Thoughts and news about swing dancing in Ottawa
Posted by byron on 10.13.08 11:53PM under General
Or should it be, “Back to the roots: People!” A little punctuation goes a long way.
A major theme in swing dancing in the last few years has been this idea of “getting back to the roots.” Generally speaking this was a movement led by some of the world’s top Lindy Hoppers, who saw a need to examine the origins of swing dancing and recapture the original spirit. It was partly because dancers looked around and saw that with all the emphasis on “technique,” “connection,” and “improvisation,” things just weren’t that fun anymore. The whole exhuberance of Lindy Hop in the swing era was somehow missing. It wasn’t really the same dance.
So dancers pored over the old clips, they dug up old recordings and played them at dances. After a few years of borrowing partner connection ideas from West Coast Swing, Ballroom and Tango, Lindy Hoppers started looking more closely at how the original Lindy Hoppers used to do it. And after a few years of Hip Hop and Ballet Jazz influencing modern Lindy Hop movement, dancers started looking at vintage jazz movement, from Charleston to Tap.
But Bryn’s post about starting at the beginning brings up an important point: beyond the roots of swing dancing in Charleston, jazz movement and so on, even beyond the West African and Western European dance influences, the most important roots of swing dancing are people.
There’s a lot of talk about “social dancing.” Too often I get the impression that “social dancing” to many swing dancers just means a sport in which a “leader” tries to get a “follower” to do weird things to her body, roughly in time with a beat. But social dancing is more than just improvisation, leading and following. It’s when dancing takes on a social role. In both the African and European traditions that Lindy Hop descends from, dancing was a major feature of social gatherings.
I started swing dancing in the fall of ’98, but I also began learning ballroom and Salsa at the same time. One of the reasons I was so much more interested in swing was the freedom to improvise in ways that Waltz or Rhumba didn’t offer (at least as I was taught them). But the real deal-maker was the people. I just met so many cool people when I went out swing dancing that even if I hadn’t enjoyed the dancing, I still would have come back.
It’s always, always about the people.
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