Tango Etiquette

 

To facilitate crowded dance floors, tango is danced in an anti-clockwise direction with the more advanced dancers towards the centre of the room and beginners close to the outside. To avoid injury on crowded floors, the traditional backward step is usually omitted, together with any high or dangerous kicks.

 

Traditionally the music played in the milongas of Buenos Aires and copied internationally, are played in sets, called tandas. Each tanda consist of three to five tunes, which are selected from one of the groups of either Tango, Vals or Milonga style music.

 

To signify the end of each tanda a music track is played that obviously has nothing to do with tango. This is called the Cortina. The Cortina that we are currently using in our milongas is an Esther Phillips track that is hopefully different, but not too jarring in its effect.

 

The tanda was developed naturally in Buenos Aires to help cope with the shortage of female partners, whilst still allowing couples sufficient time to feel out each others dancing abilities and have some chance of gelling by the last track.

 

The tanda was also very useful when accepting dances from strangers, as you knew that you had only four dances at most with that partner. The more savvy followers would delay starting dancing until later in the tanda and sometimes not until the final dance of the tanda! The alternative and last resort, was to leave the dance floor prior to the end of the tango, which is considered an insult, but sometimes necessary to prevent injury!!

 

It is considered good form to escort your partner back to her/his seat at the completion of the tanda.

 

Again tradition influences the dance list order, with a main group comprising of two tango tandas, one vals tanda, two more tango tandas and finally a milonga tanda. This group is then repeated until the final tanda of the evening, which is traditionally a set of at least two versions of ‘La Cumparsita’, which allows you time to get back to your sweetheart for the last dance.

 

All of the tracks in our tandas were drawn from a list of internationally chosen dance  ‘classics’, so in theory there should not be any duffers and we have a supply of tandas sufficient to last for ten hours without repeating a tanda.