The International Tango Machine Guide to Berlin Milongas – Part I: Overall Impressions

Posted on October 15, 2018 by Steve Darmo

Greetings friends and fellow tango dancers.

I just returned from 15 night vacation in Berlin, Germany. I had only spent 6 nights in Berlin total on two previous trips.  It was a city that I fell in love with and wanted to return to.  This year I decided to go to Berlin instead of Buenos Aires. I’ve been to Buenos Aires 4 times now on tango trips and wanted to immerse myself in Berlin – home to the largest tango scene in the world outside of Buenos Aires.  Berlin has a lot of history and has a lot of culture and other things to offer outside of tango.

Overall Impressions of Berlin and the Tango Scene

I’m glad I went out of my way to visit Berlin this year. Berlin is the 3rd most visited city in Europe, behind London and Paris.   It actually gets slightly more visitors than Rome according to a couple of sources.  Americans seem to not be in on the secret – I only ran into a handful while there, and none at the milongas.

For me, my trip to Berlin actually cost less than going to Buenos Aires. Berlin is very inexpensive.  I got a nice Airbnb for just over $30 USD per night, and on top of that I spent an average of just under $60 USD per day. That included including getting around, meals, museums, tours, and milongas!   Plus the flight to Berlin was only $600 US going out of Toronto compared to a typical cost of $1,400 US going to Buenos Aires.  I basically went to Berlin for 2 weeks for a little more than what it would cost just to fly down to Buenos Aires.

I got a very good impression of the tango in Berlin during my stay.   It was well worth going there to experience the city by day and the tango scene by night.   I was there 15 nights and went to 20 milongas!  I danced every day except for one – when I took a long day trip to Dresden.

The price of the milongas in general is very inexpensive. The typical cost of entrance to a milonga was only 6 Euros (about $7 US).  I paid as little as 4 Euros and as much as 15 Euros.  The three milongas I went to with live orchestras playing music were more expensive – costing 15, 13, and 10 Euros respectively.   All of the milongas have a bar where you could buy drinks, and a few of them had some food available also.

The overall quality and ambiance of the milonga venues in Berlin is very high. I would say that the venues are nicer than the typical milonga venues in Buenos Aires.  The dance floors are definitely nicer than in Buenos Aires.  The Tangoloft is the most elegant and magnificent venue for dancing tango in the world.  They even have some places that stack up well with the old time milongas in Buenos Aires.  The Clärchens Ballhaus has been around for over 100 years and survived World War II.  The milonga there is held upstairs in an old ballroom that hasn’t changed since the end of the war.  It has large mirrors with several of them broken, and seems to be in a perpetual state of neglect except for the candles on the table and the lively bar area.  It reminded me very much of La Catedral in Buenos Aires.  Villa Kreuzberg was a lovely milonga held in a villa like setting.  I would go there any time over Villa Malcolm in BA.   Even the outdoor venue – the Strandbar at Monbijou Park is a great setting with a wood dance floor set right on the river.  While the number of people and overall quality of dancing isn’t as high there as it is at La Glorieta in BA, it is right on the water across from the Museum Island and has seating and a bar area and the ambiance is hard to beat.  It is in a high traffic area where many regular people pass by and can grab a drink and listen to the music and watch.

If you’re tall, then coming to Berlin to dance is like a dream. I’m 6’-0” and I have never danced with as many tall women as I did when I was in Berlin.  There were milongas where I danced with 4 or 5 women in a row who were as tall as me or taller with their high heels.  Sometimes I tend to slouch over when dancing with short women, but I couldn’t do that in Berlin – dancing consistently with so many tall women forced me to maintain good posture and balance while keeping my chest up and not leaning to far forward.  The women in Berlin are good dancers and many are very powerful and athletic and can pull you off axis if you are leaning too far forward.   With that being said, in Berlin I also danced with some of the shortest women I ever danced with anywhere.  I danced with a couple of women who were under 5’ tall – and amazingly we were still able to dance in close embrace.  They had to dance tall to make this happen.  One of the women even commented to me that she normally can’t dance much or well in many of the milongas in Berlin because the men are so tall – but she said she liked dancing with me because we connected very well.  When dancing with someone that short, I really needed to concentrate on remaining tall and with good posture so I would be falling or looming over my partner.

Another thing I like about dancing in Berlin is what I call the “Berlin Embrace.” The women here seem to give a more snug close embrace than in other parts of the world. This embrace at least rivals that in Buenos Aires.

Berliners like both traditional tango and also Neo tango or non-tango music for dancing. The venues tend to segregate themselves and will announce whether they play all traditional or mostly neo tango or a mix.  A couple of the milongas I went to had two separate rooms – one with traditional Golden Age tango and another with alternative non-tango music.   For the most part the milongas here played cortinas between tandas.   But not all events.

