A City of Plenty
Andrea Shepherd & Ksenia Burobina
Montréal tango dancers know that their city is special, and they are proud of it. But, what makes it so special? To get the complete answer to that question, we surveyed about twenty-five tangueros and tangueras, focusing on those who travel regularly for tango to and from Montréal. We got answers from local and visiting dancers of all experience levels, from two years to over twenty, amateurs and professionals alike. Clearly, there are two main things that stand out for all dancers about Montréal— the friendliness of the community and the variety of activities available.
Tanya, from Rochester, New York, first came to Montréal during the springtime Bailongo festival in 2014 and has been returning about once a month since then. She calls Montréal dancers supportive, kind and inclusive and credits them with making her fall madly in love with tango. She says the city has a beautiful embrace that offers an overall welcoming feeling.
Aleksis lives in Vermont and has been coming to Montréal to dance for over a decade. These days he drives up to Montréal several times a month. Originally from New York City, he has danced tango all over the world, but he feels Montréal has a special connection to tango. He says: There is a nice balance between the level of the dancers and their personalities. It’ s open and friendly, a very welcoming place to share close embrace.
A Bountiful Selection It was widely noted and is widely known that you can dance tango every night of the week in Montréal, usually with a choice of activities. The city is relatively small by big city standards with a metropolitan population of about 4 million and fewer than 2 million in the city proper. But with up to four different places to dance on any day of the week, it appears to have one of the largest per capita offerings of tango activities. If you include the schools and activities that have sprouted up in the suburbs and neighbouring towns in recent years, the choice is even greater. photo by Stephane Wagner
A Rich History of Tango Montréal has one of the oldest tango communities in North America. You can dance tango seven nights a week today, and you could dance tango seven nights a week twenty years ago.
2018 will mark the official 30th anniversary of Argentine tango in the city. The tango community has grown steadily over the years, evolving and transforming in the process. These days, Montrealers sometimes lament the fact that there are too many activities going on at once, forcing dancers to choose between must-attend options. Because the population is not huge, if there are three or four milongas on a given evening, there just aren’ t enough dancers to fill them all. However, visiting dancers cherish this abundance. The city is not that big. Most milongas are centrally located in the Plateau, Mile End and downtown areas, making it easy to visit more than one place in the same evening.
It is worth noting that Montréal is a quite safe city. It easy to roam the milongas freely. Anyone can walk the streets at night and public transit is highly accessible. The excellent Metro system is closed by 1:00 a. m. However, there is a network of night buses that run till the wee hours. Montréal has a widespread and wellused Bixi bike-sharing service as well as a couple of car-sharing services— car2go and Communauto. To use these services, you normally have register ahead of time to have your driver’ s license verified.
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