Being in his festive company can validate me as a decent person worth taking a chance on. If the head honcho is a guy, I offer him tribute like sharing wine or something like that. If it’s someone younger, I ignore her because the line to dance with her is way too long and I need to earn the milonga’s respect first.
![last man sitting last man sitting](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ti6JVOlKquM/maxresdefault.jpg)
If it is an older woman, this is the person I dance with first. In my experience, this is typically an older man or woman. This can easily be identified as who everyone goes and greets. Sometimes the social anchor is just a regular that everybody knows and loves. What I do is I spend the first 15 – 20 minutes to see who the head honchos of the milonga are.
![last man sitting last man sitting](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/Uu6cqFfytgwfa6Yo7JQ9rm-1200-80.jpg)
While everyone says they watch to see how a person dances, I don’t look at the dance floor. Now that would be nice, but I find that most of the time, I need to make my own luck. The other part is as an outsider, I think people expect that they will be welcomed with opened arms. I’m sure someone out there will have a bad time because I didn’t get to them, but we all do what we can. I make myself available to help people meet each other by introducing people to one another. I make a big effort to welcome as many people as possible, and yes I barely dance at my own milonga. It is our responsibility as host/organizers to set that tone or else someone else will. Attagirl… it’s chataceo time.Ī problem I see is that some organizers do not have control of the tone of their event. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been away a long time’, she chatted back. ‘I bet you know a lot of people here’, I chatted. After a while, I was joined by another fugitive. I went straight to the large, brightly-lit dining room. The lay-out of the dance floor encouraged dancers to congregate in one particular corner of the room, putting short people at a distinct disadvantage. Their gazes crossed mine without even a blink. So, it’s my turn now, I thought, this is how it feels. I was warmly greeted at the entrance, but many of the other ‘amigos’ were mostly looking for, and seeing everyone, except, you know, me. It felt as if, on arrival, someone had thrown Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak over my body.
![last man sitting last man sitting](https://image.freepik.com/free-photo/young-man-with-laptop-sitting-floor_23-2147577277.jpg)
I recently went to an ‘invitation only’ marathon. The disadvantages, well, the investment in time for talking, where you could be checking your iPhone. The advantages are: self- expression, clarity and discretion. I started to advise newcomers to talk to as many people as possible, a method known as chateceo, disclosed to me by women, of course. As a result, everybody is primarily reconnecting with people they know, which, to outsiders may appear as excluding them. Many of them are old friends, so our codigos have watered down. Our followers and leaders mingle chaotically in our bar area. After that incident, we, the cold crowd, did some internal investigating. A stranger got up and said loudly “You are the most arrogant, cold lot I have ever seen in tango”, his arm making a wide sweeping gesture to include everyone present. Once, during an announcement, I asked rhetorically if ‘everybody was having a good time’. Our milonga’s lack of an explicit policy gets us into trouble. After everybody magically hooks up with a dance-partner, I have to walk to the other side inconspicuously to see who else was scanning while she should be focusing, or the other way around. At encuentros, I am usually the last man sitting. My eyesight fails me in low light, I am focusing when I should be scanning, or the other way around. Unfortunately, I am regularly struggling. Clearly the tango community loves to discuss these mysterious, wireless communications preceding dances. I am one of them, I guess.Īs a milonga organiser you are supposed to have an official position on inviting codes, but, I don’t.
![last man sitting last man sitting](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UCiZet5rwL0/maxresdefault.jpg)
Men frown: to many of them this cabeceo stuff is a skill at which they may potentially fail gloriously. I notice, that women’s eyes glisten whenever they talk about the intimate eye-to-eye communication, the little nod of consent, or, the polite turning away in rejection. Subtlety, or etiquette, were not really the thing when growing up in my family.
#Last man sitting code
It was about some code I had broken, but don’t ask me which one: when discussing inviting codes in tango, I feel quite lost. It was remarkable, because we hardly knew each other. I thought I had my cabeceo under control until someone came to the bar of our milonga to tell me our relationship was over.