Confitería Ideal

In the subte at Independencia, I bumped into Julio, a dancer from Chicago I met at DNI last time round. He told me about some classes (Tuesday at 15:30) at the Confitería Ideal, where the focus was on subtle moves for tiny spaces. As a prospective leader, I thought that sounded like exactly what I needed to know, so I went along.

The Ideal, if you’ve yet to go there, is a building in sumptuous art deco reminiscent of Paris, with a marble staircase leading up to a ballroom on the first floor. It has a splendid stained glass ceiling, doors and windows of bevilled glass, wood paneling, decorative mirrors, chandeliers, marble pillars, a pergola and a substantial dance floor.

The class was three hours long and the teachers were Eduardo Saucedo and Ivana Smolianovich, beautiful people endowed with an infectious sense of humour, blessings common to the tango teachers of Buenos Aires. The focus of the first half of the lesson was a choreography including barridas and sandwichitos. The second half was milonga : one – two – kiss – four – five. ‘Kiss’ represents the brushing of the man’s calf against the woman’s as he switches tracks in the box step.