Here's something I have been thinking about off and on for literally years. How do we most effectively propagate knowledge about lindy hop in this era?
Traditionally, lindy hop is a street / vernacular dance. It evolved and developed outside of a formal studio setting, largely in public or semi-public spaces (dance clubs, jazz clubs, house parties, etc). It is improvisional in nature and values creativity, personal expression over lock-step technique and rigid choreography.
The reality is that lindy for the most part does not fit the true definition of a vernacular dance anymore. Most lindy hop knowledge originates in formal studio / class structure.
That said, there are many ways that lindy hop knowledge can be spread, even outside of the class structure. Some examples:
People who learn within their family, from their parents or other mentors
Kids who learn in gym or after school programs
Learning online or via taped footage that is emulated
Observation and mimickry of others you see out social dancing
Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing via friendship networks and informal exchanges of information
Instruction books and guides
Many of these we might think of as sub-optimal for learning lindy, which we believe is best learned through a guided, facilitated process from a teacher with a certain measure of expertise. So we encourage newbies to take lessons from a professional teacher or a formal studio environment, at least to get the foundation of knowledge you need to begin "properly" lindy hopping.
For many of us, these classes need to be accompanied by implicit knowledge you gain about the dancing from dancing socially, ideally with a wide variety of people of various skill levels. And after a certain point, we stop taking classes and gain most new information and skills from ocassional workshops and camps, and from more social dancing.
While this might make sense for lindy hop today, there is no law that this is the only way or even the best way that dance knowledge and skill is disseminated.
In b-boy culture, learning to break typically comes from being a member of a particular "crew," practicing and sharing knowledge together, and most importantly competing against other crews. It's the "cypher" dance circle and the battles that form the basis of what practitioners would say is true b-boy knowledge and skill. Preparing to battle, analyzing your opponent, being in the circle, and analyzing the results later are integral to being a b-boy.
Authenticity is preserved by being evaluated by your peers and elders in the field, who routinely judge competitions from the local to international levels.
Salsa dance culture, as I understand it, has strong tensions between formal dance studio instruction and knowledge gained "culturally" through family and on the dance floor. There is a wide diversity of styles, that come from different localities and influences from New York style, LA style, Cuban, Colombian and many more. This diversity is to the degree that practitioners will not / can not dance with other dancers unless they know the roots of where they learned (particularly on 1 versus on 2?)
Authenticity is complicated by salsa's connection to enthnicity and different Latin cultures. Thus a Latino salsa practitioner who learned from his or her family and within a latino community might be deemed more "authentic" than someone who learned exclusively from a dance studio, ability and experience notwithstanding. Contrast this with b-boy culture, which has Puerto Rican / African-american roots, but whose contemporary and accepted dominating innovators come from all over the world.
So going back to my initial question: How do we most effectively propagate knowledge about lindy hop in the digital era? I don't pretend to have the answers. But I think it helps to think out-of-the-box and creatively about we keep this dance form alive and growing for succeeding generations.
Originally posted Tuesday, March 15, 2011 (1 year ago)
I want to collect my thoughts before I give a good reply to this, but one quote from Maxie Dorf I think relates well to this subject,
As you probably know, I taught Sylvia
and Jonathan and very pleased with
what they have done the last 10 years.
They are the only ones that I know of
that has broken down the Balboa.
Balboa was a street dance and never
was taught. You had to watch the
dancers and practice at home. My main
purpose of teaching them was to keep
the dance going. And thanks to their
tapes and personal teaching throughout
the world, I know now that it won't
die. That is, teaching my style. -
Maxie Dorf
Originally posted Tuesday, March 15, 2011 (1 year ago)
Edited on Tuesday, March 15, 2011 1:38 pm (1 year ago)
Rik - You ask a valid question, but you are taking on an awful lot here. It just so happens that I'm studying for an exam in a "program design and development for learning meetings" class this week. People have written many volumes on tiny details regarding how you teach anyone to do anything. I don't think you want this thread to go in a direction like that.
And you raise the issue of the future of "lindy culture" - Should it return to its "street roots"? Should it embrace the formal instruction model?
Maybe it's best not to complicate things.
