How I learnt to dance both roles II: milongas in the beginning

Part I

I started dancing as the woman in a class but went to milongas right from the beginning, as soon as I heard there was such a thing as social dancing in Argentine tango.  I remember some of us went to milongas in Glasgow with my first teachers for which I will always be grateful.  Milongas were always exciting even if things didn't always go as you hoped and in some places they could be downright scary.  

I kept going to class because I had already been infected with this idea that you have to keep working at your dance in class to be a proper or better dancer in the milonga.  And I wanted to dance as much as possible.  One day I danced 15 days in a row, between classes, practicas and milongas and the nearest of these was half an hour away. Like many people at the start, I had more than got the bug. 

I remember going to practica when I had only been dancing for about a month and asking the teacher if I could join. The teacher was a harsh type, whose dancing I realised later was embarrassingly grotesque.  They said I needed more experience in class before I could attend the practica.  I see now what a harmful thing that was.  The message was "You're not good enough".  That rule was later dropped.  Later still that practica folded when a friendlier place opened, with more community spirit. 

It took me at least months to go to a milonga on my own.  I didn't ask people I met in the milonga to show me things. I don’t think I thought about it. You get so brainwashed by class you think you can only learn from teachers. Looking back, the milongas felt intimidating, both when I started dancing in the woman's role and then later too, when I danced more in the guy's role, especially as I went alone.  I often made myself go. Sometimes I had a terrible time; sometimes it was great.  It was a different sort of intimidation as the guy though.  It was more a sense of: was it going to be good enough for the girl?  The milongas can be intimidating if you are alone and new and you don't know anyone.  Then the woman learns she is supposed to wait to be invited, so she is in a passive role which can become depressing, especially when combined with the other factors.  I didn't have the confidence to look to guys for dances, never mind good dancers.  

I think the intimidation as the girl, in the beginning, also came a lot from the elite group in the milonga at the time, who sat together in a corner, danced together.  Some of the people in this group even said to me, after two or three years when I'd earned the right to speak to them, that it was exactly about that:  earning the right to dance with better dancers.  That's when I wrote Notoriously Unfriendly.  Looking back, it's amazing I survived that environment.  They would say something like "That proves you were tough enough for tango" which is just not how things are or should be.  Those are the kinds of attitudes for which Argentine tango has a bad reputation. As so often happens with controlling types, the unsuitable people get into power, and these controlled local milongas.  Lots of experienced dancers gradually stopped going and on the few occasions I went over the next three years, the milongas had a transient population of mostly new people and students.  But December 2015 is probably around the time I began dancing the man's role regularly so when I did dance it was often in other places.