A Day in the Life of LA Tango, Year 2043

Put on your Tango future-vision goggles. What do you see?Imagine, thirty years from now. It’s the year 2043. Welcome to the Platinum age of Tango.

You’re looking at the LA weekly, and there are three different milongas to choose from different great live music groups, and it’s just a Monday night. You know that if you go out there will be fifteen, twenty people you love to dance with there.

Beforehand you could swing by a friend’s house for a house-milonga. Most houses and apartments these days are being built with the idea of social dancing in mind with little hardwood ballrooms. Or you could grab a practice rotunda for an hour after dinner.

Maybe you’ll warm up dancing to those old recordings of the little quartets and sextets from back in the 2020s, those little bands where you knew all the musicans. Or the good old vintage electronic Tango from the turn of the century. Gotan project is so nostalgic these days !

You reflect back. It’s amazing to see what Tango has become. It’s amazing to remember how impossible it was, fifty years ago, to imagine having a good, secure job in the world of Tango -- and now it’s actually quite normal for people to go into real careers in Tango.

There are all these awesome jobs for Tango teachers and community curators, at the local Tango schools. Jobs with meaning, freedom, and flexibility -- and with benefits, vacation time, training, and the chance to make stuff happen working with amazing inspiring colleagues. There is enough time to learn and to dance, and still enough energy to take care of yourself and your family for the long term. Things work.

You pull on a pair of retro harem pants and strap on your multi-surface friction-free dance shoes that record the steps from every tanda in a microscopic embedded Intel chip. You walk by a bunch of kids jamming in a cul-de-sac, they seem to be working on some crazy soltadas. You take off. House milonga it is.

What do you see when you put on your Tango future-vision goggles??