Why not assume, for the time being, that the way Lindy culture has evolved in recent years is the way it should have evolved. In other words, the way people learn lindy as you described it is the way people generally WANT to learn lindy. The whole lessons/workshops/learn-stuff-when-you-go-out-dancing thing is pretty much how we do this. And the "watch clips to figure out how to do a dance or step or move the way so-and-so did it" is how we do the research that makes teaching this dance to others possible.
Face it - we'll never have another generation of lindy-hoppers who will learn this dance by inventing it: picking up 20's Charleston on the dance floor without formal instruction and then changing it into "breakaway Charleston". That's already been done and you can only do that once.
Now were in the middle of a "let's figure out how to do lindy hop the traditional way and then take it into new directions that are totally OURS." To get caught up, people have to start by taking lessons to learn all that stuff lindy instructors pick up off film clips.
FWIW - I will be very surprised if clips from our dances and competitions in the current era (like Showdown) won't get picked apart by a future generation of lindy hoppers 50 years from now - who will then start to make lesson plans for their next workshops...
"A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having" - V
Originally posted Tuesday, March 15, 2011 (1 year ago)
Thanks Racetrack. I don't expect that there isn't much that anyone can do about it. It's happened and that's the way it was meant to happen.
But I'm curious if there are other modes of learning that other local scenes support that are outside of the formal class / studio system? In NYC, there was a peer sharing group that I know some folks were trying out.
In San Diego, one of the venues started showing a swing dance clip every week. I don't mean they just play some clips while people are dancing. They actually sit everyone down and watch a clip chosen by someone who finds the clip inspiring.
Originally posted Tuesday, March 15, 2011 (1 year ago)
For a short period of time I was part of a group that met a few hours before the evening dance at a nearby house to practice whatever we felt like working on. One of the local venues has an additional small room that effectively functions as a practice room. People hang out, trade moves, do a little dancing, etc.
Originally posted Tuesday, March 15, 2011 (1 year ago)
Those are really cool examples!
It's common in b-boy circles for dancers to see someone do some new trick on Youtube and to try and emulate it. They might then post their own video of their attempts, successful or not.
Originally posted Wednesday, March 16, 2011 (1 year ago)
(Feel free to correct me, all of this will be mostly opinion and guesses, also rambling)
The "new" Lindy Hop is not the same Lindy Hop that was invented, and that's (mostly) a good thing. It's good because even though we lost some freshness and wildness we gained connection. But this is also the reason Lindy has to be taught.
Without connection you can't dance, with connection you can. If you get a fresh follower that groks connection you can do almost anything with her. If you get a fresh leader that groks connection and sit him in front of dance videos or, even better, live dancers, he will end dancing Lindy.
Not long ago I sent a "Bug's question of the day" about what would be a good proportion of class time vs social dance time to get better (no Facebook access here, cannot link it). The most frequent answer was that you should social dance a lot more than going to class, some suggesting a full 0%-100%.
So sum it all, once you learn connection Lindy knowledge permeates through every dance you go or watch.
Face it - we'll never have another generation of lindy-hoppers who will learn this dance by inventing it: picking up 20's Charleston on the dance floor without formal instruction and then changing it into "breakaway Charleston". That's already been done and you can only do that once.
We won't invent it, but it will be evolved, with moves introduced or refined, changing styles, and generally making it our dance. Every error we make while dancing is the opening for a new variation.
Most of the videos I've seen are of the best dancers of back then, and of course they had connection, but I've seen some other videos that, while the dancing was good, it looked hurtful. I'd wager that connection, in average, has increased for the average dancer.
I cannot get my records straight, but I remember from somewhere that there was a discussion whether the dance was better before or it's better now, and there was a quote from an old-timer saying (paraphrasing) "If we had knew how to do this this way we would have done so, because or way hurt."
The "new" Lindy Hop is not the same
Lindy Hop that was invented, and
that's (mostly) a good thing. It's
good because even though we lost some
freshness and wildness we gained
connection. But this is also the
reason Lindy has to be taught.
Without connection you can't dance,
with connection you can. If you get a
fresh follower that groks connection
you can do almost anything with her.
If you get a fresh leader that groks
connection and sit him in front of
dance videos or, even better, live
dancers, he will end dancing Lindy.
I'm with Rik on this one. Take a close look at the Hellzapoppin' clip and tell me these dancers had no connection.
Also take a look at some clips of Dean Collins and his troupe.
