Milonga (dance)


Milonga dance is dancing to milonga music.
In a book published in 1883 Ventura Lynch, a noted contemporary student of the dances and folklore of Buenos Aires Province, noted the influence the Afro-Argentine dancers had on the city compadritos, who apparently frequented the Afro-Argentine dance venues, "the milonga is danced only by the compadritos of the city, who have created it as a mockery of the dances the blacks hold in their own places".
Ventura Lynch also noted the popularity of the milonga. "The milonga is so universal in the environs of the city that it is an obligatory piece at all the lower-class dances, and it is now heard on guitars, on paper-combs, and from the itinerant musicians with their flutes, harps and violins. It has also been taken up by the organ-grinders, who have arranged it so as to sound like the habanera dance. It is danced too in the low life clubs around... markets, and also at the dances and wakes of cart-drivers, the soldiery and compadres and compadritos.
Distinctive elements added from candombe were "quebradas", improvised, jerky, semi-athletic contortions, the more dramatic the better, ironical elements like walking around the partner with exaggerated tiny steps or humorous jumps, and cortes, a suggestive pause, or sudden break in the figures of the dance. Unlike in the "Tango" of that group, however, where these movements were danced apart, they were now danced together. Jose Gobello suggested that the mazurka was also altered in the districts close to the docks. This Africanized milonga-tango, as well as the habanera and mazurka, was frowned upon, and found wholly unacceptable by some sections of Argentine high society.