The week before the Paris tango festival I went on a city trip to the beautiful historic polish city of Kraków. Besides site seeing the city and visiting the amazing sculptures in the Wieliczka salt mine (worth a visit!) and the depressing concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, there was time to meet my long time tango friends from Warsaw.
On Saturday night we attended an open air concert of the polish tango group “Tango Bridge” with Katarzyna Jamróz near Teatr Slowackiego. They played mainly Piazzolla compositions, it was very enjoyable and the singer Katarzyna Jamróz was quite impressive.
After the concert we took a tram to a new milonga – the Milonga Royal -, the only choice that night. Some people at the concert warned us that it was not a very popular one… They were instead going to join the huge crowd that was celebrating Wianki (Saint John’s night) at the riverside.
The milonga was not crowded at all, maximum 15 dancers. It quickly became clear why it was not popular. It was a mainly neotango oriented milonga, which is not a priori bad – I’ve attended a rather good neotango milonga in Warsaw before (Milonga u Artystów at Mazowiecka street, unfortunately discontinued) -, but the choice of music was very erratic, no consistency in the sequence of tracks, no tandas. The music was mainly non-tango and electrotango with quite a lot of milonga’s mixed in.
Imagine for instance Narcotango followed by a milonga followed by a Miguel Calo tango followed by an amorphous piece of undanceable junk… You get the picture.
Anyway, we had some fun because I could dance with my friend again after about a year, which was why we went to a milonga in the first place.
Don’t let this put you off of dancing tango in Kraków though, my friends assured me that there are much better and traditional milongas. A few years ago we went to a good milonga there indeed.
See the places in this post
October 3, 2007 at 6:41 pm |
[...] Sunday and dance there… But the seeds of doubt were planted in our heads, also because of my bad tango experience in Kraków before the summer. So on Saturday morning we decided to leave Kraków for another city trip and [...]
October 17, 2007 at 6:33 pm |
We visited Krakow for a weekend and also went to Milonga Royal – unlike your experience, we had a blast; yes, the music is mixed, lots of neo but good classical choices as well. The place was actually packed, about 30 people. I mentioned to someone your article and the lady said that there is a group of “ultra-convervatists” tango dancers who are not pleased that Royal exist. We didn’t have a chance to go to the other milonga organized by them on sunday but nevertheless our experience was positive.
October 22, 2007 at 4:48 pm |
Thanks for your comment Jon, it gives a more balanced view to my experience. Maybe we were just unlucky and picked out a bad night. I didn’t like saying that it was bad because I really like the Polish tango scene. I’ll consider giving Milonga Royal another try next time I’m in Krakow.