In point of fact, the way new lindy hoppers are taught connection is mostly based on what people learned during the late 90's through the first decade of the 21st century from watching clips of the original lindy hoppers doing their thing at Harvest Moon Balls, in Hollywood movies, dancing on the beach in California, etc. The things learned from these clips ended the so-called "style wars" of the late 1990's by proving that the so-called "Savoy style" of lindy (as opposed to "Dean Collins style") never existed back in the day. Is that the "no connection" style of lindy that you were referring to in your post? I don't know anyone who dances lindy that way any more.
"A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having" - V
Originally posted Wednesday, March 16, 2011 (1 year ago)
I'm siding with Jaume. When you're looking at old clips you're looking at the best dancers, dancing with their regular partners. Even then I often find myself cringing a bit at some of the dancing. Also, when you consider that there are a lot of lindy hoppers today who have been dancing several nights a week for 10+ years of their life they are typically going to have better connection than someone who has danced for a year or two, even if it was during the 40s. There is a reason it was called jitterbugging, and it's not simply because it was an energetic dance. It's because the dancers often looked and were a bit out of control.
Sure, there were dancers back then that had great connection, and there are dancers now who have been dancing for years who have terrible connection. After years of dancing I can usually do a decent job of identifying who has good connection by watching them dance. With follows I see if I'm right when I dance with them, and with leads I often ask follows what they were like to dance with. When watching old clips as compared to watching people dance now, my general impression is that connection is better now. On average, follows look like they follow better, and leads look less jerky and more clear.
Originally posted Wednesday, March 16, 2011 (1 year ago)
I think its a bit of a myth that there were no dance classes back in the swing era. Certainly this would have been true for the inventors but for the rest of the jitterbuging population classes would have been a feature of learning the dance. In Australia dancing and dance instruction was very popular in the 30s and from the research that I've done it was the influence of the dance schools in 38 and 39 and not.visiting American sailors in 41 and 42 that popularised jitterbug and swing here.
Originally posted Sunday, April 3, 2011 (1 year ago)
Edited on Sunday, April 3, 2011 3:37 am (1 year ago)
I wish I knew what to call the style of Lindy Hop today.
The dance doesn't resemble anything that I saw in the old movies.
Everyone is doing their own thing.
I would hate to see the dance totally changed into something else.
Maybe what I remember from old movies is choreography and not social dancing.
Sorry but I disagree about connection being better now.
What I feel as a leader are followers giving too much weight and moving their shoulders. It's really hard to lead a swingout if a follower is giving all her weight and moving her shoulders away from me.
These are the beginner to intermediate followers for the most part so it must be something they are taught in class.
Listen 24 hours a day! Weekly updated shows
How Should Lindy Hop Knowledge Be Propagated?
Here's something I have been thinking about off and on for literally years. How do we most effectively propagate knowledge about lindy hop in this era?
Traditionally, lindy hop is a street / vernacular dance. It evolved and developed outside of a formal studio setting, largely in public or semi-public spaces (dance clubs, jazz clubs, house parties, etc). It is improvisional in nature and values creativity, personal expression over lock-step technique and rigid choreography.
The reality is that lindy for the most part does not fit the true definition of a vernacular dance anymore. Most lindy hop knowledge originates in formal studio / class structure.
That said, there are many ways that lindy hop knowledge can be spread, even outside of the class structure. Some examples:
Many of these we might think of as sub-optimal for learning lindy, which we believe is best learned through a guided, facilitated process from a teacher with a certain measure of expertise. So we encourage newbies to take lessons from a professional teacher or a formal studio environment, at least to get the foundation of knowledge you need to begin "properly" lindy hopping.
For many of us, these classes need to be accompanied by implicit knowledge you gain about the dancing from dancing socially, ideally with a wide variety of people of various skill levels. And after a certain point, we stop taking classes and gain most new information and skills from ocassional workshops and camps, and from more social dancing.
While this might make sense for lindy hop today, there is no law that this is the only way or even the best way that dance knowledge and skill is disseminated.
In b-boy culture, learning to break typically comes from being a member of a particular "crew," practicing and sharing knowledge together, and most importantly competing against other crews. It's the "cypher" dance circle and the battles that form the basis of what practitioners would say is true b-boy knowledge and skill. Preparing to battle, analyzing your opponent, being in the circle, and analyzing the results later are integral to being a b-boy.
