Rivertango

Rivertango - from one open-air milonga to another, but Tangocommuter commutes - moved from the river outside Tate Modern to Spitalfields this year, probably because it coincided with the Thames festival, but it is surely a vast improvement on the Tate Modern site, which is overrun by by a flood of visitors, where dance-floor invasions are the order of the day and one never knows who is there to dance or just to watch, with a cold damp wind blowing off the Thames: as a place to dance it's unsafe and uncomfortable, a nightmare. Spitalfields is altogether more of a milonga, under the canopy, which gives it a bit of a protected, intimate feel. There are tourists in Spitalfields, and the odd unsupervised toddler or visiting rock n'roller intrudes on the dance floor, which admittedly is hard (the floor, that is), but it's easy enough to spot who's there to dance, and it feels like a milonga. I hope the move to Spitalfields will be permanent, because one visit to the riverside site last year was enough for me.

As for the two £25-a-head milongas, I am told that the Sexteto Canyengue gave note-perfect renditions of tango scores, as classical musicians can, and incidentally gave a perfect demo that, although tango is played from the notes on written scores, the way those notes are played, their precise duration, the precise speed of phrases, the changes of speed within phrases, the exact emphasis, the 'attack', all of which give tango its own distinctive swing, are almost as important as the work of the composer and arranger. Was that worth £25? & the fact that other milongas, which usually charge 1/3 of that price, closed 'in favour of' this extravaganza, leaves me gob-smacked. Surely something expensive and exclusive has to earn the right to be expensive and exclusive, and it doesn't sound as if it did.