren't on social media. We email to ask each other about events. I would never, ever make my choices based on e.g. a notoriously unreliable list of Facebook 'attendees'.

    As for what organisers say of things, I think people are aware enough of the vested interests there not to pay too much too much attention to that.

    I'm very surprised though. You sounded in your earlier comment as though you weren't a fan of closed events, yet you run them?! Why? And do you use these lists as described?

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  5. The unpredictable, fleeting nature of tango happiness lol, you are preaching to the choir. Quoting Heraclitus, you can't step into the same tanda twice. But people have this urge to control the uncontrollable, and to seek reassurance in repeating the elements of the past experience. And in the broader statistical sense it works ... the song and the partner may not work as well as before, but the more people around you are excited and eager and looking forward to the experience, the better the event works overall. Even if they are excited for a wrong reason and the specific moment of bliss they anticipate isn't gonna come again. It's still better to be optimistic :)

    And I'm qa bit surprised myself, how I ended up on an Enc committee if I made no secret of my distaste for closed events in the past. There may be two reasons. One is that it was a new event under new management who never organized anything bigger than a mini-workshop before, and they wanted to tap into my years of organizer's experience. Another is that the tango festivals are a dying art form, and I'm ready to give up on one of the two festivals I built. Exploring, exploiting, and hopefully a little bit subverting the Encuentro format may be a logical transition. I am actually cautiously optimistic that one can do a better job within the formally closed-event framework, with warmer vibes and stronger local community inclusion. Time will tell.

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  6. Very true about festivals. When people travel for tango, they want to dance socially. I keep hearing people say they find it exhausting to do workshops and dance at night. Many prefer to use the daytime to dance in the afternoons which are less frenetic than the evening or to explore the new area and dance in the evening.

    But the idea of a closed event with "stronger local community inclusion" sounds contradictory. The Linlithgow event didn't look like it had that many locals and I saw no local advertising on e.g. Facebook / local tango websites. But if one was going to invite a bunch of locals and shut out the rest, it could be asking for a lot of trouble.

    On the other hand, people are making these groups because they aren't enjoying something about their local scene - the music, the dancing, the lack of novelty, or they are just looking for people who like the things they do, be it guys not asking directly for dances or just a kind of dancing that is more focused on the partner than on showiness.

    That said, I heard someone - a very good dancer - at an encuentro we were both at vow that they were never going to another closed type event. Why? Mostly, all the rules, also the hothouse atmosphere, the same people in the same room each day....

    But *that* said, the marathon I went to was a cosier, more intimate event, more international. A lot of the cosiness I think had to do with the fact that many people already knew one another and people ate together quite informally whereas at the other event there was no food at lunchtime and the dining was more formal.

    Instead of an encuentro locally I would prefer an open weekend of one long milonga that atttracted people from further afield so visitors could do tourism or see friends around that. One good quality Saturday night milonga, quarterly, would be great. Something like the Salon De Oranjerie.

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