Authenticity is preserved by being evaluated by your peers and elders in the field, who routinely judge competitions from the local to international levels.
Salsa dance culture, as I understand it, has strong tensions between formal dance studio instruction and knowledge gained "culturally" through family and on the dance floor. There is a wide diversity of styles, that come from different localities and influences from New York style, LA style, Cuban, Colombian and many more. This diversity is to the degree that practitioners will not / can not dance with other dancers unless they know the roots of where they learned (particularly on 1 versus on 2?)
Authenticity is complicated by salsa's connection to enthnicity and different Latin cultures. Thus a Latino salsa practitioner who learned from his or her family and within a latino community might be deemed more "authentic" than someone who learned exclusively from a dance studio, ability and experience notwithstanding. Contrast this with b-boy culture, which has Puerto Rican / African-american roots, but whose contemporary and accepted dominating innovators come from all over the world.
So going back to my initial question: How do we most effectively propagate knowledge about lindy hop in the digital era? I don't pretend to have the answers. But I think it helps to think out-of-the-box and creatively about we keep this dance form alive and growing for succeeding generations.
Why It Took Me 13 Years to Learn the Big Apple • My hiphop crew Freeplay performing at the Dance-a-Rama (video).
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I want to collect my thoughts before I give a good reply to this, but one quote from Maxie Dorf I think relates well to this subject,
If you are bored check out my blog... http://taintwhatyoudo.wordpress.com/
This way. :-)
Website and Blog: ickeroo.com
Rik - You ask a valid question, but you are taking on an awful lot here. It just so happens that I'm studying for an exam in a "program design and development for learning meetings" class this week. People have written many volumes on tiny details regarding how you teach anyone to do anything. I don't think you want this thread to go in a direction like that.
And you raise the issue of the future of "lindy culture" - Should it return to its "street roots"? Should it embrace the formal instruction model?
Maybe it's best not to complicate things.
Why not assume, for the time being, that the way Lindy culture has evolved in recent years is the way it should have evolved. In other words, the way people learn lindy as you described it is the way people generally WANT to learn lindy. The whole lessons/workshops/learn-stuff-when-you-go-out-dancing thing is pretty much how we do this. And the "watch clips to figure out how to do a dance or step or move the way so-and-so did it" is how we do the research that makes teaching this dance to others possible.
Face it - we'll never have another generation of lindy-hoppers who will learn this dance by inventing it: picking up 20's Charleston on the dance floor without formal instruction and then changing it into "breakaway Charleston". That's already been done and you can only do that once.
Now were in the middle of a "let's figure out how to do lindy hop the traditional way and then take it into new directions that are totally OURS." To get caught up, people have to start by taking lessons to learn all that stuff lindy instructors pick up off film clips.
FWIW - I will be very surprised if clips from our dances and competitions in the current era (like Showdown) won't get picked apart by a future generation of lindy hoppers 50 years from now - who will then start to make lesson plans for their next workshops...
"A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having" - V
Thanks Racetrack. I don't expect that there isn't much that anyone can do about it. It's happened and that's the way it was meant to happen.
But I'm curious if there are other modes of learning that other local scenes support that are outside of the formal class / studio system? In NYC, there was a peer sharing group that I know some folks were trying out.
Why It Took Me 13 Years to Learn the Big Apple • My hiphop crew Freeplay performing at the Dance-a-Rama (video).
In San Diego, one of the venues started showing a swing dance clip every week. I don't mean they just play some clips while people are dancing. They actually sit everyone down and watch a clip chosen by someone who finds the clip inspiring.
Website and Blog: ickeroo.com
For a short period of time I was part of a group that met a few hours before the evening dance at a nearby house to practice whatever we felt like working on. One of the local venues has an additional small room that effectively functions as a practice room. People hang out, trade moves, do a little dancing, etc.
Those are really cool examples!
It's common in b-boy circles for dancers to see someone do some new trick on Youtube and to try and emulate it. They might then post their own video of their attempts, successful or not.
Why It Took Me 13 Years to Learn the Big Apple • My hiphop crew Freeplay performing at the Dance-a-Rama (video).
