It’s a Swing Thing
By Yuki Noguchi

Friday, January 17, 2003; Page WE30

You wanna play?

He pauses slightly, mid-spin, as if the hesitation of a half-twisted torso poses the question.

A shimmy shimmy of the shoulders is my answer:

You betcha!

A linger on a turn sets up a joke.

A wriggle of the hips interrupts with a response: Beat you to the punchline!

At its best, swing dancing feels like great conversation. It has playful spirit that's all wit. That razzmatazz, that blues in your shoes, that swing thing. Rhythmic chitchat goes by many names, but avid dancers call it "connection."

You can scan a roomful of dancers and spot good connection. The awkward pair won't have the telltale bounce. The flashy ones with exaggerated moves won't be in sync. It's the couple with the light feet moving in harmony that catch the eye.


Connection is a chemical measure of how much you get each other on the dance floor. It's spontaneous. It's goofy. It's magic.

And I'm addicted to the stuff.

Luckily for me, Washington supplies the best swing dancing on the East Coast. This area sustains a retro-boom partly inspired by the Gap advertisements of circa 1998, which featured poorly executed, inauthentic swing-dance routines as part of their pitch for khaki pants. While venues in Boston have petered out over the years, and New York's scene has faded to give way to the next trend, Washington's swing subculture continues to provide plenty of venues, live music and good dancers to satisfy my near-daily cravings.

The number of venues during the week even exceeds that of San Francisco, a major hub of swing: Mondays at Chevy Chase Ballroom; Tuesdays at Clarendon Ballroom; Wednesdays are best at K2 in Beltsville, but Lulu's Mardi Gras Club on M Street is closer to downtown. It's Chevy Chase or Zoots and Dolls in Fairfax on Fridays; Glen Echo Park on Saturdays.

For the unindoctrinated, the scene might appear a bit cultish.

My mother, who lives nearby, feels she's lost her daughter to a hobby. I come home to her sober messages on my voice mail: I guess you're out dancing...again.

But Mom, there's joy in a swivel! I need a balboa turn! Jazz is playful, and swing is silly. It mesmerizes and intoxicates. It's as good for the soul as it is for the body.

Longtime dancer Larry MacDonald smiled like Buddha when I asked him what he likes most about dancing. "Harmony," he said. "Harmony I achieve with a woman. My whole life, I've been trying to get that off the dance floor."

My friend Erik Newton started dancing four years ago after seeing an elderly man kiss his wife sweetly on the forehead after a dance.

"I want that," he said.

Couples, though, are the anomaly in the swing scene. The style of dance is often cast in an oversexed role, as in "swinging lifestyle," but that's a misperception. It's mostly a single person's sport, and the norm is to go stag. Though you dance with a partner, you typically switch almost every song.

It's not uncommon to find yourself dancing with someone with whom the only thing you have in common is dance.

Age, in particular, is where swing shows its greatest diversity. I've danced with a high school student whose mother is also a regular. One of the most playful dancers I know is a man named Barry, whose college-age daughter often accompanies him to dances. Sometimes it's the parents who hook their kids on dancing, but more often parents are the ones who become hooked watching their children dance. (My mother took swing lessons for a while so she could see me.) A typical dance will get strong representation from twenty- and thirty-somethings like myself, and an almost equal number of men and women like Larry MacDonald and Bob Schmitt, my middle-aged bachelor pals. The retired reverend Arnold Taylor, an excellent dancer at 77, still vividly remembers learning to dance in grange halls during the Depression 72 years ago.

Swing dancing is light and funny, and in a buttoned-down city that often takes itself too seriously, that can be refreshing.

It's also almost laughably wholesome. The main thing about swing dancing is the dancing. There are those who come to scope out a date, but they usually fall into two categories: the uncommitted types who give up after a few dances yield them no dates, or the converts who discover that they'd rather be dancing than romancing, anyway.

There are some rules of engagement, of course. In no particular order, they are: Do nothing untoward; if someone asks you to dance and you're out of breath, politely decline, but seek them out for a dance later; remember that you, too, were once a beginner; don't eat raw onions before dancing; be nice; change shirts when you get too sweaty, and for heaven's sake throw away the ones that smell like mildew.

Those are really the things that matter when you're a swing dancer. Unlike many Washingtonians, dancers generally don't care what you do for a living.  I've danced with dozens of leads (leads are male dancers, female dancers "follow" the leads) who at best know my first name and how long I have been dancing, but don't seem to care one iota what I do during the day to support my dance habit.

As habits and vices go, this one is inexpensive. Admission typically costs $5, up to $15 at the most, for a famous 16-piece band event or fundraiser. I figure: That's the cost of one night of bar-hopping in Adams Morgan spread over a whole week.

I started dancing about two years ago, after watching one of my best friends from college hone her swing skills during a brief stint living in San Francisco.

My introduction wasn't easy. I spent most of my time observing from the sidelines, hoping a good lead would take pity on my poor skills and dance with me anyway, all the while burning with envy as I watched the better dancers glide and turn in perfect synchronicity with their partners.

Breaking into the scene can be intimidating. All beginners become acutely aware of a caste system on the floor and feel it would be disorderly to ask a Brahmin to dance. I found that chatting with people on the sidelines, being friendly and mustering the guts to ask a better dancer paid off.

Initially, I made a host of beginner's mistakes, starting with my clothing. I wore black platform shoes that looked the part but didn't give me the cushion or the stability that swing dancing requires. I wore shirts and pants that weren't fitted enough, so the excess material trapped air and sweat and slowed my movement. I had long hair that reached almost to my waist and did violence to men's faces when I spun around.

