Montreal - International Tango Festival (@Tango Libre) - Sunday

In the afternoon we met with fellow blogger Caroline, and we hung out for a while, had a great Lebanese lunch and sat down on the grass in a park and chatted. That was a pleasant low key afternoon.

After the experience we've had Saturday, we went to the place where the festival milonga was going to take place, wary of what we would find. The milonga was going to take place in a room in the Old Port which has glass walls on two sides, it looked pretty cool. We got there at about 8PM and looking at the long line formed at the entrance I realized I did not recognize anyone. It seemed the live music with Beba Pugliese attracted a lot of people who are not avid tango dancers. Also, the Claude was DJing again (see my prior post) and the room did not seem large enough to allow such a large inexperienced crowd to dance comfortably. We heard there was going to be over an hour of performances and since the admission price was $35 we felt it was not worth taking a chance, so we went to L'Academie instead.

L-Academie was pretty empty, presumably most people went to the festival, which I later learned it was not exactly true. While the festival milonga was packed, I was told that a lot of regulars were in neither place. What I think happens in these cases, people assume everyone is going to the festival milonga, and if they feel like that is not worth going to, they just stay home or do ... gasp ... non-tango activities.

But despite being a slow night, I had a good time. Aside from Debbi, I danced with a few people. "L", a french woman who moved to Montreal because she liked the people here better then her compatriots, she is a good dancer. I danced with her before when I came to Montreal for the Neo-Tango festival, and when we came for my birthday, and back then she was very tense and her dancing suffered. But Sunday she was not nervous and it made such a great difference. It was a lovely couple of tandas.

I danced with "I", a girl I never danced with before, she is a lot of fun, highly musical, great embrace and while she did anticipate the movement a bit, the qualities she has certainly made up for that. "M", a woman who was obviously somehow connected with the milonga as she seemed to know everyone, was probably the best dance of the night technique wise, but somehow not the most fun, as she didn't seem like she was really enjoying herself much. But she did stay for 3 tandas, so maybe she was having an off night. "E" was there, a girl I met at the Neo-tango festival when she asked me to dance, while she doesn't have the best technique out there (not that she is not bad, mind you) she is fun to dance with in great part because it's really obvious she enjoys it a lot and she doesn't tense up when something goes wrong, and that is so important it makes up for any other issues.