Los Molinos playing at TTMS

I was really impressed by the number of opportunities to dance tango to live music in Berlin. In just over 2 weeks I got to dance to live tango music a total of four times.  Once to a 7 piece (3 violins, 2 bandoneones, bass, and piano) tango orchestra from Buenos Aires – La Orquesta Típica Andariega, once to the quartet Los Molinos, once to a trio, and once to a bandoneón soloist.   Seeing live musicians play and getting to dance up close to them is an amazing experience, and this rivaled my experience in Buenos Aires where was usually able to dance to live music at a few milongas on each trip.

The DJs for the traditional milongas were very good overall. They stuck to classic golden age music for the most part.  However, some of them ventured a little outside of what you would hear in Buenos Aires or the United States and played some more obscure orchestras or went deeper down on the depth charts on the major orchestras.  As a tango deejay myself, I take a special interest in what the deejays are playing and what is working on the dance floor. And I am always keeping my ears open for good songs that I haven’t heard before.  I did note that several deejays played tango tandas by the orchestra of Fulvio Salamanca.  I can go almost an entire year in the States without hearing any tandas by Salamanca.  The only other place I heard him played much was when I was in Montreal.  I’m going to start including some Salamanca in my rotation for the right spots in a milonga.  He has been on my list for some time to research, as I didn’t have any of his music prior to my trip to Berlin.

Some of the deejays did some interesting things that I don’t recall ever noticing at milongas before. I once took a DJ class where the instructor broke the orchestras down by classifications –the main classification of “Class A” included only the 4 major orchestras of D’Arienzo, Di Sarli, Troilo, and Pugliese.  He said that as a general rule, you should begin and end every milonga with a tanda by a Class A orchestra.  I had never heard any DJ open a milonga with a tanda by either Troilo or Pugliese.  However, one of the deejays in Berlin opened the milonga with a tanda of tangos by Troilo, and given the venue, it actually went well.  Another DJ played an entire vals tanda of three valses by Pugliese.  I could never find three Pugliese valses that went well enough together to play – but now I have another name.  Finally, one DJ went off the reservation and violated tango etiquette by playing the song Adiós muchachos in the middle of a Lomuto tanda.  I didn’t have the heart, or the words in German, to tell him it was good that he wasn’t playing in Buenos Aires because nobody would dance to it.  Tradition dictates that song is supposed to be off-limits for dancing because supposedly Carlos Gardel was whistling it in the final moments before his plane crashed.  Speaking of Lomuto, I was also at another milonga in Berlin where the deejay played a milonga tanda in which the first two songs were milongas by Lomuto, and the third song was the tango Si soy así by Lomuto.  It actually worked well in the tanda, and I think the DJ did this on purpose. His music was excellent all night

Finding Milongas in Berlin:

If you come to Berlin – I recommend you download the “Hoy Milonga Berlin” app onto your smartphone or device. I have an iPod Touch and was able to download this.  It lists all the milongas and practicas around Berlin and has an interactive map.  I flew to Berlin from Toronto, where I had just attended the Toronto Tango Experience.  I had some great classes there and learned some new things that I needed to practice to be able to work into my regular social dancing.  I tried to also find some Practicas in Berlin – but those appeared to be very elusive.  The app lists several events as “Praktika” but when you read the fine print – what they call a practica is more like a class with an instructor.  I attended one such “praktika” at Tangotanzen Macht Schön (TTMS) before the milonga and it was essentially a class where they showed moves and then we danced a song or two to work on things.  They didn’t have you switch partners.  I thought that class was excellent – but it was not what is known as a “practica” in other parts of the world.  Some of the practicas are advertised as practicas and then the app lists classes before the practica – and the classes take up the entire allotted time for the practica.  Not finding a good practica was a bit disappointing for me.

Berlin is large and spread-out. I think it is even more spread-out than Buenos Aires.  I was living very close to the U2 station at Shönhauser Allee in Prenzlauerburg north of the center and I traveled several times to milongas in Kreuzberg – and it took a long time to get to those.  For instance it took me a hour each way by public transportation to get from my apartment to the Villa Kreuzberg milonga.  The last night I took a taxi back – my only taxi ride of the trip – and that 20 minute drive cost me almost 20 euros.   Fortunately the public transportation system in Berlin is very good and inexpensive.  The subway (UBahn) and surface trains (SBahn) run all night on the weekends and until 1am on weeknights.  The UBahn is replaced by night busses on weeknights that run every 30 minutes after 1am.   Because it can take so long to get from one end of town to the other, there are milongas and events in different parts of town every night of the week.  Looking at the Hoy Milonga Berlin app, you will see that there are 4 to 8 different events to choose from every night of the week.  Many people will understandably just stick to events in their neighborhoods.  Thus when I went to events in Kreuzberg they all had a similar crowd.   Events in the north near me tended to have a different crowd.  And some of the special events would draw from all over town.  I saw several of the good dancers at many of the events all over Berlin – and when I saw them there I felt confident that I made a good choice in selecting that particular milonga to attend.  I figured if the best dancers in Berlin are there – then the milonga must be a good one.