On occasion, some dancers take pains to fashion their hair Rita Hayworth style and comb through vintage shops to find the right zoot suit or dress. But on any given night, the vast majority of dancers seem to prefer function to form. I am one of those people: I dance in my old running shoes and tape the underside with duct tape to slide better. I wear pants and skirts made of soft material that doesn't chafe, even after hours of bouncing around. I wear fitted shirts or tank tops that allow my skin to breathe but are tight enough that they don't flap around, trapping air as I move. I cut my hair to shoulder length and keep it tied close to my head.

Many things about swing are similar around the country. The etiquette, for example, or the way dancers dress up or dress down. Dancers on the whole are also consistently friendly, especially to dancers from other cities.

Yet every city has its own style. Sometimes it's so distinctive that you can identify a stranger's home town by the way he or she dances. This happened recently with someone named Ray, whose style reminded me of the smoother, slower blues style of my friends in St. Louis, where I grew up. Sure enough, Ray, who was in Washington for a few days on business, was from Cleveland -- a stylistic cousin of my Midwestern home town. The reverse happened to me when I was dancing in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco one Sunday a couple of months ago and met Rob Wooldridge, a likable English teacher who instantly identified me as an out-of-towner because I carried my upper body with more "tension" in my arms.

In that sense, dance styles are like regional dialects. It's not clear where they come from or who perpetuates them, but they betray your dance origins.

Insofar as Washington has a distinctive style, it is what my colleague at The Post and fellow dance lover Jen Balderama calls "Hollywood style with a Washington flavor."

Hollywood style is a subset of swing typified by a very taut connection in the arms, so that the follow is leaning back slightly, keeping an elastic but tight link with her partner. The effect is that the dancers look as if they are swinging around in elliptical shapes, gliding rapidly backward with the follow swiveling from her hips in a distinctly sexy way. As the name suggests, this is typical of a style found in Los Angeles; in Washington, it is combined with a speedy jitterbug flair.

What determines a city's style has a great deal to do with who teaches in those cities. In Washington, the most marketed, and therefore most accessible, pair of teachers is Tom Koerner and Debra Sternberg, which makes them the proverbial parents of the swing style here.

There are other teachers in the area as well. John "Psychoboy" McCalla teaches classes in Bethesda, Frederick and Baltimore. Donna Barker teaches swing and other kinds of dance, generally in Arlington. Zoots and Dolls in Fairfax hosts Friday night dance parties preceded by dance classes taught by various teachers.

Most people who learn to dance in Washington, however, start with the duo of Koerner and Sternberg, who usually host five or more dance parties a week. They teach five nights a week, including an hour-long beginners lesson followed by an intermediate class. Their sessions cost $96 and last eight weeks. Following the intermediate class, people start to file in for Koerner and Sternberg's open dance parties, which usually draw enough people to cause traffic congestion on the dance floor.

Koerner, who calls himself a "recovering" divorce lawyer and has a penchant for off-color jokes, said the classes are attracting more and more new students -- as many as 120 people in one of last season's classes. After years of practicing law, he is trying to make a full-time job of his passion.

The fact that he may be doing just that is a sign that a new generation of dancers is coming up through the ranks.

"We don't have a Britney Spears or a Run-DMC to, you know, promote Lindy," said Sternberg, who at 49 is a superbly perky woman who performs death-defying over-the-head aerial moves to frighten and inspire her students. So Koerner and Sternberg promote like crazy. "We always see new generations coming through; you have to rely on people who are going to start dancing" to keep the scene alive. She has been dancing for 15 years, and together with Koerner spends most weekday and weekend events teaching two, hour-long classes.

Critics of Koerner and Sternberg say they don't teach much about posture, body frame, stance and other fundamental skills that enable a person to communicate well with a partner. They go over that in the first class but then quickly proceed to teaching steps and routines of progressive difficulty, so that often by the end of the class some students are kicking around haphazardly off the beat.

I took one class from Koerner and Sternberg -- the only class to date I've taken in swing. I found that I learned most from the charity of leads who could teach me the fundamentals.

What makes good dancers is not how many moves they know but how they carry themselves. The most advanced dancers will spend hours on the most basic steps to improve their dance style. It makes sense, because swing is just a bunch of variations on a handful of basic step sequences: the triple step, the eight-count Lindy circle, and what are called Charleston, balboa and shag. If those aren't etched deeply and cleanly in your muscle memory, there is not much point to building your repertoire.

The person most responsible for my dance education is probably Jason Aldrich. He and I make fun of each others' politics, but he loves dance as much as I do, and he's a supremely patient teacher.

Jason has a smooth style that is clear yet gentle. He doesn't -- as some beginner leads do -- jerk my arms out of their sockets to get me to move quickly. If I keep my arms with the proper amount of tension, I effortlessly end up where he intends me to be. Keeping my balance when spinning or turning with him is also easy, because he counterbalances my weight with his. Mainly, it's the combination of these two things that makes us have a good connection, so that when he decides to do a complicated move, I can generally follow, because my body naturally responds to his lead.

I have kept up my commitment of dancing at least three nights a week for the last two years, except when I was running a strict regimen of 40 miles a week to train for the Marine Corps Marathon. During that time, I disappeared from the dance scene for about six months, but I returned to it at an even more feverish pace three months before the marathon because I injured my knee.

