We may not have our beloved Tango at the moment, but we still have our memories. Many of those Tango memories were formed at Club Milonga, especially during our early years before the many milongas and festivals now in Toronto started being formed.
With that in mind, here are some group photos taken at Club Milonga during the first 3 decades of our existence. They should help to trigger many memories for those who were members or otherwise attending the Club between our founding in 1992 and our having to close due to the COVID-19 lockdowns in March, 2020. Some names from the past are also linked to copies of vintage Club newsletters which included interviews with them, or other bits of information about them, along with other notes about the Club during our first decade or so.
Many faces, many dances and other encounters to remember... Some of those in the pictures remained regulars (more or less) for many years, some stopped frequenting the Club for various reasons, and a few of them are no longer with us.
But they are still here, in our memories.
May there be more such memories to come in the future!
December 1996. You might remember in particular David Harvey, whose 95th birthday bash at the Club in 2004 was covered by CBC. We had a good article about him in our newsletter (called "Tango Heartbeat" at the time), Volume 19, Fall 2003.
Fabian and Roxana were teaching at Club Milonga during March to May 2003, and took this photo for us during March. They were a young couple who had learned Tango from Roxana's milonguero parents, Oscar and Lydia Callegari, continued their studies with Todaro and other greats in Argentina, and were well on their way to becoming known internationally as teachers, performers, and all-round ambassadors of Tango. They would regularly stop in for a dance at the Club when they weren't on the road during the early to mid-1990s, and made a point of reserving time in their schedules to teach at the Club each year, usually in May and June. For some 25 years, they rarely taught classes here in Toronto, outside of those they gave at Club Milonga.
If you remember the clapboard sign that Club Milonga normally puts outside when we are open, Roxana and Fabian might look familiar. The person who painted that sign based it on an image of them, from when they were even younger than they were in this photo.
(Oscar and Lydia were probably the very first teachers of Tango here in Toronto, starting in 1986. They offered much encouragement while plans for Club Milonga were taking shape. They finally shut down their own classes when Club Milonga opened, and were often seen at the Club during our first few years. Many of Club Milonga's first members had been students of Oscar and Lydia.)
September 2008. Some concerns about the future viability of the Club were already starting to be raised, but you'd never know it from the attendance. You might recognize Bryant Lopez and Faye Lavin, who were teaching at the Club that month.
June 2009. Another eventful year. Roxana and Fabian would usually set aside May and June of each year so they could teach at Club Milonga, and have been very supportive of us since our early days.
Note the sound absorbing fabric which the Club had installed around the room for a while. It made a big difference to the music sound quality in the room, during the years it was up there!
August 2016. Apart from being a weekly venue for learning and dancing Tango since our founding in 1992, we have also served to give a number of relatively new (and newly arrived) instructors setting up in Toronto - including many of the Tango instructors now operating here - their first real chance to become known in the Tango community. These included Pablito Greco, who was teaching at the Club in August 2016.
October 2016. Lucas Carrizo and Paula Tejeda were teaching at Club Milonga by special arrangement. Their first appearance with us was in August and September 2015, and the interest was such that one person literally flew to Toronto from BC for a few weeks to be able to attend some of their classes with us.
In the first decade or so of the Club's existence, many of the great Tango teachers from Argentina and elsewhere featuring in Toronto were being hosted or arranged by Club Milonga. You may recall Carlos Gavito, Miguel Pla, Chino Aguerrodi, Nelson Avila, Mariela Franganillo, Elias Navas, and others... ( Cristina Rey knew Gavito from when they were stage partners in the 1960s, and arranged an 8 week series of Saturday-and-Sunday workshops with him for us while he was in town with the Forever Tango show one year.) In the years after 2010, much of the hosting of instructors from overseas has been taken over by the organizers of some of the many festivals and other venues now in Toronto.
October 2017. Club Milonga has had some ups and downs in recent years, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Sandra Rocha, who was teaching at the Club that month, has long been very supportive of the Club, and even served on our Board of Directors one year. She also organized a group trip to Argentina in 2001, which those of our members who went along thoroughly enjoyed. Unfortunately, she had to skip some teaching nights in October 2017 because of a back injury, but graciously arranged for an instructor who had newly returned to Toronto, Adam Czub, to fill in for her on those nights.
February 2018. Ruben Bustamante is another Argentinean who had come to Canada in 1989 in the cast of a Juan Carlos Copes show. Originally a very well known folklore dancer from a very young age, he picked up Tango with that show and has been performing and teaching Tango for many years since. You might recall when his "Los Milongueros" Tango show troupe performed at Club Milonga's Moonlight Ball at the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse one year. He was also teaching a separate class we tried setting up on Tango for stage performance, which was based around dancing a choreography of his that was in the tradition of "Tango Argentino" and other Big Stage Tango shows.
Ruben was back with us again in August 2018. Some of the instructors we have had enjoyed strongly loyal followings, and Ruben has been one of them. One fellow would make the drive from Hamilton, in spite of often terrible traffic, to be in our classes when Ruben was teaching, but rarely otherwise.
December 2018. Lisandro Gomez and Tatiana Melnyk not only teach Tango, they also operate a Tango Theatre company which performs regularly (pandemics permitting). This shot was on the night of our 2018 Christmas Party, following their lesson.
August 2019. When the Tango Argentino show played in Toronto in 1986, everyone who saw it was amazed by the show's Tango dances. Three local dance instructors who were inspired enough to more or less drop what they were doing and switch to Tango, becoming among the very first local, non-Argentinian Tango instructors here, were Bob Waugh, Alberto Gomez and Gary Dafoe. Bob worked with Cristina Rey to come up with a teaching plan for the Club, and was teaching most of our lessons until 1996. Gary was the first outside Tango instructor to be hired for a stint at the Club after Bob and Cristina moved on. He has also referred streams of interested people, from his own classes and elsewhere, to Club Milonga since our early days. He and Sahori have been back to teach at the Club many times over the decades, most recently in August 2019.
October 2019, on the night of our 2019 Halloween party. Roxana and Fabian were teaching at the Club, and came dressed in "Day of the Dead" costumes that night.
We did our best to keep Club Milonga open during 2020, but suffered fast plummeting attendance as more became known about the COVID-19 situation that was unfolding around the globe. We were open on March 10, but after some urgent debating based on the increasingly dire news reports, shut down the following week. (Which happened to coincide with a government order for businesses to close on the 17th as the severity of the pandemic started to sink in.)
It is August 2021 as this is written, and Club Milonga remains closed. Some Tango establishments have been re-opening (again) with mandatory restrictions in place, such as masks and proof of vaccination, reduced capacity limits, social distancing, and sticking with one partner for the entire evening with no changing of partners allowed. Some of these restrictions run counter to the Club's welcoming approach to all who are interested in Tango, whether they have regular partners or not, so Club Milonga has not been among the list of places in Toronto that have been re-opening. And another wave (here in Toronto, our 4th) of a particularly virulent strain of COVID-19 is currently getting going.
We have no idea when we will be able to open again, but the best bet at this point seems to be for sometime in 2022.
May the joy of Tango be with us all again then.