I was in
Denver this weekend to visit my daughters and was fortunate enough to catch a milonga at Cheesman Park Pavilion near
the Denver Botanical Gardens. The event was incredible! My only complaint is
the difficulty I had in finding out about it. If I hadn't been alerted to it by a friend, I never would have found it.
This post is dedicated to making the Denver tango scene a little easier to navigate.
The
pavilion is a fantastic space for
dancing but its availability cannot be verified until the day of the event. Once
availability is confirmed, the organizers of this event make it known on
Facebook. You need to be a member of the Colorado Tango Events Facebook page in
order to find out about this milonga.
Here is
the link to their site:
When I
look for a tango scene in a particular city, I’ll google the city’s name +
Tango. Googling Denver Tango resulted
in three obvious choices:
None of
these sites is a comprehensive list to Denver’s milongas but tangocolorado.org was, by far, the most complete. To
assemble a full list, you will need two more websites:
I have
only been to Denver three times so I can't offer a review of all the events. I
have been to Cheesman Park Pavilion twice and to the Savoy twice. Both venues are
in very different settings but they are equally pleasing.
Followers
looking for the better opportunity should go to the pavilion but The Savoy is
almost as good.
To leaders,
especially those new to Denver’s tango scene, I would say that The Savoy is the
better bet. It’s dark and alcohol is available, so the tangueras are a little
more ‘relaxed’. Just kidding;-)
The atmosphere
at The Savoy is more romantic. Cheesman
Park Pavilion is outdoors and there is a lot of conversation. It can be
difficult to catch a women’s eye if she is engaged in a four-way exchange on Comme Il Faut shoes. It is a very casual and familial scene, kind of like NYC’s summer
tango at the Shakespeare Statue in Central Park.
I’ve
found that the outdoor gatherings are tougher on leaders who are there for the
first time. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe women are less willing to be seen
dancing with a stranger when they are in a public setting.
The first time I came here, I couldn't get a cabeceo accepted to save my life. This is my second venture to Cheesman and I got lots of dances this time around.
The
crowd at The Savoy fluctuated with dancers coming and going throughout the
night but never reached more than sixty dancers at any one time. Cheesman Park
Pavilion is a big space and there were 80 to 100 milongueros there both times I attended; most people stayed the
whole night once they arrived.
Whenever
I talk to people about tango in Denver, the name Mercury Café is always mentioned. I haven’t been there but I did
include their calendar in my list of links. If you look through it, you will
find a number of tango events.
In most
of the internet offerings, you’ll notice that Michele Delgado, a local tango
instructor who has taught in Buenos Aires, is a major presence. She is an
excellent teacher and offers a number of classes aimed at improving a woman’s
skill and confidence on the dance floor.
At
Cheesman, I danced with quite a few tangueras
who said they were students of hers. They were of varying levels of skill but all were
incredibly delightful to dance with. This is either a testament to Michele’s
tutorial skills or just a coincidence that all these women were gifted followers.
Even
though I had never met these women, I was able to dance tango with them because
they simply waited for my lead (what a novel concept). Once I determined their ability, I tried my best to lead only those steps that they could easily follow. As long as we
both played our parts, having a good time was easy.
It should be this way everywhere!
I would say the degree of proficiency for all the dancers at the pavilion is quite high but I do not think that novices felt the least bit inhibited from joining the crowd on the dance floor.
Grisha
Nisnevich was the DJ at the pavilion. His musical compositions were extremely
complimentary to my ability to choreograph on the fly, as most tangueros do. I found that I could depend on him to assemble tandas with
characteristically unique rhythms repeated throughout the songs.
These rhythms were readily identifiable. They helped me and my partners easily build upon
the movements we explored together during the first melody of the set. By the second song, I could
attempt more daring maneuvers and my partner could embellish
without restraint. All this made for an incredible conclusion to our encounters
when we danced to the final song of the tanda.
“What, over already?” was a remark I often heard spoken by couples at the end of a tanda.
There is
a lot of free tango music out there. If you bought 300 tango songs for a dollar, chances are that none of it will be stimulating for the dancers. A good DJ assembles his library with a surprising amount of time and effort. Grisha is obviously one of these DJs.
This
weekend was the fourth time I’d been to an event DJ’d by Grisha. I feel safe in
saying that he primarily plays tango classics. The group dynamic during
his performances is amazingly cheerful. I find his music selections enhance my creativity and make dancing easy.
If you are looking for tango event in Denver and found your
choices to be as confusing as I did, check to see who is the DJ. If it is a
Grisha event, you can be reasonably certain there will be a lot of good dancers
there and that you will have a good time.
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