Would you associate the name PractiMilonguero to a series of interviews? Probably not.
I have said many times that the interviews came about by accident and it is true.
It was the year 2010, Tango Nuevo was in vogue even more in Europe and the United States. I had returned from my tour and I was worried about that situation. I could not admit that a style of tango that has been danced for generations such as the Milonguero, was not mentioned to new students and only one that had just emerged was made known to them.
I am not a foolish person who opposes evolution. I know very well that things change and I am not opposed to it. I just maintain that it should be reported that tango is not a fashionable dance, it is a culture of Buenos Aires that we must respect and preserve.
With that idea spinning in my head, those days I wondered what I could do to spread the traditional tango.
One afternoon, I had just given a private class to a student who asked me which milongas I’d suggest him to go to. He was a very good dancer who liked the Milonguero style; that is why I proposed a traditional milonga to which I usually go.
When I mentioned it, he immediately reacted by saying, “No! I don’t want to go back there, I’ve had a bad experience ”. I asked him what had happened and he related the following to me:
He had come to a woman’s table to ask her to dance. Not only did she not speak to him, but she turned her head away from him. He continued standing there for a moment without knowing what to do and another woman who was at a nearby table and had noticed the situation, offered to dance with him.
Obviously he did not know that in traditional milongas, the invitation is through the “cabeceo”.
I felt very sorry for his experience and I also realized that it was necessary to teach not only to dance, but also to transmit the codes that are used in the traditional milongas here in Buenos Aires. As I have commented in a previous post, for those of us who live in Buenos Aires and dance tango, there is no rush like for those who visit the city. Week by week, we discover the milongas and the codes.
After hearing my student’s experience and making the decision to teach the codes, because as my friend Osvaldo Natucci says, “La enseñanza acorta el calendario” (Teaching shortens the calendar). I decided to open a space where I would organize the music in tandas of only two tangos to have a better opportunity to practice that subtle invitation.
I thought that PractiMilonguero was a good name for the event because it would be a practice, not a milonga. But at that time, the practices were associated with Tango Nuevo so the name had to make it clear what style it was.
I had published an ad in the magazine “El Tangauta”, he had printed flyers that were distributed in the milongas. Everything was going well but a problem arose.
Do you want to know what happened and watch the video? (Click here)