No Time to Tango

There have been many life changes for me over the last few years.  The biggest being that I moved from London where I could dance Tango every night of the week, to a place of no Tango.  Zip!  Fortunately, I still have the music.  It took some time to get used to, but slowly, other things replaced the Tango void.  This is interesting in itself as Tango used to fill a void.

I haven’t danced at a milonga in over a year.  Even so, I have still kept up the blog so that others may find out where to dance.

That time has come to an end.  Something had to give and keeping up this blog is one of them.  I need time to do other things.

So, this is the last post you will see on this blog and the calendar will be removed.  You can still find out about venues and read about my Tango journey.

Adios and Happy Dancing!

Arlene

Milonga Maalbeek – Brussels – A Review

Review of Milonga Maalbeek
De Maalbeek, Hoornstraat 97, rue du Cornet 1040 Etterbeek.
Metro Schuman, bus 36 & 80
9pm – 2 am

We arrived around 11pm. The space is a modern theatre, large, decent sound quality. Use of theatrical lighting, as in Cellule the night before, created atmosphere but made the place very hot. There is a bar in the entrance of the building, away from the milonga space inside the theatre. No food! We were told this is normally a busier milonga but on this particular evening there were 20 people max when we arrived and numbers only went down. Perhaps because the previous weekend was the Brussels tango festival, could be the local tanguera population was recovering.

The greeting at the entrance was polite and reserved. The presence of 6 or so ex-pat Argentineans made us feel more welcome, without them the night would have been really quite solemn. The music was classic dance-able tandas, though the downbeat cortinas did not help the low energy atmosphere. The music peaked around 12:30 with D’arienzo back to back with a tanda of fast milongas, seems to be in fashion in Brussels. Most of the time we were there there only 3 or 4 couples on the dancefloor at any point. At 1:30 the place was emptying out, we relied on the courtesy of a resident Argentine to call us a cab, again hailing a cab would have been impossible and the Metro (15 min walk away) was closed by then. This could potentially be a nice night out if there were more people, but for us it was rather disappointingly flat.

The following night (Sunday) we were in Paris. The downlow from Carlos’ cousin was that Sunday is not a good tango night, the Parisiennes get up for work early on Monday. She recommended a practica that ended at 10:30. We opted instead for dinner followed by “le Crazy Horse” cabaret – well worth a visit for the high standard of choreography, lighting, and performance.

http://www.milonga.be/

Review by:  http://www.carlosyalisontango.com