Cool! I’m on the cover of THE tango magazine of the lowlands (The Netherlands and Belgium): La Cadena.

The picture was taken by Belgium’s best tango photographer Peter Forret, also maintainer of milonga.be.

This weekend is the Brussels Tango Festival, I’m going tonight and I went the first 2 days. The opening night was great with a good atmosphere. The second night was not ideal, the floor was sloping and slippery and sticky at the same time. It was of course too crowded with unexperienced dancers before the demos, but that got better after the demo’s as usual on friday and saturday.

Very nice opening night at Concert Noble.

But that’s not all, there was more tango in Belgium, yesterday, saturday, the first dance event in the past 200 years was organized in the Ovidius room at the charming medieval castle of Horst by El Rumbo.

A beautiful setting, the night was introduced by master story teller Ivo Hermans of De Koerier van Navarra, linking the castle to tango in his own very unique historical and poetic way. Overall a great night with the old El Rumbo gang

I recently discovered a large resource for tango music and other tango related information on eSnips.

You can listen to a lot of tango music from the very very old - the earliest I found are from 1907! (e.g. Hotel Victoria) - to the latest neotango music. It’s easy to create and save your own playlists as well.

Some interesting resources to start with:

• The “Biblioteca Tanguera” with pdf books on tango (mostly in spanish).
• The “Discografias” with discographies of most orchestra’s.
• For old and rare tango’s check “Guardia Vieja” and “Orquestas Olvidadas“.

For anything else you can just search the name of any song and/or artist. It’s an amazing collection and everyone can contribute to it!

Just found this very cool video on youtube, Juan D’Arienzo is wild! This is just Rock ‘n’ Roll!
The song is “Loca”, and it’s recorded somewhere in the first half of the 1960’s:

Wednesday my new DNI tango shoes arrived from Buenos Aires with a friend!

I immediately tried them out at the milonga and they are absolutely fantastic! They dance like a dream! Very good and comfortable fit. They have 3 cm french heels, higher than any of my older shoes (all Susana Artesanal with 2.5 cm straight heels).

The soles are special too, the front sole has an oval rubber piece in the center and suede around it, clever design and it works. I used to dance on suede soles, but the past 2 years I preferred rubber for better grip and stability. Rubber soles are perfect on most tango floors, while suede can often be too slippery. The DNI soles try to combine the best of both worlds.

It’s a different feeling with the higher heels, I still have to get used to the slight change in balance (respect to all women…), but I like it. I think I will order another pair

On Halloween there was a Bajofondo concert in Hasselt, it was the second time this year that I saw them and as always it was an excellent and exciting concert, not to be missed! It’s so good to see the fun and pleasure that these guys have on stage. They were even wearing Halloween masks!
Moreover, I bought the new CD “Mar Dulce” and had it autographed by Santaolalla, Ferres and Supervielle! Yes! I’m happy

I tried to capture the energy and action of the concert in photographs, just as I try to capture the action of tango dancing. I like to see movement in photographs so it’s not all sharp and crisp. It’s more impressionistic I guess…

Here are my attempts:

Martin Ferres:

Ferres-Casacuberta with Halloween masks:

Javier Casalla:

VJ Veronica Loza dancing on stage:

DJ Supervielle:

The Audience:

Last weekend I went to Warsaw with a tango friend from Brussels, mainly to dance tango and to visit some of our polish tango friends. We stayed in the Oki Doki Hostel, in the new center of Warsaw and close to all the milongas.

It was not my first visit to Warsaw and I remembered a reasonable level of tango there, not exceptional, but I was also much less experienced at the time. So without too high expectations we prepared for our first milonga on friday night, Chłodnej Milonga.

A nice big floor and to our delight good music and quite a few very good polish tangueras. ‘Comme Il Faut’ shoes seemed to be very common
See a video of this milonga on Youtube.

This was an excellent introduction to the warsaw tango community! Almost every tanguera we danced with asked if we would come to the Sunday afternoon milonga as well, it was their favorite and the best in Warsaw. Unfortunately our plans were to go to Kraków on 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 stay in Warsaw!

On Saturday we went to the Złota Milonga (Golden Milonga).

A round room, a quite slippery floor and a lot of ‘tango decoration’. We were quite early and there seemed to be only a few beginners dancing, we feared for the worst… But then all our favorite tangueras from friday arrived! The music was good again (thank you DJ Luiza, for the music and for the very nice tandas that we danced!) and it turned into the milonga with the most fun!

On Sunday we went to the much anticipated ‘Comme Il Faut’ afternoon milonga in ‘Klub 55′ in the Palace of Culture and Science.

This place had the most ‘real’ tango atmosphere with only very traditional music by DJ Radek, who danced in Brussels milongas a few times already. It was not as big as the other venues, with a good floor, all our favorite tangueras were present and a few new ones were written on our favorites list. This was clearly the milonga where all the good dancers came, also a lot more good male dancers than the other milongas.
Check Pawel’s pictures of this milonga.

On Saturday night Luiza had invited us to come to her Sunday night milonga as well, but we were just too hungry and tired after the ‘Comme Il Faut’ milonga (I’m sorry, Luiza …)

We’ll certainly return to Warsaw for tango, if you want to try out the Warsaw tango community check Akademia Tanga Argentynskiego or the milongas page at Blautango, we highly recommend it!

See a map with the locations in this post

Last Sunday a tango night was organized on the Argentine frigate “Ara Libertad” in Antwerp by Tango aan de stroom.

Dancing on the wooden deck of this large sailing ship was quite a special and romantic experience. Although the deck was slightly curved and sloping I didn’t have too much trouble dancing and keeping balance. Any inconvenience was more than made up by the whole atmosphere of being on a ship and the background of the river.
The nice thing was that even some of the Argentine sailors were dancing in their uniforms!

See a map with pictures of the Ara Libertad

A woman walks up to me:

“Are you a good dancer?”

“erm???…”

That was the weirdest way anyone ever asked me to dance…

“I haven’t danced for a while and otherwise I go crazy.”

“u huh…”

I must admit that it was an open air milonga with lots of unknown people, beginners and non-dancers, but still…
And she was not so experienced as I found out.

That’s right! Today one of my tango pictures was selected for tweeduizend.be, a photo site for pictures taken in and about Antwerp, analogous to drieduizend.be for Leuven.
One photo is selected daily from all photos tagged with “tweeduizend“, “Antwerp” or “Antwerpen” on Flickr and Photoblog. So everyone can easily participate! Just tag your pictures!
One cool feature of tweeduizend.be is the Google Maps mashup.

This is the winner:

TRANCE

More pictures I took on the same event.