TANGO WAYS

M I L O N G A
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Dancing in a milonga is a little bit like driving on a highway. There are lanes: usually two, an inner lane and an outer lane. You can't move from one to the other without looking first to make sure that you can do so safely. Generally it is preferable to be in the outermost lane, because then you have one less side to have collisions on.

The middle of the room is a definite no-go area. Dancing there is tantamount to taking a stroll on the middle of a highway median. It causes potential danger to yourself and your partner and everyone around you. There is really no excuse for moving back and forth across lanes or cutting across the room.

There is a simple truism that eludes too many of our tango friends: Tango is not a race: there is no finish line. Therefore, there is no reason to overtake. You can dance as fast or slow as you want and take as big steps as you want, but we all need to move around the dance floor at relatively the same speed. Patience! We have available to us a number of techniques to slow ourselves down when the pair in front of us is not advancing quickly: Make a big step and then pause. Or turn and turn and turn, always moving forward a little bit with each turn. Or take backsteps, but of course never taking a big backstep against the line of dance. There's nothing wrong with covering miles and miles doing little circles behind the person in front of us, waiting for them to move on. And of course there's the simple rockstep, easy-peasy and fun to play with musically. Being patient gives you a chance to be creative in response to your environment (a beautiful thing), rather than show off your imagination by dancing as though you were in a vacuum (not lovely at all).

By the same token, you may have learned some very expensive figures, but you should at all costs avoid doing stationary figures on a crowded floor. Learn to make them move incrementally. Keep them advancing! After all, we don't just dance with our partner, we dance with the entire room.

When you start dancing in the middle of a song, you'll discover that your colleagues have already established a ronda, the revolving circle of dancers that you have to join. You don't do this by plonking yourself smack-dab in one of the lanes, having a wee chat with your partner, and then launching off. This will make people pile up behind you or, worse, overtake you, probably hitting someone else in another lane. Your own bad habits might not get your partner hurt, but they're likely to cause someone else to have a collision.

Zigzagging is a big no-no, as is cutting across the room. In Buenos Aires, no matter how elegant or musical you are, if you cut the floor like a jigsaw you are considered a jerk.

1. There is no reason in a salon to overtake. Overtaking is bad form.

2. You can't stop the flow of traffic for more than a few seconds. Otherwise, the leader behind you will be forced to overtake you, switch lanes, and risk hurting someone else.

3. Stay in your lane! If you move diagonally to the line of dance, you're asking to get hit. Or, by moving suddenly in front of someone else, you may cause them to get hurt. Just because your partner doesn't get hurt doesn't mean that the two couples behind you won't bump because of your sloppy floorcraft.

4. New York has a bad reputation for floorcraft. We all have a responsibility to change this. Our partners' achilles tendons will appreciate this.

5. Exercise extreme caution when leading and executing boleos. People can really get hurt. If you are led to do a high boleo, you have the option to keep it low. If you lead a high boleo, you must be certain that you will not hit anyone.