Dancing became my de facto training. I danced six or sometimes seven days a week -- an average of probably 12 hours altogether. That unorthodox regimen kept me in sufficient shape that I ran for the first time in three months on marathon day and was able to complete the race in about five hours -- within 30 minutes of my original desired time.

Dance feels like a more balanced exercise than running, and getting a workout happens to be a byproduct of the fun.

Doug Won, a wonderful dancer in the St. Louis scene and an orthopedic surgeon, told me the arm movements -- even simple pushes and turns -- get the heart pumping faster. Most of the songs fall in medium to fast tempo range, but the exercise is low-impact, so the heart works at that ideal range that helps the body burn fat, rather than sugars, he said.

Swing dancing has another health virtue that probably contributes to its appeal to older people: It spares the joints. Contrary to popular perception, swing dancing is not a set of gymnastic flips in which the woman lands with a jarring thud; few people perform those moves except for purposes of performance. So the knee injury that I sustained doesn't bother me at all, even when I twist, turn, bend and bounce.

Longevity is on dance's side.

Washington's swing scene shows no sign of fading, and those who are nourished by it show no sign of aging.

It stays because it draws you in, sticks to you and lingers. When Ella Fitzgerald's voice caramelizes a dance floor, who can resist partaking of that sweet joy?

Yuki Noguchi covers telecommunications for The Washington Post.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

 

 

 

 

(Streetswings Dance History Archives: Lindy Hop)
 
The very first known form of swing was the Texas Tommy in 1913, which later changed to the Mooch and Sugar in 1916 and even later called the Break-A-Way by 1919. During the 1920's when the Charleston was becoming all the rage, the Breakaway and Charleston would start to mix with and was forming a new yet unnamed dance style with a few other dances thrown in the mix.
 
In 1927 this style was finally acknowledged and given a name by a fabulous swing dancer named George "Shorty" Snowden. 'Shorty George' from New York's Harlem was to re-name the 'break-a-way' the "Lindy Hop or Lindbergh hop" after the famous pilot "Charles Augustus Lindbergh"

(Lindbergh made his thirty-three hour flight across the Atlantic Ocean to France successfully on May 20, 1927.) There are two main stories about the name that go something like this (the 1st one being the main one, second being more correct):

1) In September, 1927, a newspaper reporter having never seen this style of dance before walked up to the winners at a dance marathon contest in Central Park in New York, (known as the un-official start of the Harvest Moon Ball Contest (later to be tried again in 1934). This reporter asked the winning couple (Shorty George!) what it was that they were doing, as he had not seen it before. Shorty thought for a second and replied "the Lindy Hop... We flying just like Lindy did!". The newspaper reporter did an article on the contest in his newspaper and described what he saw calling it the "Lindy Hop."

 2) A dance derby (marathon) which started on 6/17/1928 at the Manahattan Casino, (155th Street and Eighth Avenue in Harlem, New York.) Shorty George (#7) was Dancing in a (supposedly non segregated) dance marathon and decided to do the Breakaway, a reporter for the New York Graphic (?Walter Winchell maybe?) observed and came over and asked what kind of dance he was doing, Snowden without stopping, thinking quickly replied "The Lindy Hop... Were flyin' just like Lindy did!"... supposedly he reported this in his article. Fox Movietone News also captured Shorty's feet in this derby on film. Shorty became one of the remaining four couples out of eighty left dancing before the marathon was closed down on 7/4/1928. The New York Times announced: "NEGRO DANCE DERBY ENDS.; Stopped After Sixteen Days by Order of Commissioner Harris." However there are publications that use the term Lindy Hop (dance) prior to this date, so number one is maybe closer to the correct story.

The Lindy was going to become famous in a rapid pace of time, so fast most instructors around the country had no idea about it. The Woodland Daily Democrat Newspaper on September fourteenth of 1927 Miss Sullivan said that "the Lindy Hop" placed third in the annual Dance Masters of America (D.M.A.) conference held in New York and was described by Miss Sullivan when asked about the Lindy Hop, however it was the Lindbergh Wave Waltz that took third and that is what she described (dum-de-dum, dum-de-dum-dum-de-dum), it was obvious she had no idea what the reporter was talking about. The Kinkajou was first and the Dixie Stomp being second place and the Lindy Wave Waltz was third.

In the last 90 years the Lindy has become the first form of swing as we know it today (the Great Grandfather of all Swing if you will) and along with the Charleston were the main dances of the 1920's. The Charleston mixed in with the Lindy, as well as other prior forms of dance such as the Texas Tommy, Turkey Trot, Apache Dance, Black Bottom, The Shimmy, The Strut, Cakewalk, The Frisco, Foxtrot, Tap and more. These dances were known as "Jazz Dances." The Lindy was the first form of swing "White America" had seen and was about to fall in love. Some of these folks would go to the famous "Savoy Ballroom" in Harlem and watch the "African-American dancers" strut their stuff.

Many of these dancers in 1920's were teaching many of the "White Folks" to do these dances, thus, they were making a "honorable living" in a very racist period of time. This became very competitive among some of African-American dancers, some would clip papers to their back with phone numbers or a studio name written on them while they danced. If you liked the way a dancer danced you could then get in touch with them and take lessons. Through this type of competition, the dancers would start to do more wild and crazy stuff to get the attention of the spectators.

