The Rendez-Vous Roberto+Vio 2025 is coming soon, the weekend of 21.June!
We began last year to to build TangoForge’s own environment for dancing, the Ballhaus at Domaine Valent.
Our main inspiration is Tangoloft at Gerichtstraße 23 in Berlin, where Roberto and I grew into our partnership. Mona Isabelle and Henning Klose assembled a luxurious décor of antiques, candles, fresh flowers, charm and elegance in every corner. Henning committed that it should always feel like his living room and Mona infused the room with joy – an electrifying welcome. Tangoloft was precious to nearly everyone who ever visited. It elevated dancers.
I like to tell people that the best job I ever had was lighting the candles at Tangoloft. This was not actually a job, it was an honor and privilege when we taught just before the milonga. To circulate the room lighting more than 100 candles allowed me a taste of Mona’s power to create place and space that could dramatically, palpably, nourish and inspire.
We were overjoyed that people who attended the Rendez-Vous 2024 already commented on a resemblance to Tangoloft, however preliminary.
The décor is a mix of cement walls, gilt mirrors, chandeliers, and antique candelabras full of candles. That’s the Tangoloft dimension.
Our Ballhaus is unusual for European milongas in one crucial aspect. Only one third of it is dance floor. Most milongas and events give such priority to the dance floor that they all but ignore the time dancers spend off of it. They give a lot of attention to the surface of the dance floor; very little to the environment for the all-important cabeceo. They throw some chairs at it, and maybe some light, but few organizers think about the experience of those who are seeking it.
I went to one event where the cabeceo was supposed to happen either on the pitch-dark edges of a very large room ringed by lonely chairs or in an overlit and cold hallway with only 2 or 3 “seats” (a box, a table, two plastic chairs). I remember another event where the only seating was in an ante-chamber with no view of the dance floor, a room which also housed the air-conditioner. A welcome respite for hot dancers coming off the floor, but impossibly uncomfortable for people waiting for cabeceo.
This is not the place for explaining how fabulous, modern, and important the cabeceo is. Check out: In Defense of etiquette 2023: Part I: Codigos, In defense of etiquette: Part II: Cabeceo, In Defense of Etiquette III: The Mirada, Pleasures of the Cabeceo, The reverse cabeceo, and our Etiquette Guide to the Cabeceo and Beyond.
The cabeceo requires density and cross-cutting gazes. That means people need to be facing each other and passing each other. To create this, there needs to be a jumble of tables and chairs. Not a situation where all the chairs and bodies are facing the dance floor, or strung out in a line. This I learned at the very formal, very effective (now sadly closed), Niño Bien in Buenos Aires. The dance floor was a long rectangle, surrounded by two rings of tables (three lanes of tables along the short sides). This is the same at La Viruta and Salon Canning (in a square surrounded with three rings of tables). In Berlin, Ballhaus Rixdorf got this right. Back in Buenos Aires at Villa Malcolm, three sides of the dance floor host just one ring of tables. These tables are where you go with a date, so as to be shielded from mirada and cabeceo. Those open for cabeceo business find a place among the jumble of long tables. The tables are packed close. The chairs are entangled and shared. Everyone must stretch and wiggle to pass back and forth, negotiate access to their bag tucked underneath a chair that someone else has occupied – in so doing generating sensual pre-cabeceo contact across social groups.
These three milongas had very different lighting. Niño Bien was brightly lit with no distinction between tables and dance floor. At La Viruta, the tables were in nearly pitch dark while the dance floor had a dark part (where everyone danced well) and a stage-lit part (where everyone rather fell apart). Villa Malcolm had a more flattering and comfortable medium level of light both on the tables and the dance floor. Regardless of the level of light, the important point is that every seat was facing other seated people. Chairs were never positioned directly toward the dance floor, which is often the case at European milongas. Equally important, from any position people could regard the dance floor. No one was expected to sit or seek the cabeceo in a hallway, separate room, or space with no view.
The cabeceo requires cross-cutting angles for the contract. It requires spaces of contact for the pre-cabeceo. It also requires the mirada. The mirada is a powerful gaze of admiration for a leader. To admire, women need to repose with elegance and comfort, in a reasonable chair (not a bar-stool), with a table on which to place her drink, fan, or other accoutrements. She should not have to stand. Her place must be warm enough to sit comfortably in a sexy dress for 30 minutes. She should not be in the bar. (That is the man’s place of retreat and camaraderie, where he should not be hunted.) To admire his dancing, she must be able to see the dance floor and the dancers must be able to see her to perceive her gaze, but she should not be glued to the edge (toes vulnerable to impassioned dancers in the outer lane) nor isolated from the social area. Her gaze must be able to comfortably move between the dance floor and the tables, so that she can dispense her admiration alternately between dancers on the floor and those who are socializing.
The easiest way for smaller milongas to improve the cabeceo and mirada is to divide the room into two rectangles, one for dancing, and one for tables. (No chairs or tables ringing the floor unless the room is huge enough for two rings of tables.) Then crowd as many tables and chairs as you can into the cabeceo area. Removing observers, toes, and entrance and exit traffic from three sides of the floor has the added benefit of improving the experience for dancers. Most importantly, no lines of chairs fixed in one direction. Chairs must be grouped socially, preferably around tables, to create cross-cutting gaze within and between clusters and social groups.
Ballhaus Valent is therefore divided into three parallel and equal rectangles. The dance floor is central. To one side is Bar Cabeceo, where we have just laid a shiny black floor from a theater set under our collection of antique tables and chairs.
The third rectangle, the Lounge, expresses our other commitment, to tango’s evanescent expressions – deeper intimacy and dancing in solitude.
This space was inspired by Berlin’s Milonga Popular c. 2017 (at Mehringdamm 61). This important experiment acknowledged adjacent desires important to tango, including: to get a bit drunk and dance freely, even alone … to access dramatic artistic experiences outside of the tango genre … to develop the intimacy beyond tango’s rules …
To evolve and popularize tango, Milonga Popular carefully nurtured these avenues: A saxophonist or juggler would join the dancers on the floor… The milonga would transform temporarily at midnight to an open-bar disco… There were huge snuggly couches in dim corners and a nearly dark room with lush, intense contemporary music for dancing alone or making out while dancing… Personally I wasn’t so comfortable with the expanded intimacy, but I often danced alone in the back room.
Although some events welcome solo dancers to use the main floor, this never feels comfortable to me. In fact my favorite milonga space in Europe is the Schaulust in Bremen (home of the premiere neotango event now known as the NuevoTangoRave). The seating area of the Schaulust is a Lounge, not especially conducive to cabeceo (which takes place at awkwardly close range in the doorway, foyer, and on the stairway). This Lounge a series of 7 or 8 massive steps, 50cm high and 1m wide (wide enough to dig through your backpack, have a picnic, retreat to a deep conversation, do yoga, take a nap, or dance alone). I do my solo dancing about halfway up these steps, not posing a traffic obstacle or spectacle on the main floor, still in the main room, still connected to the party, elevated like a cage dancer yet nearly unobserved in the dark.
Our Lounge invites an intimate and snuggly conversation in a corner of our huge couches and offers a sparkly, elevated dance floor for solo dancing.
