Old men saying "no" and "you're doing it wrong"
This week: DJ Glenn Scales!
Boilermaker Jazz Band @ Glen Echo Park! (Sat) March 13
The Jam Cellar is combining the amazing Boilermaker Jazz Band and the beautiful Glen Echo Spanish Ballroom for an awesome night of dancing! $15 Admission,
Beginner Swing Lesson @ 8PM (Free with admission), Dance From 9PM – 12AM. Glen Echo Park Park Spanish Ballroom, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo, Maryland. Presented in cooperation with the Glen Echo Park Partnership for Arts & Culture, Inc., the National Park Service and Montgomery County, MD
March's Inter/Adv Classes (March 2-March 23) HOLLYWOOD AND HARLEM:
Classic Moves and Styling
In the original days of swing, Hollywood and Harlem were the nation's hot spots for swing dancing. Though each dancer was unique, East Coasters and West Coasters tended to share certain styles and moves in common with others from their areas. In this class, the Jam Cellar crew will teach many of these Hollywood and Harlem styles and moves, to give inter/adv dancers great tools for leading and following, and to give their dancing that classic look. Throw in a lot of discussion on the history of jazz dance, and this thing's a steal. 8:30 p.m. Tuesdays, March 2-23. $55 for entire series. $15 drop ins. Students should be comfortable with all the material in our Building Your Basics series.
March 30– AERIAL TASTER CLASS
Are you a guy who doesn't know how to pick up a girl? Are you a girl who doesn't know if she wants to be thrown? Now's your chance to try it out, as a little taste before our month-long aerial series coming this summer. We'll learn a basic aerial or two, to get you used to the idea. This class is specifically geared towards creating good aerial posture, attitude, and practicing technique. $15 gets you into the class and dance. 8:30 p.m. March 30. Partners recommended, but not necessary. However, we do recommend comfortable clothing and sneakers for both boys and girls. (Practicing aerials can be a work out.)
The Old Timer (Part 1: A Classless Dance)
This is the first part of a 5-part essay where I discuss the world of the original swing-era dancer; a person that, in many ways, was probably not like you and me. Also, I work very hard on the thoughts and words I put into these essays. If you mention these ideas to others, please throw in a reference and/or send them to this website.
In trying to capture the true spirit of the original swing dancers, I realize often how much I fail at doing so. I think that, to some degree, the modern scene as a whole has this problem. Look at an old Jitterbug picture, and chances are there's something about it that we wouldn't quite capture in a dance picture taken today.
This is much more true for video clips. For instance, a few of us Balboa teachers work very hard to figure out why the "Venice Beach Clip" dancers look the way they do, and why we don't look like them. I believe before we can start recovering that spirit of the original swing dancers, we first have to understand how different they are from us. By which I mean this: Even though we may all be desiring to express ourselves to the same great music, the original dancers came at that expression from different paths, and I think that produced a different dance than we have today.
A Classless Dance
We often joke in classes how the original dancers are absolutely terrible at teaching the dance. A lot of the crotchety southern California old timers would teach with only the words "no", "nope," and "you're doing it all wrong." If you asked them what step they just did, they'd do it again, different, swearing that they did it the same as the first time. It's not their fault. In fact, it reminds me of my father who tried to teach me how to drive stick in his corvette, which he loved at least half as much as my mom, whom he loved more than anything in the world. He couldn't explain things very well and got very frustrated about it, especially after the sound the car made when I interpreted his instructions. The reason why he couldn't teach it is because it's something he learned to do himself, something he had perfected his own way of doing through countless years of trial and error, and something he had never been asked to teach before.
One of the large differences between the original jitterbugs and us is that we are almost all taught how to dance by instructors. This simply was not true for a lot of the original dancers, which is why they, for the most part, aren't good instructors. People like Frankie Manning, who ran a troupe of dancers and was expected to train them, and Dean Collins, who was passionate about teaching and breaking down the dance, were pretty large exceptions to the rule. For the most part, dancers learned by going to a dance and trying to steal stuff they saw others do, or by trying to make up new stuff. (Frankie Manning has said he was known as the biggest thief in the Savoy Ballroom.) Anyone who has tried to learn by this method today knows the result: in trying to steal something from someone else, you get it wrong, and in doing so invent a new step.
In a several ways, this style of learning is actually more productive for certain dancers than the modern take-a-class style. Let me explain: The act of taking a class could be looked at as being spoon-fed a dance education. To get better, or to create their own look, most of the original dancers had to be very pro-active about learning how to dance. After seeing a move they wanted to steal, they'd probably have to try it out right away, before they forgot what it looked like. They'd make up material often, and before they'd go out to a dance, they'd probably practice the new stuff they were working on to try out that night.
Working so hard to learn something by yourself without a teacher is a very personal thing. It makes the product of that learning a child, complete with some amount of the love, protection, and pride that connection infers. Something tells me this is an important part of the puzzle of the original jitterbug spirit. The great dancers you see in the past probably don't look like any other dancers, because they worked hard to build up their own personal style of swing dance. (Side note: the only reasons why others of the era look like Frankie or Dean is probably because Frankie or Dean taught them).
A note on followers: imagine a follower that never took a class in her life. She had no idea what any "steps" were, she only stepped under her feet and it was up to the leader to move her around. This meant a leader would absolutely have to lead what he wanted to do, and a follower would always step right under herself.
The downside to all of this is that the original dancers didn't really have a lot of, well, gentleness. We can tell because in a lot of the clips, it's obvious the followers are being muscled around, and that sheer pulling/pushing is doing work body leading could be doing much better. Also, different dancers might have different leading/following rules, or not many rules at all (at least, consistent ones).
Obviously, the classes-is-spoon-feeding statement is an extreme description, and I don't want you to think for a second that I'm suggesting the modern scene stop taking classes. I think the benefits of classes far outweigh the cons (especially for women's arms). Teaching is incredibly important to any modern swing dancer because it means you don't have to reinvent the wheel by trying to learn swing mechanics on your own. Because of classes, modern dancers have a much bigger range of movement, much deeper understanding of technique, I believe, and much more inspiration for what they can accomplish. And though a follower can learn an awful lot about swing dancing by thinking about how an original follower would have danced having never had a class, the original follower's couldn't do half of the super advanced things a modern master follower could do who used modern frame and following techniques.
Besides, here's the best news: it's easy to get the best of both worlds by going to classes AND trying to steal/create the way the old timers did.