The Dancing Bug

Why do swing dancers have such a hard time dancing to music?

Latin dancers know what steps to do to which music. If it’s a salsa, they do salsa. They wouldn’t do chacha or bachata or merengue to a salsa. That would be weird.

Why is it, then, that swing dancers insist on doing east coast swing to “Brazil”? Or lindy to “Do What Ory Say”? Or charleston to “Wade in the Water”? Or balboa to “Yakety-Yak”? Or shag to “Smooth Sailing”?

People seem to come out to swing dances with one fixed idea in mind. They just learned tandem charleston, say, and they’re determined to practice it as much as possible. So “Nuages” comes on, and there they are doing their tandem charleston.

Last night we had Alex Yan down from Seattle. He is this really cool DJ who has a video setup and DJs everything from video clips. So there was a greater than normal variety of styles and tempos of music, covering the whole swing spectrum.

But I was watching this one dancer off and on throughout the night, and every time I looked at him, no matter what the song was, he was doing these huge kicking swingouts. Every single song that came on, no matter what, his follows were being yanked into these big swingouts. At first it was agonizing to watch. After awhile it just became very, very funny.

Partially I blame this on the mania for teaching beginners east coast swing. It causes problems in two ways. First, we rarely play songs that are particularly good for east coast swing. So people who only know how to do that dance mostly end up dancing it to hot jazz or whatever. They learn to disassociate the dance from the music. Then second, we teach people in subtle ways that east coast swing is only for beginners. So after people learn other dances, they never want to do east coast swing again, even if the song is perfect for it.

We must never forget that there are very many songs out there for which six-count swing is the only appropriate choice, no matter how expert we are at doing other dances.

I think we all need to calm down on our moves and our fixed ideas, and actually listen to these songs. Remember that historically, it was the music that came first, and then the dancing grew out of it. People had no need to invent lindy hop until the music itself taught them how to do it.

We need to recapture this idea in our own dancing. We need to recreate in our own bodies the history of swing dancing by getting out of our brains and more into our ears, and letting the music teach us how to dance.

The song will teach you how it wants you to move, if you will only listen.