The whole
point of returning to Buenos Aires was to learn tango whilst also being able to
dance swing. In my two weeks here last February I'd had a taster of both and
enjoyed it. The swing community here is thriving and the prospect of being in a
place where I could quickly develop some friends appealed to me greatly.
Well it has
and it hasn't turned out that way. To begin with, let's talk tango. I love this
dance. Me encanta. But after 8 months away I had to go right back to basics. I
went to a couple of milongas early on and felt like I thoroughly embarrassed
myself on the dance floor, thus shaking my confidence terribly, so that I went
back to watching a lot and dancing very little. This is hard on the ego.
Nevertheless, I stuck with it. I tried various different tango schools and
milongas before settling on my favourites, then I settled into a routine which
involved a lot of tango in the afternoons and swing in the evenings. Maybe with a bit of yoga inbetween.
The result
of this hard work is that I am now much more comfortable at milongas,
particularly at asking people I don't know for a dance. I stick to the basics,
doing nothing fancy. I try to play with the rhythms of the music, although I'm
not very familiar with tango music and so it makes it hard for me to predict
what's coming. And I don't understand the lyrics, so I can only hope that what
I am articulating on the dance floor somewhat corresponds to the tone of the
song. It's still quite hit and miss - there are some people with whom I can't
seem to click and the tanda of 3 or 4 songs that we dance together seems to be
a struggle; then there are others with whom everything just seems to flow and
we have great fun on the dance floor. Oh I love these dances.
Now let's
think about Swing. Everyone is so friendly here and so I hoped to make some
good friends quite quickly, but it's not really turned out that way. My best
friends here are all foreigners, and I'm not really sure why. I thought maybe
it was because I kept trying to speak in Spanish to start with, which greatly
limited my ability to have conversations and so to strengthen relationships and
so I went through a stage where I half gave up on the Spanish and started
chatting more in English, but this didn't seem to make much difference. I don't
know if this is because the tone of our relationships had already been set, or
if it's some other reason. No sé!
My
confidence of dancing swing has also been a bit of a roller coaster. It felt
great when I first arrived and could dance again after so much time. But then I
quickly felt like I was massively rusty and though I could dance the basics ok,
I'd lost a lot of the extra things that made my dancing fun. It wasn't until
the Swing Break camp about 6 weeks after I arrived that I felt like I was back
to my old self.
Swing Break
camp was awesome! It was outside of the city center which in itself was a
welcome change from the heat and noise of the city. Unashamedly I'm a fan of the film Dirty
Dancing, and this reminded me so much of that, right down to the watermelons.
We were camping in a leisure park, we had dance classes throughout the day
(broken up by dips in the pool to cool off) and live music throughout the
night. The whole leisure park just dedicated to swing dancers. It was heavenly.
If only all weekends could be like this one was.
Another big
event here was the Lindy Hop Argentina International Festival (LHAIF,
pronounced "life"). This was in early January and brought in about 30
Brazilians plus many other dancers from all over the world. It was superb. I
learned a lot, and it was so nice to be dancing with so many different people.
On the final night we had a bit of a hip-hop after party which was also very
cool, seeing some different dance styles coming out. It was at this festival
however, that I had one of my worst dances in a long time. It was with a lovely
girl and a great dancer, but all the time her eyes were darting around one
corner of the room. "Are you looking for someone", I asked.
"Sorry, I was distracted, but I 'm back again now" she replied. Less
than 10 seconds later her eyes were off again - she didn't make me feel good
about myself.
My Spanish
conversation has gone through similar highs and lows as my dancing. There are
times that I feel like I can hold a conversation with someone, and there are
times when I can't understand two simple words strung together.
So all in
all, although I'm living a complete life of luxury at this time, there have
been some real head challenges for me. I'll be all the stronger for pulling
through them.
When I've
not been dancing, I've spent a lot of time thinking about two things. One is
the business I'm going to start shortly - an online consultancy specialising in
sustainability and finance. The other is politics. I'm currently writing a
manifesto for a fictional party - the sort of manifesto that I think a party
should be putting forward if it really wants to make a difference to the world.
I won't go into the details here!
After three
months in this city, I am struggling with it. Although I'm still enjoying the
dancing and I do have some friends here the city itself is bothering me. The
heat, the noise, the litter, the air quality, the lack of green space - all of
these things so dear to me. So once again, I find myself in a place where my
life doesn't have balance. Recently I've been out of the city a lot - a visit
to the Tigre delta again, a weekend in Rosario which is a beautiful city on the
Rio Paraná with much less traffic and some lovely parks by the river, and 10
days touring the beaches of Uruguay which are stunning to say the least. These
breaks have made me realise how much I'm missing the outdoors, and so I've
decided that it's time to move on again. Now for a month in the Swiss Alps of
Argentina - Bariloche.
