Free with this weeks mailer: 20 seconds of Balboa
This Week DJ Aba Browning
Will be aba-solutley amazing.
May Inter/Adv Series: What You Need
This month: both leaders and followers will go through a boot-camp style fix of their weaknesses, and a hard-core workout of their strengths. Personal attention and private-lesson like setting. $55 for entire series; $15 drop-ins.
MUSICALITY and RHYTHMIC FOOTWORK Special Inter/Adv Lindy Hop workshop with Bobby and Kate, May 22
Bobby and Kate will hold two special classes from 2 p.m.-4 p.m. May 22. The first, is their patented Musicality in Lindy Hop class, at 2 p.m., centered on both leader and follower musicality. Then, at 3 p.m. is Fancy Footwork in the Rhythmic Style a class that has footwork cookies for both Leaders and Followers, that will wonderfully compliment your new musicality skills. Each class is $10. It happens at DC Dance Collective, 4908 Wisconsin Ave. NW, a few blocks down from Chevy Chase Ballroom. (I know, I know, we love Chevy Chase, too. Especially in Fletch.)
A Year of Clips: Start Cheering
This year marks the tenth year anniversary of the All Balboa Weekend. It was the first Balboa-focused dance camp in existence, and marked the beginning of the resurgence of Balboa and Bal-Swing. To celebrate, we'll be discussing Balboa a lot this month, over here at Jam Cellar and over at Swungover.com.
Many people can picture Frankie Manning swinging out in Hellzapoppin. But can you picture an original Balboa dancer doing a Toss-out or Lolly Kicks?
Try not to blink during this clip, or you might miss one of the most important moments in Balboa/So Cal Swing history. It's from the enormously long and strange dance sequence in the film "Start Cheering."
On the left of the screen is Lollie Wise and his partner, Lil (Lilly?) And on the right, Maxie Dorf and his partner, Mary.
The choreography in this clip is simple–merely a bunch of what we call Lollie Kicks and Behind-the-Back Toss-outs. But it's the way they look doing those moves that fascinates us modern Balboa dancers.
A few historical notes: We call them Lollie kicks specifically because Lollie, in this clip, was a badass as doing them. He happens to be a tall, lanky, kicky kind of guy.
This is also the only footage we have of a young Maxie Dorf doing the sort of swing dancing he probably would have done socially. We have another clip of him dancing young, but the director obviously gave him the direction to act crazy and zany, and thus we can't tell how much of that would have been like he actually would have danced.
The reason this is important is because, by almost all peer accounts, Maxie Dorf was one of the greatest swing dancers of the era. And by "swing" we mean, specifically, So-Cal Swing, the dance that combined with Balboa to make the modern Bal-Swing.
Why this clip is so important to us, along with the Venice Beach Clip, is that they are the two best representations of what the original Bal-Swingers looked like when they were young, energetic, and inventing the dance.
What is also shocking to us is that none of us look or move quite like them. Even if you were to, say, get 24 of the most advanced Balboa students to imitate it, they still wouldn't get close. There's something about the way they styled, their pulse, posture, and movement through the figures that we have yet to master.
Is it something worth mastering? Well, I think myself, and most of my fellow teachers, are not just artist, but explorers at heart. And there's something in the style of the Start Cheering dancing that not only looks cool and swings hard, but taps into swing in a way we haven't quite gotten yet with modern Bal-Swing, and a lot of us are excited to try to tap into that.
Doing so should give us further insight into the world of Bal-swing leading/following, etc, and inspire new moves and ideas that should, at heart, look more Bal-Swing than some of the material we do today, which can look either too Lindy-ish, too West Coast-ish, or just not quite right.
We may not get there, but instead come up with something similar and new. We already have come up with a lot of really neat, subtle, pretty dancing inspired by the Start Cheering clip, and I'm excited about the future.