Swing dance
Swing dancing is enjoying a huge worldwide revival. Since the 1980s, modern exponents of the dance style have been instrumental in ensuring that this revival has traversed the globe from the USA, Britain, Europe, Australia and the Far East. Just about wherever you might go in the world, there will be some form of swing dance class or social gathering. Swing dancers are ever thirsty for more input about this dance style, and so many international dance “camps” have sprung up to cater for this. The most famous and long-running of these is the Herrang Dance Camp, where thousands of swing dancers take over a small hamlet in Sweden for the entire month of July. Here they can learn all levels of Lindy Hop, Boogie Woogie and Rhythm Tap in a wall-to-wall and truly international swing dance atmosphere.
But what is swing dance? The origins of swing are relatively unclear. This is not due to a lack of possible theories on the origins, but rather to an overwhelming number of them. Here’s an encyclopedia definition:
''Swing'' is a group of related street dances that evolved from Lindy Hop. Swing is a partner dance, where the couple consists of a leader and follower, who share a dance connection.
But a more accessible and graphic definition might be:
Swing Dancing refers to partner dancing where the man literally "swings" the lady through a series of dance patterns. Swing Dancing can either be simple or complex.
In fact, it could be said that Swing is any dance that is done to Swing music! Swing Dancing owes its start to Jazz music, which is considered to be the only art form to originate in America. Swing music in particular concentrated on the interweave of coordinated Instruments where the band leader and his musicians were considered the star.
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Jazz musicians who began their career in New Orleans, the "Cradle of Jazz", moved up the country to Chicago and New York. Many musicians moved from the South to Harlem, a black enclave in New York City. Harlem has been credited as the birthplace of Swing music, the Charleston and then Lindy Hop dancing as well during the 1920s. Bands led by legends such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie became the early models for the famous Big Bands of the 1930s. |
However back in the 1920s, there were no traditions in partner dancing to draw from. As the Swing sound hit Harlem, people danced freestyle as they looked for ways to express themselves to the vigorous energy of the music. Into this vacuum came the CHARLESTON – the first swing dance craze!
The Charleston dance was a social jazz dance highly popular in the 1920s and frequently revived. It is characterised by its toes-in, heels-out twisting steps and was performed as a solo, with a partner, or in a group. Mentioned as early as 1903, it was originally a black folk dance known throughout the American South and especially associated with Charleston, South Carolina. Analysis of its movements shows it to have strong parallels in certain dances of Trinidad, Nigeria, and Ghana. In its early form the dance was highly abandoned and was performed to complex rhythms beaten out by foot stamps and handclaps. About 1920 professional dancers adopted the dance, and, after its appearance in the black musical Runnin' Wild (1923), it became a national craze in the USA. As a fashionable ballroom dance it lost some of the exuberance of the earlier version.
| Even though the dance started off as a black community dance, it gradually moved to the young white communities across the United States. The wildness of the Charleston frightened some and it soon was banned in some towns and on some American campuses. The bans, like Prohibition itself, just made the dance more popular, as college youth thumbed their noses to authority and danced anyway. |
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The dance became so popular that it even gained respectability with Britain’s party-loving Prince Edward (later king) of Wales strutted his Charleston stuff in public.
The Charleston affected the culture of society in the 1920s. It was a movement that sparked in the black community and soon became a USA-wide, every-society craze. The dance soon caught on in many different countries around the world. It changed the way people thought about life.
As Swing music developed in the 1920s, so did a new dance which was part Charleston, part something else. The Savoy was an enormous Ballroom which occupied an entire city block in Harlem and served as the home to black musicians like Count Basie, Chick Webb, and later Cab Calloway amongst others. This new dance magically acquired its name in 1927. There are many different versions of this story – here are two similar ones!
One night shortly after Charles Lindbergh's historic solo flight across the Atlantic, a huge dance marathon was in progress at the Savoy. A very talented dancer called George “Shorty” Snowden was doing jumps, leaps and somersaults followed by sky-scraping acrobatic lifts with his partner. Impressed by the young man's skill, a reporter asked him what he was doing. "Hey, man, take a look, I'm flying! I'm doing the Lindy !" The airborne image clearly fit. Another version states that when asked by the reporter what this crazy dance was called, the quick witted answer was that it was the "Lindy Hop" - from a newspaper headline “Lindy Hops The Atlantic” - and the name stuck.
Interestingly, many of today’s Lindy patterns include all sorts of variations on the Charleston. It was the addition of the newer "Swinging" patterns plus the acrobatics and jumping that signified the emergence of this newer dance form. Inspired by the music, it almost seemed like the dancers were indeed ready to fly!
The term JITTERBUG appeared in the early 1930s. Cab Calloway, a famous black band-leader, is given credit for coining the term with his 1933 song "The Call of the Jitterbug", but its original meaning was far removed from dancing. Back then the "Jitterbug" had darker connotations. In Calloway's case, he had a trombone player who trembled from alcohol abuse (i.e., he had DTs known as the "bug juice jitters"). Not long after the song came out, the meaning of "Jitterbug" shifted to become a slang word for "hepcat" (a musician who plays swing or jazz) and the type of music he played (i.e., Jitterbug music). "Jitterbug" shifted again to signify a person who moved his body well while dancing ("Shake, Rattle & Roll"). By the late 1930s the "Jitterbug" had joined "Lindy" to become yet another popular name for Swing dancing.
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Jitterbug as a dance is so close to the Lindy hop that one might call it the same. The Jitterbug though, referred to a different styling, and may also refer to the way the white kids danced the Lindy Hop - as if they had been drinking the "Jitter juice". Nowadays, the term Jitterbug can be used to mean different dances in different places, but Lindy Hop still refers to the Savoy Style of dance.
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The radio had already made Swing music enormously popular but the spread of the dancing lagged far behind. Back in the 1930s there was no television to spread images of the dancing around the country quickly. However by the start of the war, all of the large cities had become Jitterbug hotbeds. When GIs, sailors, and flyers enlisted, they were sent to major ports for a temporary stay before departure. These service men and women headed straight for the USO dance halls since dancing was by far the major form of recreation. As the 1940s began, many GIs from all parts of the country now saw the Lindy/Jitterbug for the first time. Once they saw it however, they didn't waste any time learning how since dancing was the quickest way to break the ice in an age when time was very precious.
OTHER SWING STYLES
There are many styles of social partner dance spawned by dances like the Lindy Hop and Jitterbug. Here are a few of them with some brief definitions:
Boogie-Woogie: is the European counterpart to East Coast Swing, danced to rock music of various kinds, blues or boogie-woogie music but usually not to jazz.
Street Swing: swing dance based more on hand and arm movements and patterns than footwork.
West Coast Swing: developed in the 1940s and 1950s as a stylistic variation. Followers stay in a slot, which reduces their ability to move left and right but improves their ability to spin left and right.
West Whip: a style of Swing popular in Houston, Texas, emphasising moves spinning the follower between dance positions with a wave rhythm break.
Push: a style of swing popular in Dallas, Texas, emphasising moves spinning the follower between dance positions with a rock rhythm break.
Carolina Shag: a style of Swing popular in the Carolinas emphasizing the leader's nimble feet.
DC Hand Dancing: a Washington, DC synthesis of Lindy and Swing.
Cajun Swing: a Louisiana Bayou style of Lindy danced to Cajun music.
Pony Swing: a Country Western style of Cajun Swing.
Jive: the International Style version of the dance is called Jive, is part of the Latin syllabus of Ballroom dancing and it is danced competitively all over the world.
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