Lo de Celia, Sunday night

Lo de Celia is warm and intimate, very appealing. Great sound quality, rather a varied selection of music. A long tanda of Chacarera then Paso Doble and another Spanish-sounding dance, followed by a tanda of mostly early Pugliese, four tracks of achingly tender music, so breath-taking that the soft sound of leather soles on a tiled floor can be clearly heard, like hushed breathing. Plenty of people dancing to it. Then a tanda of milonga/candombe followed by De Angelis. And then New Orleans. This was late-ish, perhaps the part of the evening when music gets varied. I like the dancing here: there's room for it, and the sound and the room are excellent. Great social tango.

But when you're in the packed second row of the senior members of BsAs tango society, flanked on all sides by more of the same, unless you know the glancer well it's hard to interpret a glance with any certainty, and since this seems to be a large group of people who know each other well an outsider isn't likely to get much of a chance here. After they've all picked themselves partners and got onto the floor the space opens out a bit, and then it begins to be possible to look around at who is left seated, but nearly everyone is on the floor. I drink up my 'agua sin gas' and stumble out into the raw night.