Slip Slidin’ Away

It’s a cool London Wednesday night and I am fastening my shiny Alanis shoes, perched on a chair in the dark, grungy, beer-scented space so incongruously known as The Dome. I have my usual ants-in-the-pants eagerness to be up and dancing from the very second the buckles are fastened and am already scoping out the scene. The floor no longer appears as Dante-esque to me as it did on my first visit. Within only a couple of months, my eyes have adjusted to London tango. I’m not entirely sure that this is a good thing.

I’ve heard many complaints recently about how difficult it is to get good dances in London. I decide to play the intrepid naturalist tonight so I can report back on local partner-choice customs for my international readers.

For someone who is accustomed to the more formal Buenos Aires milongas, with their neat rows of leaders and followers eyeing each other during the cortinas, the Dome tango jungle is a wild and bewildering place. The music is played in tandas, but, with no cortinas to signal the changes of orchestra, couples enter and leave the floor at will. I spot a few leaders out there whom I would like to dance with but, having no idea as to when they will next be partnerless and available, I lack a good strategy for capturing them.

Most of those who are not dancing fit into two clear categories. The majority stand or sit next to a specific woman, often engaged in conversation. The women have the unmistakeable gleam of tango longing in their eyes, but play a patient waiting game: making small talk and fishing discreetly for an invitation to dance. In Buenos Aires, men and women tend to clump together in homosocial groups: by contrast, the London scene looks, to my outsider’s eye, strangely couple-y and heterosexual to a fault. The other, solo men generally gaze at the dance floor or wear a fierce look which defies approach. Only the beginner men scout the room actively and seek out partners to dance with. The beginner men and your crazy faithful blogger.

Since I assume that the men who sport forbidding expressions do so mainly to deter beginners from requesting dances and since — rightly or wrongly — I don’t consider myself a beginner, I set out on a hunting mission undeterred. I attempt the direct approach. “Would you like to dance?” I ask brightly. My quarry is a complete stranger whose playful, syncopated nuevo style I admired from my seat. “I would love to, but I don’t like this orchestra,” he apologises (a punchy Típica Victor track is playing). Suspecting this to be a face-saving white lie, I quickly beat a retreat. Sure enough, a couple of bars later, when the coast is clear, he takes to the floor with his chosen partner. This is my first lesson in Dome-ian anthropology.

I am beginning to get the lay of the land. Most of the better leaders here, at The Dome, prefer to dance with women they know personally. This is an adaptive behaviour which has evolved because of the extremely uneven — and mostly, frankly, low — quality of the local dancing and the challenging conditions of this slipperiest, most treacherous of floors. So I behave like a local. I seek out men I know.

Standing by the bar, pouring out my glass of tap water, I face a pleasant dilemma. I am sandwiched between a thirsty 4am Boy and a visiting teacher with whom I enjoyed some beautifully fluid dances at a previous milonga. The visiting teacher is smiling at me. I smile back, but opt for trusty 4am Boy, who I’m sure will dance with me once he has rehydrated.

Following 4am Boy’s dynamic, twisty style and myriad changes of direction is a challenge on this skating rink dance floor. Our dancing is punctuated with many exclamations of “Whoops!” “Sorry, I slipped.” “No, it was me, I slipped.” “Sorry, sorry!” “It’s not your fault; it’s the floor.” “Whoa!” “Wheeeeee!” The floor is a demanding mistress: stray one degree from your axis when you are transferring weight and she playfully sends your free leg half way to the splits. It is excellent balance training.

As usual, 4am Boy’s intense, deeply musical dancing leaves me glowing with happiness as we finally leave the floor for the relative stickiness of the sidelines. But there is further pleasure in store for me later in the night. I spot a dancer I’ll call The Gardener, whose no-nonsense Antipodean attitudes I find refreshing. I used to love his dancing when I was a beginner and am steeling myself for a disappointment as we hit the dance floor. Revisiting former favourite partners after a period of years, when your own dancing has changed and developed in the meantime, is a tricky business. They usually don’t feel as good in your arms as you remembered. But The Gardener is a happy exception to this rule: smooth, controlled and playful. And, over the course of the evening, the floor has gained a degree of grip. I speculate that perhaps the dancers’ sweat has condensed and rained down upon her like a fine dew. Or perhaps she has been lightly scuffed by our shoes. I feel an empathy with Mistress Floor. I too am at my best at the end of a long evening. Like her, I need to be tempered by tango.