As time went on, dance contests became more and more "attention getting." In the 1930's a dancer named "Frankie Manning" *claimed to add the first Air-Step" (lifts/ flips) into the Lindy (Al Minns and Leon James as well). These and other "Air-Steps" or Aerials had been done for years before in other dance styles such as the tango, waltzes, Flash and Acrobatic dance acts, apache dance etcetera,through many exhibitions by professional club entertainers, but supposedly had not yet been done in the Lindy, especially with the speed in which they would be done, plus add the element of surprise and these aerials would become completely unique to the Lindy Hop.

In many interviews Frankie describes how his first "Air-Step" took place: "Frankie and partner were practicing for a dance contest to try and beat then King "Shorty George Snowden" at the Savoy, Frankie and partner, worked out a back flip they *saw (??) and it worked, they did it in the contest and beat Mr. Snowden."

Also in a book called "Swing as a Way of Life" (1941) states that "young dancers like Al Minns, Joe Daniels, Russell Williams, and Pepsi Bethel produced the "Back flip, Over Head and the Snatch!." At any rate, this started the attention getters on to a new agenda... Aerials!

Over the years aerials became a main attraction in Lindy competitions and exhibitions, however, aerials were not permitted at most clubs and ballrooms during any social type dance while on the dance floor except during exhibitions or contests as too many dancers and people around these dancers were getting hurt. Even the famous Harvest Moon Ball eliminated Aerials during the contests for a brief period of time.

The Savoy Ballroom opened in 1926 and was the main haunt for Harlem's dancers. During this time the original Lindy or Break-A-Way looked more like couples Charleston, with a splash of the other dances thrown in rather than today's style of Lindy. Shorty George was at the head of the pack during this time frame. The Savoy would later prove to be the breeding ground for swing as the main dance.

In the early 1930's, Hubert "Whitey" White was the head bouncer at the Savoy and noticing an opportunity to make some cash decided to form a group called "Whitey's Hopping Maniac's," later to be known as " Whitey's Lindy Hoppers ". It was a pretty open market for him as his only competition was "Shorty George and his dancers" who were doing most of the exhibitions and shows around town in ballrooms and clubs such as the Cotton Club at the time, Shorty would join Whitey's very first group as well but later quit.

Whitey had auditions and picked some dancers to start his group. This was to become the form of Lindy Hop we know today. During the Lindy Hoppers reign, the Lindy was to take on a newer "Sophisticated or cleaned up look." The Hoppers went on to become the main Swing groups of the time and traveled all over the world performing in many exhibitions, movies, and stage shows. About the same time ... Dean Collins was to bring Savoy Style Lindy, a smoother and slower form to Los Angeles in the early 1930's which gave birth to today's modern West Coast swing.

When Benny Goodman became the "King of Swing," the Lindy Hop would become known as the "Jitterbug." The term Jitterbug would eventually be applied to all styles of swing over the years and the term Lindy Hop would almost be forgotten about as the term Jitterbug took the reigns. The main way to tell if the "old movies" (1930-50's) feature Lindy, West Coast (called rock and roll) or East Coast Swing is:
1) If they do Sugar pushes its West Coast Swing (Dean Collins choreography).
2) If no Sugar push its Lindy (probably Whitey's Group).
3) If however there is no Sugar push, Whip or Lindy Circle then it is East Coast Swing (standard movie choreographers/ stock dancers).

Another form of swing that was extremely popular among white America about the same time was the Shag.

As time progressed on, many factors would come into play to change the look and feel of the original Lindy. Music being the main factor of change as it seemed every ten years the music changed. ie: Ragtime to Jazz to Big Band to Big Band Swing to Rock and Roll to Bop to Motown to Soul to Funk etcetera and many secondary styles of music surfacing as well such as Latin music, Psychedelic, Folk Music, Blues, Rhythm and Blues, Rock a Billy, Country Western, Beach Music etcetera. These music changes would give new semi-pro dancers who could care less about the past (somewhat same as today) a new lease on the dance but were doing it differently as the older dancers either got married, had kids, died, became handicapped for various non dance reasons, overwieght and didn't want to go out, or just got older as well as other factors to long to go into here, so the dance was changing but was still the same.

Another main factor was that many "exhibtion dancers" of the day were trying to invent their own versions as well (example Champion Strut), usually unsuccessfully as that was the thing to do for many years, similar to the Line dance craze a few years back, everyone became a choreographer. New dancers are always gullable when the words "New Version or improved or updated, modern etcetera are used to sell them, however the older pros who lasted kept it somewhat in check as they usually taught the best. These newer "semi-pros" were similar to going to a chiropractor to have your tonsils removed.

Jitterbug/Lindy or whatever you want to call it stayed as King for many era's, but alas, all must give way sooner or later. The Twist dance became the death blow for the Lindy Hop/Jitterbug in 1959. (See Twist page as to why.)

Many folks ask what style of swing/Jitterbug is best, West Coast, East Coast, Whip, Push, Lindy, Shag etc. However, there is no best style. The best style would depend on what type of music you are dancing to at the time, Geographics, the theme of the dance being held, the speed in which the music is played and the dance knowledge of you and or your partner. If you're partner only knows one style of swing, then their style would be the best style to dance with them at that time. If they only know one style they usually will declare that the style they know is the best style above all others and usually will make derogatory statements.

Swing (Jitterbug) is a wonderful dance form in all it's versions that fits all types of music, Personalities, Finances etc. Calling yourself a swing dancer means you can at least do the basics in many forms of swing and a few well. So learn to swing dance whatever style, you're unique and your dances should be varied and your style should represent your knowledge of dance that other, newer dancers (and they are the majority) don't possess, and not limited to only one. However you will eventually find you like them all and soon you will understand the importance of them all as well as understand why there are different styles to begin with. So enjoy them and mainly smile, laugh and have fun.

