Les Cigales 2011 - Carpentras

Okay. I absolutely had a ball at this event last year, and I raved about it, so I have to update you.

This year, I had some wonderful dances with some people that I had never seen before, and probably never would have met anywhere else. I remember some beautiful tangos, a brillliant milonga candombe, and another fantastic milonga with a lady. I felt by the end of it that I was dancing well and giving and receiving a great deal of joy.

I thought the DJig was very good. Different styles, given a high priority, all good. The sound was good.

There were enough seats. There were reasonably priced drinks, the place was clean (apart from the two tons of talcum powder) and there was a means of getting food.

I stayed in a lovely B&B of the foodie kind called a tableau d'hote. It was beautiful. The people in this area are very kind and friendly, in my experience. People helped me find the buses and the way. The young gentlemen running the kebab shop were very nice.

Torrential rain for most of the weekend was unfortunate and certainly affected the mood, so adjust your perception of the following remarks accordingly.*

The location. Carpentras left something to be desired - it was much more difficult to reach than Toulon, and as far as I discovered, much less interesting. It would have been helpful to include on the website the information that the Thursday (!) was a religious holiday in France and that transport from Avignon was more complicated and very much reduced. I was very lucky, but this could easily have left me and other people stranded with great difficulties finding accommodation or transport. It was stressful, and for some people very expensive, and it affected the mood of the whole weekend.

The numbers. There were too many people. I don't think the concept of a milonga scales up beyond 200 people in this sort of context - maybe in others, but I doubt it. Even when you know that there are many people there you want to dance with and who want to dance with you, your chances of finding any person for any tanda are just too small. For a milonga that big to work well, you need at least excellent lighting and lines of sight, which there weren't.

Technical problems. The concrete floor was alternately, simultaneously, and chaotically sticky and super-slippery. The room was too dark in the evenings, and during daylight the chairs were patchily backlit, making the chances of cabeceo very limited and even just finding anyone you wanted difficult, especially if you didn't know their face well - and dancing with faces you don't know well is kind of the point of these things.

Poor focus. There were lots of people there whose basic concepts of what tango is, were so incompatible with one another that they wouldn't really want to dance together by choice, either as partners or on the same floor. This wastes everyone's time and money. I don't know why that happened. It was fine last year.

18% women over. If you say that you are going to balance numbers, you must, in fact, do so. In particular, I most strongly advise against promising it, failing to do it, and then announcing that you've seen far worse in Buenos Aires. If in Buenos Aires they treat women's money, time, effort, and attention as worth dramatically less than men's, that is their own affair and has nothing to do with me. Making a childish excuse like that for a plainly given, plainly broken promise, just makes the women think that you have no brain and no respect. If there are too many of us, you need to tell some of us no so that we can spend our time and money on another event. If it's me that gets the no, fine. There are other events. Don't mess me about.

If it's the same venue next year, and on Ascension weekend, then I will not be going. It's too expensive and troublesome for the risk. If it's back in Toulon, or somewhere easier, with smaller numbers, the technical issues fixed, and very good reasons to believe that the focus will be better and that the women will be treated equally, then I will most likely go back. It was a great event last year, the DJs are excellent, and it could be again. But this time it was much harder work and had too many irritations, considering the cost of travel, the cost of accommodation, using up holidays, and other things I could have been doing with the time.

* I actually quite enjoyed some of the rain - there was a Bollywood-scale downpour on the Sunday afternoon, so loud we could hardly hear the music, and the sense of strange poetry was only enhanced by the circus parked outside that included a cage of real live tigers who roared, a grazing bison, and a creature that might have belonged to the llama family. And a bloke in a costume having a smoke. I do like the sound of rain. But it brings gloom with it, and sunshine would have been better, I'm sure.