One thing I didn’t really have time to pursue was trying to take tango classes during the day. In Buenos Aires there are tons of tango schools that offer classes throughout the day, and there are many tourists there just for tango who take classes during the day.  I couldn’t readily find any tango schools in Berlin that offered classes during the day.  And from my experiences at the milongas – over 90 percent of the people I danced with were living in Berlin, there didn’t appear to be any tango tourists like me.  And I wouldn’t really even classify myself as a “tango tourist” – I was more of a regular tourist who saw the historical and cultural sights during the day and just went out dancing at night.  This aspect of Berlin makes it much different than going to Buenos Aires where it is much easier to meet other tango dancing travelers who are there for the same reasons.  In Buenos Aires it is easy to meet others who are there for tango and you can have an instant connection with and will be able to connect with to go out for lunch or dinner or travel to milongas with.   I fell more alone and isolated in Berlin than in Buenos Aires.  However, there is so much to do and see in Berlin, that I wasn’t bored.

Berliner dancers tend to be much more accepting and open to outsiders than the dancers in Buenos Aires. In BA they get so many out of town dancers coming in all the time, that the locals can spot them a mile away and many good dancers won’t dance with outsiders.  In Berlin I got plenty of great dances with very good local dancers.  They seemed to be friendlier and more welcoming than in BA, and I made more friends with locals during my trip to Berlin than I ever did going to Buenos Aires.

Berliners don’t tend to follow all of the traditional codigos present in the Buenos Aires milongas. But they follow most of them to some extent.  Here is what I could observe over the two weeks.

  1. Cabeceo. I could see that the use of cabeceo was alive and well in Berlin. I only ask for dances strictly by using cabeceo and I had no problem getting dances for the most part. However, I did notice that some people who appeared to be close friends would go up to each other and ask for dances from time to time.   I even had someone walk up to me and verbally ask me to dance on three or four occasions. The settings are much more relaxed than Buenos Aires and I didn’t feel those times to be anything unusual. However, I also observed at least a dozen occasions when a woman was sitting down and watching the dancers and a man randomly came up and approached her, when she wasn’t looking at him, and asked her to dance. I was happy to see that in each of these occasions the woman declined the dance. Cabeceo is alive and well in Berlin.
  2. Entering the line of dance. While cabeceo between men and women looking for dances is alive and well – the use of eye contact among the men for getting onto the dancefloor and into the ronda is something that they do a very poor job of in Berlin. Most of the milongas the men dancing make no eye contact whatsoever with people entering the dance floor, and people will just enter the dance floor at their will and ignore the dancers already on the floor. This wasn’t the case everywhere, but it was the case in most places. The very traditional milongas at Café Dominguez, Walzerlinksgestrict, and Berlinos Aires milonga the leaders tended to follow the traditional rules for getting into the ronda. At places like Tangoloft and Nou Tango and some of the others people just seemed to burst their way onto the dancefloor.
  3. Line of dance. Once in the line of dance, people generally seemed to follow it well. Aside from entering the line of dance, maintaining it and navigation wasn’t much of a problem overall. Places like Tangoloft were an exception where you had to navigate around dancers doing crazy things and a room that was irregularly shaped with many nooks and crannies.
  4. Cortinas.   Some of the venues don’t use cortinas so it is hard to catch people to get dances because there is not a regular convenient stopping point where everyone leaves the dance floor at the same time. The worst offender of this was Bebop where they didn’t play any cortinas and people hardly rotated partners.   The Tangoloft is also known for not playing cortinas. However, they play a good mix of traditional tango and neo-tango/alternative music, and regularly switch from one genre to another and it is easy to hear the breaks when switching partners makes sense.   At Tangoloft the dance floor is so big, having cortinas may actually add to chaos because it would take everyone so long to get off the dance floor. Generally there I will dance with someone for one complete perimeter loop of the floor and then drop her off back where we started from – that usually took 3 or 4 songs for one loop. The more traditional places played regular cortinas.
  5. Other rhythms. I didn’t hear any chacarera at any of the milongas. And only one of them played anything danceable for cortinas like Latin or swing music. The traditional milongas in Buenos Aires will all take a break from tango at some point in the milonga and play a set of swing or Latin music for dancing.
  6. Rotating partners. One thing that I also personally observed is that in Berlin it is fairly common to find someone you like dancing with and just keep dancing with them for multiple tandas in a row. This just doesn’t happen in Buenos Aires or most other places. I think in Berlin the number of dancers at a particular event isn’t always very high and there may be a limited pool of people to dance with. If you find someone you like dancing with both people may just feel that this is the best dance partner they will have and will dance together for a long time. I went to several milongas where I danced with the same woman for 4 or 5 tandas in a row or more and it didn’t seem very unusual at the time. In Buenos Aires dancing 3 tandas in a row is akin to setting a “coffee” date after the milonga.   In tango sometimes it is very hard to find someone you really connect well with, and Berliners will often just keep going with that great connection without worry about other expectations.

