Give me a packed milonga!

Give me a choice of a milonga with wide open spaces or a comfortably packed dance floor, and I'll choose the latter. There's something about dancing with the other dancers - picking up on their movement, feeding off their energy, feeling like the milonga is an organism which is slowly moving around the floor.

Then there are the navigational challenges - leading my partner, responding to the rhythms of the instruments, capturing the emotion & timing of the melodies (of the orchestra or vocalist), advancing & turning with adjacent dancers, utilising tight spaces - and making it all work.

The wide open spaces in a sparsely filled milonga? - great for practising complex figures or the fun of racing around to a vals, but there's something about the essence of the milonga that's missing here.

However, there are a couple of conditions to my preferred packed floor: it should be comfortably, not tightly packed (when it can be simply difficult to dance at all), and other dancers need to respect the codes of use of the dance space. Here's an interesting and amusing article on Tango & Chaos that's worth reading on use of the dance floor.

Bob