|
How
does Lindy Hop relate to Swing, more generally speaking?
The current distinction has a lot to do with the recent
history of the dance, so let's zoom through a brief
historical overview. First, a matter of names: they keep
changing! The music has always been called Swing, but
the dance never was until the recent revival! In its
earliest days in the late 1920s, the dance was usually just
called "jazz dance." In the 1930s, it was usually called
"Lindy Hop," and from the 1940s through the early 1990s it
was called "Jitterbug." Up to and through the 1940s, under
all those different names, the dance was a rich mixture of
6-count moves (moves that last for 6 beats of music),
8-count moves, as well as 2-count, 4-count, 10-count, and
whatever else seemed to work. In those days, it was mainly
the name that changed from time to time. The dancing itself
stayed pretty much the same, although there were different
regional styles and, of course, some overall evolution in
the dancing as new dancers came on the scene.
After
World War II ended, the whole nation returned to working and
raising families, and almost all of the dance palaces and
big dance bands went out of business. The ballroom dance
studios kept part of the tradition alive for the next 40
years, mainly the 6-count moves, usually under the name
"Jitterbug." In the late 1980s, historical amnesia began
wafting across the country from California, and like whoa
dude, by the mid-1990s most people were calling the 6-count
form of the dance "Swing" instead of Jitterbug. Also
in the 1980s in California, a revival began that was built
around a small subset of fancy, acrobatic steps performed by
professional dancers in movies during the original Lindy Hop
era (mostly 8-count moves, plus a few 6-count). When slowed
down a bit, this revival of exhibition-grade dancing became
the "Lindy Hop" that people now refer to. This
revival finally hit Boston right after the famous "Gap" ad
on TV in 1998, and both styles of the dance (preserved
Swing and revival Lindy Hop) enjoyed a
tremendous surge in popularity.
Most
dancers these days will mix the 6-count and 8-count moves
together during a single song — they balance each
other extremely well. 6-count Swing has developed a
wonderful repertoire of turns and spins that Lindy Hop
cannot match; and Lindy Hop includes some terrific
bring-her-in-and-let-her-out moves, plus various
Charleston-derived kicks, that have no corresponding Swing
vocabulary. In combination, they fit with and play against
the music in great ways. In addition, in its current revival
form, the Lindy Hop fanatics have developed a substantially
different style and "technique" from most Swing dancers.
Another
famously characterizing quality of Lindy Hop is that the
woman often does a swiveling motion during the
Forward-Forward steps, but the popularity of this has
dropped in modern times as the steps have become more linear
and the original strong tick-tock left-right lead has nearly
disappeared from the dance. Without the motivating tick-tock
lead, the swivels become arbitrary and awkward for most
women dancers. (For history buffs: The lady's swivels on
1-2 were introduced by Edith Matthews, partner to
Twist-Mouth George, in 1935, according to Frankie
Manning.)
For
all these reasons, Lindy Hop is really best learned in a
separate course. We now call our course "Lindy Hop"
and sometimes include a subtitle such as "Swing II-alt" or
"Intermediate Swing" to try to show that it's at the same
level as our regular Swing II class, but includes different
contents.
Just
to make things even more confusing, even the hard-core Lindy
Hoppers will refer to a dance event as a "Swing"
dance (as in, "Are you going to the Swing dance on
Friday?"), but the actual dancing that they do at that Swing
dance, they'll call "Lindy Hop."
Got
all that ?
Swing
vs West Coast Swing (WCS) vs "East Coast Swing"? First
of all, sigh, there is no such thing as "East Coast Swing"
and never was. The term has gained currency recently, and we
hate it.
In
our own version of reality, there is Swing,
formerly called Jitterbug and danced
everywhere in America (never just on the east coast) by
millions of people. And there is an old niche variant of
Swing created in California in the 1940s and still danced by
a small number of devotees, that was originally called
"Western Swing" and is now called "West Coast Swing"
(WCS). Both started as simplified derivatives of Lindy Hop.
Both have elaborated themselves over the years, with WCS
going much farther along the elaboration route.
The
original technical difference between Swing and WCS
stemmed from one of the oddities of old style Lindy Hop,
which was the parent of them both. Old style Lindy Hop
originally developed by glomming together everything that
worked with the music. In it, sometimes the lady did a
Rock-Step (Backward-Forward) when one move ended and another
began, and sometimes she walked Forward-Forward instead.
Well, Jitterbug (later called Swing) favored one and WCS
favored the other: in Jitterbug the lady almost always does
a Rock-Step, but in WCS the lady almost always walks
forward-forward. Thanks in part to that forward-forward
walking action, WCS evolved to be extremely linear or
"slotted," as most WCS dancers will tell you. (They'll
usually also tell you, incorrectly, that regular Swing is
round or circular, but that's just false: regular Swing is
sometimes purely linear and slotted, and sometimes more
rounded, as the dancers prefer. WCS
instructors seem far more prone than other dancers to making
up false factoids about dance forms they don't know or don't
like. It is annoying to those of us who have to clean up
after them.)
California
Casual. When the recent Swing craze started in
California in the late 1980s-1990s, Californians started
using the term "Swing" instead of "Jitterbug." This caused
the few but fiercely devoted West Coast Swing fans to have
to explain themselves over and over: is "West Coast Swing"
different from "Swing"? From frustration and annoyance, we
guess, they artificially fabricated the term "East Coast
Swing" as a kind of mocking "clarification" of the
difference. (In fact, the "clarification" is completely
false: Jitterbug/Swing was danced everywhere, not just the
east coast.) This artificial and mocking fabrication was
preserved on the otherwise excellent web site of a Los
Angeles-based West Coast Swing teacher named Sonny Watson, a
man with a wonderfully voracious interest in social dance
history (streetswing.com). He explicitly admits that the
dance was never called that and acknowledges that the
term is a recent invention created by West Coast Swing
people as a play on the term "West Coast Swing." However,
the youngest West Coast Swing dancers and teachers, ignorant
of history and apparently unable to read carefully, have
started calling everyone else "East Coast" dancers. This is
as stupid as as if Ahnold started calling the other 49
governors "east coast governors." Even Ahnold isn't that
stupid. Starting around 2001 or so, some of the youngest
Lindy Hop dancers also started using the stupid WCS term
"East Coast Swing." Both the young WCS and the young Lindy
people use the term "East Coast Swing" with a sneer, as a
pejorative term.
While
we admire the Californian genius for creating new cultural
trends, we wish they would stop renaming the various Swing
dances. We especially wish the West Coast Swing (WCS)
dancers would stop insulting other forms of swing and trying
to rename them in their own image.
|