Notes:
During this time, many things were being named after Lindbergh, even Al Smith tried to start a dance named after him (Al Smith Hop). Eleanor Powell did a "Jig Hop" in the "Fine and Dandy" Broadway play in 1930, which is related. Also there was a dance called the "St. Louis Hop" in 1926 and is described in Betty Lee's Book, it is a form of swing. In 1914, a dance called the "Aunt Jemima slide" may also be related. The November 1927 Dance Magazine has Lindy and Lindy Hop Lessons advertised by Charles Sadler and Prof. L. Gonzaga.

*** It's all about the humpf ***

 Swing is a broad term for a group of social dances  that are mainly danced to various kinds of jazz music. The sheer flexibility of Swing dancing adds to its richness and makes it a great social dance to learn. Swing dancing is a social dance, but unlike Ballroom dancing, it emphasizes musicality and improvisation in the sense that the mood, the phrases and the "humpf" of the music will very much affect the way you dance and the way you execute every moves. The art of swing dancing is to adapt to the mood and beat of the music.




*** It's all about the music ***


But first and foremost, Swing is Music. What is Swing music? Swing music is a kind of Jazz music. It has African roots and European roots. The classic swing dance bands were Chick Webb, Count Basie, Jimmie Lucenford, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller. Louis Armstrong... Swing music does not have a hard beat. It has a strong flow. Swing dancing is jazz dancing. You play. You improvise. You syncopate. Rock (&Roll), Rockabilly, and various other musical forms evolved from Swing music. Swing music started in the mid-1920's, and was really popular among African Americans until it entered the mainstream around 1935. It was wildly popular until about 1945, when people danced much less, and Jazz, which had always been dancing music, stopped being popular. R&B and Jump Blues, which had grown out of Swing, combined with Country & Western and gave rise to Rock & Roll. This too was started by African Americans. R'N'R eventually grew into Rock, and became completely undanceable. In the 1970's there was Disco, and later Country & Western and Rockabilly.





In the 1980's, several people rediscovered authentic Swing music and dancing, inspired by the Lindy Hop in such films as Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races. This lead to a resurgence of real Swing music, as thousands of people learned to dance Lindy Hop from the old masters like Frankie Manning and Al Minns, and the new masters, like Steven Mitchell and Ryan Francois. The film Swing Kids, which contains Swing music and dancing, was choreographed by Ryan Francois.





At the same time, in the 1980's several Rock, Rockabilly, Ska, and Punk bands were inspired by the popularity of Swing, to call themselves Swing bands. This music is often called Neo-swing. It sounds and feels a lot more like Rock than Swing, often with a hard beat, and an angry edge. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Royal Crown Revue and Brian Setzer Orchestra are Neo-swing bands. Squirrel Nut Zipper are inspired by pre-swing music - ragtime and hot jazz.




And then there are many, many contemporary authentic swing bands -- Bill Elliott, Eddie Reed, Dean Mora, Jennie Loebel, Lavay Smith, Joe Salzano, Lindy Hop Heaven. Swing music is pure joy. It puts a smile on your face.





Swing is Jazz music. Jazz is Dancing music. Swing music is pure joy.

Swing High, Swing Low

By April Witt

Sunday, January 29, 2006; Page W08

The mystic poet's words ring true: Dancing is when you rise above the world, "tearing your heart to pieces and giving up your soul"

The tall man clasps the woman's right hand in his left and draws her to him. He encircles her waist with his right arm. It is late. They are tired and sweaty, but exhilarated.

He hopes the band will strike up a swingy rendition of the tune he likes to think of as their song: Heaven. I'm in Heaven. And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek, when we're out together dancing cheek to cheek.

It doesn't, but once the music starts he feels as if he's in Heaven anyway. He extends his left arm slightly to swing his favorite dance partner out away from him before pulling her close again and lifting their clasped hands to set her spinning. The pair whirl together effortlessly, as if she is reading his mind instead of the subtle gestures and weight shifts he uses to signal new moves.

He swivels, she swivels. She keeps on swiveling until he lightly touches her slender waist to stop her motion. As they face each other, he distributes his weight evenly on both his feet. He then pulls his feet slightly apart -- setting up a Lindy Hop move called Maxie's Stop Step. She matches his movements as he does the splits, hops to cross his feet and then uncrosses them. They both know he's preparing to launch a slide, which will end with a dramatic stomp. He strikes a pose and freezes, playfully delaying the denouement. She listens to the music, trying to predict when he'll unleash that stomp. She intuits correctly. They slide, stomp and laugh, in unison.

The dancers mirror each other uncannily with one exception.

Frances Gail Courtney is a natural beauty whose wholesome, symmetrical features are lit by a perpetual smile.

Steve Terry's face is a ruined landscape of unexpected planes and proportions. One eye is higher and deeper set than the other. From the tip of his ear down, his face is improbably small. His mouth is twisted and gnarled. Yet, as he glides across the dance floor with Frances Gail, amusing her with his quick, clever moves, he manages to look rakish.

It is a fall Saturday night at the Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo Park, the storied venue for dance and romance that opened its doors in 1933. The band is taking a break. Hundreds of swing dancers sit on the 7,500-square-foot spruce-maple dance floor. They watch as a troupe of middle-aged people wearing sailor suits files out before them and lines up in formation.