(Feel free to correct me, all of this will be mostly opinion and guesses, also rambling)
The "new" Lindy Hop is not the same Lindy Hop that was invented, and that's (mostly) a good thing. It's good because even though we lost some freshness and wildness we gained connection. But this is also the reason Lindy has to be taught.
Without connection you can't dance, with connection you can. If you get a fresh follower that groks connection you can do almost anything with her. If you get a fresh leader that groks connection and sit him in front of dance videos or, even better, live dancers, he will end dancing Lindy.
Not long ago I sent a "Bug's question of the day" about what would be a good proportion of class time vs social dance time to get better (no Facebook access here, cannot link it). The most frequent answer was that you should social dance a lot more than going to class, some suggesting a full 0%-100%.
So sum it all, once you learn connection Lindy knowledge permeates through every dance you go or watch.
We won't invent it, but it will be evolved, with moves introduced or refined, changing styles, and generally making it our dance. Every error we make while dancing is the opening for a new variation.
Swing in Barcelona
Are you saying that dancers back in the day didn't have connection? I don't really see how you can back up that assertion.
Why It Took Me 13 Years to Learn the Big Apple • My hiphop crew Freeplay performing at the Dance-a-Rama (video).
Most of the videos I've seen are of the best dancers of back then, and of course they had connection, but I've seen some other videos that, while the dancing was good, it looked hurtful. I'd wager that connection, in average, has increased for the average dancer.
I cannot get my records straight, but I remember from somewhere that there was a discussion whether the dance was better before or it's better now, and there was a quote from an old-timer saying (paraphrasing) "If we had knew how to do this this way we would have done so, because or way hurt."
Swing in Barcelona
I'm with Rik on this one. Take a close look at the Hellzapoppin' clip and tell me these dancers had no connection.
Also take a look at some clips of Dean Collins and his troupe.
In point of fact, the way new lindy hoppers are taught connection is mostly based on what people learned during the late 90's through the first decade of the 21st century from watching clips of the original lindy hoppers doing their thing at Harvest Moon Balls, in Hollywood movies, dancing on the beach in California, etc. The things learned from these clips ended the so-called "style wars" of the late 1990's by proving that the so-called "Savoy style" of lindy (as opposed to "Dean Collins style") never existed back in the day. Is that the "no connection" style of lindy that you were referring to in your post? I don't know anyone who dances lindy that way any more.
"A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having" - V
I'm siding with Jaume. When you're looking at old clips you're looking at the best dancers, dancing with their regular partners. Even then I often find myself cringing a bit at some of the dancing. Also, when you consider that there are a lot of lindy hoppers today who have been dancing several nights a week for 10+ years of their life they are typically going to have better connection than someone who has danced for a year or two, even if it was during the 40s. There is a reason it was called jitterbugging, and it's not simply because it was an energetic dance. It's because the dancers often looked and were a bit out of control.
Sure, there were dancers back then that had great connection, and there are dancers now who have been dancing for years who have terrible connection. After years of dancing I can usually do a decent job of identifying who has good connection by watching them dance. With follows I see if I'm right when I dance with them, and with leads I often ask follows what they were like to dance with. When watching old clips as compared to watching people dance now, my general impression is that connection is better now. On average, follows look like they follow better, and leads look less jerky and more clear.
I think its a bit of a myth that there were no dance classes back in the swing era. Certainly this would have been true for the inventors but for the rest of the jitterbuging population classes would have been a feature of learning the dance. In Australia dancing and dance instruction was very popular in the 30s and from the research that I've done it was the influence of the dance schools in 38 and 39 and not.visiting American sailors in 41 and 42 that popularised jitterbug and swing here.
I wish I knew what to call the style of Lindy Hop today. The dance doesn't resemble anything that I saw in the old movies. Everyone is doing their own thing. I would hate to see the dance totally changed into something else. Maybe what I remember from old movies is choreography and not social dancing.
Sorry but I disagree about connection being better now. What I feel as a leader are followers giving too much weight and moving their shoulders. It's really hard to lead a swingout if a follower is giving all her weight and moving her shoulders away from me. These are the beginner to intermediate followers for the most part so it must be something they are taught in class.
I think its just lack of experience. Most of the "rock star" follows I know that are REALLY easy to lead have been doing this for years.
"A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having" - V
Racetrack, some of them have been dancing for 3 or 4 years now.
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