It’s an unlikely venue for a milonga: a huge, echoey sports’ hall, complete with bleachers at one end; white divider lines to remind us that the dance space also doubles as a football and basketball pitch; and grubby blue-and-white walls with ancient tin advertisements for empanadas, football boots and car tires. The music, provided by the ubiquitous DJ Mario from inside a tiny booth, sounds a little distorted through the ancient speakers (in the more textured, melodic tangos you lose a lot of detail). The rusty whirring fans are louder than the bandeoneons. Yet this is as close as you can get to the Mecca of tango, the birthplace of the subtle and elegant Villa Urquiza style with which I am so obsessed, the milonga of milongas (“la milonga del mundo” as they call it in Spanish, which I’ve roughly translated in the title of this entry). I feel there ought to be some kind of tango equivalent of the Greenwich meridian here and all other tango clubs, milongas, theatres, practice spaces, etc. should be mapped according to their distance from Club Sunderland.
It’s the off-season here (the weather is hot and sticky and the Christmas holidays are approaching) so some of the regulars are missing. At its best, Sunderland is packed with long tables full of well-established professional couples and their friends. But even so there is the usual mix of extremely beautiful young couples and older locals gliding elegantly around the floor. I particularly love to see the older couples. While in many other countries people of their age would be stuffed into armchairs watching television in a stupor, here they are out drinking wine and dancing until four in the morning. The men are in dapper suits, doused in some admittedly rather foul-smelling local aftershaves, with what hair they have left slicked back with gel; the women, with their carefully dyed and styled hair, squeeze their surprisingly firm curves into body-hugging shiny dresses and even catsuits that express the fashion preferences of a previous decade, their feet sparkling in vertiginous, lovely Comme Il Faut sandals.
I am meeting friends here: in the tradition of this blog à clef, I’ll baptise them Wright, Greenstone and The Philosopher. Greenstone and The Philosopher are a professional dance couple who live abroad but visit regularly. Both of them are tall and extremely handsome. We manage to bag a table right on the dance floor and begin by fortifying ourselves Argentine-style with empanadas, beef and red wine which we plan to convert into pure tango energy. Greenstone and The Philosopher soon take to the floor and set a high bar for the night’s dancing.
Unlike most of the milongas I go to, Sunderland is primarily a milonga for couples or groups of friends. There are a few brave souls who venture out there alone, mostly men. I dance a tanda with an impeccably turned-out older gentleman who sits near us at a table labelled with his Christian name, watching the dancing and nursing a single glass of whisky. And there is a certain amount of partner swapping. At one point, I catch the eye of a friend of mine who is a lovely dancer. He discreetly asks his girlfriend’s permission before giving me the nod, though – something he would not feel the need to do in most other settings. But mostly you go to Sunderland to dance with the people you have come with. I can feel my blood pressure lowering. There is no need to look around, to case the joint, to try to catch some people’s eyes and avoid others, to handle the politics of the situation, to try to get dances with the best dancers without seeming too desperately eager and to avoid the clumsy and the creepy. And I am here with two fabulous male dancers.
The Philosopher projects as much warmth into his dancing as he does in real life and has an intense and precise musicality. He is definitely one of my favourite partners. And it is always a pleasure dancing with Wright. His speciality is really allowing the woman not just to follow, but to dance, to contribute. Some men are very controlling on the dance floor and I sometimes feel like a puppet in their arms. Wright gives me all the space and time in the world to add my own interpretations of the music by varying my decorations, the cadence of my steps, etc. I try to express all the little fiddly twiddles of the violin and runs on the bandoneon keys with tiny movements of my feet and I love playing with my partner’s legs and feet in the tango equivalent of footsie. We do a lot of cuddling between songs on the dance floor, holding the final position of each song almost until the next one begins. This feels healthy and natural and good for my oxytocin levels, rather than creepy, sexual or overly intense. We joke about technical issues and choices of musical interpretation, little moments in the dances that went well or not so well. Small mistakes have us giggling and we smile with satisfaction at moments that hit the spot. It feels chummy and collegial, rather than flirtatious, which is exactly the spirit I appreciate in my partners.
The performances at Sunderland are usually of a high standard and tonight’s is no disappointment. The young couple who perform (Roberto Leiva and Maricel Gomez) have a style of dancing that I find particularly congenial and which harmonises surprisingly with the mood of the entire evening for me. There is a lightness and a joyfulness in their dancing and they are both equally playful, filling out their steps with a multitude of delicate adornments. Their feet are like four tiny sparrows flittering and fluttering about near the ground. Like many dancers, I suspect, I always feel influenced by the performance and find myself mirroring elements of the dancers’ style in my own movements, even when I don’t want to. But in this case, it is a pleasure to be infused with a little hint of the essence of Roberto and Maricel.
The only slightly awkward part of the evening is the broody presence of a guy I see around a lot and always avoid dancing with. He is sitting at a table with two women, with whom, for some reason, he does not dance. (I suspect their dancing sucks.) He stares longingly in our direction for what seem like long stretches of time. This is not as strange as it might seem, since it is normal to look at people you want to dance with. That is how tango communication works – it’s all done through eye contact. And it is natural for him to want to dance with two very good female dancers. The only difficult thing for me is that I like him as a person, but I just cannot dance with him. I decide to behave as a Argentine would. There is a clear rule here: you are never obliged to dance with anyone (unless you are a taxi dancer and being paid to do so). This is true even if you are best friends, even if you sit at a table with them and exchange your most intimate secrets all night long. Perhaps if they saved you from drowning and gave your first-born a kidney you might deign to endure one tanda with them out of gratitude. But otherwise, forget it. Personally, I think this is a useful rule. It means that you don’t have to cut people out of your circle of friends or be actually rude to them to avoid feeling obliged to dance. Dancing remains a pleasure, not a duty. But I´ll leave you with that etiquette question to ponder for now.