Like in Buenos Aires, all of the milongas have some sort of bar where you can purchase various drinks. However, in Berlin you won’t be seated at a particular table for the entire night, so if you get up to dance, someone might have taken your seat when you come back.  The security of belongings in Berlin seems to be much higher than in Buenos Aires.  Berlin has coat rooms at many of the events and people just put their coats and shoes and things in those.  In Buenos Aires you try to take the minimum to an event and are constantly worried that someone might take it.

Here are the Berlin milongas I attended (Separate articles containing more in-depth reports on the individual events will follow):

Mondays:

  • Berlinos Aires Milonga, (10.1.2018 and 10.8.2018). 9:00 PM to 1:00 AM, Rosa-Luxemburger Strasse 17, 6 Euros, Traditional With Cortinas
  • Milonga Popular, (10.8.2018). 9:30 PM to 4:00 AM, Meringdamm 61 (Hinterhaus), 5 Euros, Traditional one Room and Nuevo in another.

Tuesdays:

  • Clärchens Ballhaus (9.25.2018 and 10.9.2018). 9:00 PM to 2:00 AM, Auguststasse 24, 5 Euros, Traditional with Cortinas.
  • Bebop – Tango Café, (9.25.2018). 9:00PM to 2:00 AM, Pfuelstrasse 5, 5.50 Euros, Traditional 80%, non-traditional 20% – No Cortinas.

Wednesdays:

  • Pippo Milonga, (10.3.2018)
  • Strandbar Berlin Mitte (Open Air), (9.26.2018). 8:00 PM to 2:00 AM (weather permitting), Monbijou Strasse 3 (next to river across from Bode Museum), 4 Euros
  • El Ocaso, (9.26.2018 and 10.3.2018). 8:00 PM to 12:30 AM, Shonhauser Allee 36 (Frannz Club), 6 Euros, Traditional with Cortinas.

Thursdays:

  • Villa Kreuzberg, (9.27.2018 and 10.4.2018). 9:00 PM to 2:30 AM, Kreuzbergstrasse 62, 5.50 Euros, Traditional With Cortinas

 

Fridays:

  • Tangotanzen Macht Schön (TTMS), (9.28.2018). 9:30 PM to 3:00 AM, Oranienstrasse 185, 10 Euros for live music milonga, traditional with Cortinas
  • Nou ‘Die Freitags Milonga’, (10.5.2018). 9:45 PM to 4:00 AM, Chausseestrasse 102, 6 Euros, traditional with Cortinas

 

Saturdays:

  • Strandbar Berlin Mitte (Open Air), (9.29.2018). 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM (weather permitting), Monbijou Strasse 3 (next to river across from Bode Museum), 4 Euros
  • Tango Panoramico, (9.29.2018). 9:00 PM to 2:00 AM, Strausberger Platz 1, Haus Berlin 13th floor, 7 Euros, Two rooms – one with 100% traditional music and the other with 100% neotango.
  • Tangonacht Walzerlinkgestrict, (10.6.2018). 9:30 PM to 3:30 AM, Am Tempelhofer Berg 7D, 6 Euros, Traditional with Cortinas.
  • Tangoloft, (10.6.2018). 9:00 PM to 4:00 AM, Gerichstrasse 23, 6 Euros, Music is a mix of Traditional and Non-Traditional.

 

Sundays:

  • Café Dominguez (at Mala Junta tango school), (10.7.2018). 3:00 PM to 9:00 PM, Kolonnenstrasse 29. 6 Euros (reduced entrance of 4 Euros until 4:00 PM)
  • Tangoloft, (9.30.2018 and 10.7.2018). 3:00 PM to 2:00 AM, Gerichstrasse 23, 6 Euros / 13 Euros for live orchestra. Music is a mix of Traditional and Non-Traditional.

 

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