The dance team is called the Eight Week Wonders. For the next 2 minutes 4 seconds, team members perform, more or less in unison, an exuberant series of swing-dancing moves with names like the whip, the lawn mower and the jazz box. Their broad smiles are even more striking than their moves. As they twist, turn, jump and strain at the screaming-fast pace of 240 beats per minute, they look euphoric.

"We're all a bunch of repressed technocrats leading a double life," says Tony Nesky, a member of the dance team who is an environmental consultant. "You've got the assistant deputy undersecretary of soybean policy by day. By night, he's Jim Carrey. By night, we're throwing women over our backs."

The team -- whose members include a basement-waterproofing salesman, a dentist, two scientists, several lawyers and an expert on State Department protocol -- is the creation of local swing-dance instructors and impresarios Tom Koerner and Debra Sternberg of Gottaswing.com. "I feel like a drug lord," jokes Koerner. "Only the drug I sell is swing. The Eight Week Wonders are some of my crack babies."

Tonight, the Eight Week Wonders are practicing a new routine they'll perform in the upcoming Virginia State Open dance competition.

The Wonders -- named for the eight-week courses Koerner and Sternberg offer, at a cost of $99 per person -- take inspiration from generations of swing dancers: the manic, quick-stepping athletes who popularized the Lindy Hop at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s; the World War II soldiers who romanced their gals to the strains of big bands led by Glenn Miller or the Dorsey brothers; the teenage jitterbuggers of the 1950s.

There are better, younger, hipper and more agile dance teams in the region's thriving swing-dance community. But none is more inclusive than the Eight Week Wonders. Some Wonders have sinking centers of gravity or bad backs. So routines are choreographed to accommodate a back row of dancers who can't execute the handstands, flips and throws that are the crowd-pleasing athletic extreme of swing. The number of people on the team hovers around 30 active members. The rules are simple. Team members don't have to show up for practices or performances if they don't want to.

"I'm just a nerdy little white guy who was saved by dance," says the 5-foot-9 Koerner, 47, who quit practicing law full time to teach dance with Sternberg and host at least four dance parties weekly. "I didn't want to run a team where we had to cut people.

"We're like a family," he says. "We have to take the bad uncle back when he gets out of prison. Our motto is, 'If you have 99 bucks, you are on the team.' The best part of the group is that after we dance we all go out to Pizza Hut, which world champions can't do because they have to watch their weight."

In their dancing prime, Koerner and Sternberg captured the Virginia State Open Lindy Hop championship six times. Now they say winning isn't paramount. Some Wonders credit them with fostering a community of dancers whose friendships transcend divisions of status, political affiliation and Zip code.

"This is what I've been looking for," says Hilary Cairnie, a partner in a law firm. "It's beyond a hobby. It's a parallel universe. You ask any swing dancer who is devoted to it, 'Gee, if they didn't have dance in their life, what would they do?' What the heck would I do? I wouldn't even want to go there. I could join the country club. I could golf. I'll pass on all that. Just let me dance twice a week, every week of the year, and I'm engaged."

Although the Eight Week Wonders are close-knit, few know precisely how one of the team's most admired stalwarts, Steve Terry, a 48-year-old systems design software engineer, became disfigured. They just know that Steve and his dance partner, Frances Gail Courtney -- who goes by the no-nonsense moniker F.G. and is, at age 38, one of the youngest Wonders -- are natural dancers with innate rhythm. Watching Steve and F.G. during performances helps lesser dancers keep on the beat.

Steve doesn't volunteer information about his disfigurement any more than he allows it to make him self-conscious when he's dancing. He dances five or six nights a week at local venues. He arrives jauntily, in a white Mercedes SLK 320 hardtop convertible with red leather seats. He makes himself an upbeat presence. When a fellow dancer remarks that she wishes the winter weather outside matched Steve's vintage shirt emblazoned with a balmy scene of palm trees, he taps his forehead and says, "It's all up here."

He takes the attitude that everyone has sorrows to overcome. He just wears his on his face.

On a dark, cold Sunday night in October, the stretch of Lee Highway in Merrifield that houses the Elan DanceSport Center is nearly deserted. In a brightly lit second-story window the Eight Week Wonders can be seen spinning: together and apart, together and apart.

From the street, the moment evokes the scene in the movie "Shall We Dance" in which the successful, ennui-ridden character played by Richard Gere glimpses a lit dance studio from a passing train and is filled with longing.

Inside the studio, the Eight Week Wonders are huffing and puffing through their newest routine, "Life Goes to a Party."

The Virginia State Open competition is one month away.

Up close, the routine looks a bit ragged.

Kevin Connor, a loss-prevention analyst for the insurance industry, gets lost trying to execute the kick steps of the Charleston while traveling around a circle of dance partners. He's supposed to join hands to dance a few synchronized kick steps with each woman before kick-stepping on to the next partner -- and all without actually kicking anyone by mistake. At one point, Connor realizes he's out of sync, briefly comes to a complete stop, and laughs at himself.

Looking on, Koerner shakes his head fondly. "If I told these guys we were going to do a new routine where we'd all be throwing each other around at 200 miles per hour, they'd show up and try to do it," Koerner says. "They are somewhat delusional . . .

"I feel like the guy in the 'The Music Man' who was selling the big parade. There is a scene in the movie when the townspeople look at their children and believe that they really are wearing great uniforms and playing shiny new instruments. Because we have these goofy outfits and dance to these really fast songs, there is this illusion that we are channeling the great Lindy Hoppers from the Savoy Ballroom. But none of us are. We're all about two-and-a-half minutes of fun in the sun."

For some of the newer members of the Eight Week Wonders, the Virginia State Open will be their first dance competition.

"I'm a wreck," says Kathy Schwartz, a court administrator who is Connor's partner in dance and in life. "I don't want to be the one who messes up for the other members of the team."

Schwartz and Connor are so determined not to let the team down that they've been practicing nightly in their Bowie home. They shove the kitchen table off to one side and tie up the pendant light fixture so they can spin across the linoleum.

Schwartz isn't half as worried about executing the moves as she is about facing the judges. "I am incredibly shy," she says. "My throat closes up thinking about getting up in front of a crowd. I have to take my glasses off when we perform so I can't see people looking at us."

Frank Morra, 61, has been swing dancing since the 1950s and once landed a guest spot on "American Bandstand."

Today, he's a scientist who helps design electricity-generating plants. A member of the Eight Week Wonders since 2001, he's not at all sure the team should bother entering dance competitions.

Up close, the routine looks a bit ragged.

Kevin Connor, a loss-prevention analyst for the insurance industry, gets lost trying to execute the kick steps of the Charleston while traveling around a circle of dance partners. He's supposed to join hands to dance a few synchronized kick steps with each woman before kick-stepping on to the next partner -- and all without actually kicking anyone by mistake. At one point, Connor realizes he's out of sync, briefly comes to a complete stop, and laughs at himself.

Looking on, Koerner shakes his head fondly. "If I told these guys we were going to do a new routine where we'd all be throwing each other around at 200 miles per hour, they'd show up and try to do it," Koerner says. "They are somewhat delusional . . .

"I feel like the guy in the 'The Music Man' who was selling the big parade. There is a scene in the movie when the townspeople look at their children and believe that they really are wearing great uniforms and playing shiny new instruments. Because we have these goofy outfits and dance to these really fast songs, there is this illusion that we are channeling the great Lindy Hoppers from the Savoy Ballroom. But none of us are. We're all about two-and-a-half minutes of fun in the sun."

For some of the newer members of the Eight Week Wonders, the Virginia State Open will be their first dance competition.

"I'm a wreck," says Kathy Schwartz, a court administrator who is Connor's partner in dance and in life. "I don't want to be the one who messes up for the other members of the team."

Schwartz and Connor are so determined not to let the team down that they've been practicing nightly in their Bowie home. They shove the kitchen table off to one side and tie up the pendant light fixture so they can spin across the linoleum.

Schwartz isn't half as worried about executing the moves as she is about facing the judges. "I am incredibly shy," she says. "My throat closes up thinking about getting up in front of a crowd. I have to take my glasses off when we perform so I can't see people looking at us."

Frank Morra, 61, has been swing dancing since the 1950s and once landed a guest spot on "American Bandstand."

Today, he's a scientist who helps design electricity-generating plants. A member of the Eight Week Wonders since 2001, he's not at all sure the team should bother entering dance competitions.

Some swing dancers talk about the Zen of dance -- those transcendent moments when well-matched partners both lose and find themselves in the music and their movements. Skilled dancers seek those moments the way an expert skier hungers for the long run through perfect powder.

When this night's rehearsal ends, it is almost 10 o'clock. Steve and F.G. keep dancing. They are dancing so intensely they seem not to notice that the others are changing out of dance shoes, donning coats and exiting onto the dark street below.

Steve and F.G. bounce around the room together as if floating, trancelike, within their own private champagne

bubble. At that moment, the partners seem to have more in common with the Whirling Dervishes of Istanbul, and other ancient practitioners of ecstatic dance, than with the Jazz Age Lindy Hoppers of Harlem.

"Dancing," the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi wrote in the 13th century, "is not rising to your feet painlessly like a whirl of dust blown about by the wind. Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing your heart to pieces and giving up your soul."

One of Steve Terry's earliest memories is twirling. He recalls, as a toddler, dancing around the living room with one of his brothers, while his father, an engineer, played boogie-woogie on the family piano.

"We'd be turning around and around and around, making ourselves dizzy," Steve says.

"That was a fun time."

Steve grew up in Oakville, Ontario, about 25 miles from Toronto. When he was 16 months old, his parents noticed a bulge on one side of his face, which turned out to be a malignant tumor. Doctors surgically removed the tumor, and radiated the lower half of his face to destroy stray cancer cells. The cure worked, but the radiation severely stunted the development of his head, face and neck. It left him disfigured and with functional challenges.

Today, Steve is 6 feet tall and broad shouldered. His esophagus remains so small that it is difficult for him to swallow some foods. His lips are misshapen. To sip from a mug of coffee, he tilts his head back, then forward, before running the mug across his mouth to catch potential drips. His speech can be difficult to understand. He speaks in a voice that is high, nasal, breathy, strained and free of rancor.

Some swing dancers talk about the Zen of dance -- those transcendent moments when well-matched partners both lose and find themselves in the music and their movements. Skilled dancers seek those moments the way an expert skier hungers for the long run through perfect powder.

When this night's rehearsal ends, it is almost 10 o'clock. Steve and F.G. keep dancing. They are dancing so intensely they seem not to notice that the others are changing out of dance shoes, donning coats and exiting onto the dark street below.

Steve and F.G. bounce around the room together as if floating, trancelike, within their own private champagne

bubble. At that moment, the partners seem to have more in common with the Whirling Dervishes of Istanbul, and other ancient practitioners of ecstatic dance, than with the Jazz Age Lindy Hoppers of Harlem.

"Dancing," the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi wrote in the 13th century, "is not rising to your feet painlessly like a whirl of dust blown about by the wind. Dancing is when you rise above both worlds, tearing your heart to pieces and giving up your soul."

One of Steve Terry's earliest memories is twirling. He recalls, as a toddler, dancing around the living room with one of his brothers, while his father, an engineer, played boogie-woogie on the family piano.

"We'd be turning around and around and around, making ourselves dizzy," Steve says.

"That was a fun time."

Steve grew up in Oakville, Ontario, about 25 miles from Toronto. When he was 16 months old, his parents noticed a bulge on one side of his face, which turned out to be a malignant tumor. Doctors surgically removed the tumor, and radiated the lower half of his face to destroy stray cancer cells. The cure worked, but the radiation severely stunted the development of his head, face and neck. It left him disfigured and with functional challenges.

Today, Steve is 6 feet tall and broad shouldered. His esophagus remains so small that it is difficult for him to swallow some foods. His lips are misshapen. To sip from a mug of coffee, he tilts his head back, then forward, before running the mug across his mouth to catch potential drips. His speech can be difficult to understand. He speaks in a voice that is high, nasal, breathy, strained and free of rancor.

"I'm a medical guinea pig," Steve says. "They were, like, 'Let's try this and see if it works.' This was 47-some-odd years ago. They were just doing their best."

As a boy, Steve proved agile and daring. His father built a hockey rink in the back yard, and Steve glided around it fearlessly. He loved to ski, racing down the slope, bouncing effortlessly over moguls, knees bent, poles back. It made him feel free. "My mom, she was always encouraging me to just be normal like everyone else," Steve recalls. "She didn't put any limits on me. I was normal in every other way. This was just the way I turned out."

When Steve was 13, the family was driv-ing home from a day of skiing, tired and happy in their big eight-cylinder Mercury, when it began to snow heavily. "The wind was blowing snow over the road," Steve recalls. "My dad was driving. There was a car ahead of us in the same lane. We couldn't see it until it was too late. At the last minute, he saw the car and swerved to avoid it. There was a car coming in the other direction. We hit head-on."

Steve's father was killed instantly. His mother's back was broken. She was hospitalized for several months.

In Steve's memories of that time, grief melds with physical agony. In the year following his father's death, Steve underwent a series of reconstructive surgeries on his face. He spent more than four months in the hospital. The radiation he'd received as a toddler had left Steve unable to open his mouth wide enough to receive even routine dental care. A Toronto dentist wanted to pull all of his teeth. Instead, Steve's mother and his doctor opted for surgery. Surgeons removed sections of bone from Steve's ribs and grafted them to his jaw. To hold Steve's refashioned jaw in place temporarily, doctors wired it to a circular metal frame they fitted over the top of his head like a halo.

There were complications. "They ended up doing a skin graft from my shoulder to my face," Steve recalls. "That was bad. It was very painful. They had me all doped up. They had me in isolation because they didn't want me to get infected."

Steve recounts these details reluctantly and only when asked. "I don't want people to feel sorry for me," he says matter-of-factly.

There is only one detail of his ordeal that Steve volunteers: His mother, a widow with three other grieving children to tend at home, took the train into Toronto daily to visit him in the hospital. "My mom," he says, "deserves credit for being an angel."

Steve was resilient. By high school, he was such a strong skier that he joined the Canadian Ski Patrol, a volunteer group that provides first aid to injured skiers. Steve and three buddies from school formed a first-aid team and won several competitions.

Steve was smart, a perpetual A student. Yet he came to realize that some people looked at his face and assumed he was stupid. "If I'm at a restaurant with someone, the waitress will ask the other person what I want to order," he says. That's tough to take, he says, but not as tough as the rare lout who looks at his face and laughs.

In college, Steve studied engineering, as his late father had. For the first time, he moved away from his supportive family. He lived in a group residential hall. He skied and played squash. Driven to succeed, he studied too much, socialized too little, and maintained excellent grades at the price of not having much fun, he recalls. "I tried to be the perfect person, to know everything and always be the smartest guy in the room," he says. "My insecurity came from how people looked at me, not how I looked at myself. We are all vulnerable to how other people communicate our value to us . . . I became a perfectionist because I figured that would make other people accept me."

In 1988, Steve moved to Northern Virginia for work. Eventually, he was living and working out of his Herndon townhouse. He communicated with colleagues and clients primarily by e-mail or phone. As a single telecommuter in anonymous suburbia it was easy to feel isolated.

"I just coasted along, not thinking there was too much meaning in life," he recalls. "Basically, I was just working, eating, watching TV and sleeping. That was about it."

He tried not to ponder what life might have been like with a different face. "Not knowing anything I could do about it, I didn't dwell on it," he says. "That's just the way it was. That's just the way that life is."

Steve experienced a spiritual awakening. His new faith, he recalls, inspired him to see himself through his maker's eyes. "Instead of trying harder to get other people to accept me, I understood that God already accepted me the way I was," he says. Christian theology gave him an intellectual framework for understanding and transcending his own suffering. This passage from Galatians 2:20 sums it up, Steve says: "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ living in me: and that which I now live in the flesh I live in the faith . . ."

Yet Steve, man of faith, was still a man -- corporeal and lonely. Once, at a church singles social, Steve watched a couple do something that mesmerized him. They were swing dancing.

Determined to learn how, Steve drove to Glen Echo one Saturday night in the late '90s, parked his car and sat. He was trying to work up the nerve to go inside for the free lesson routinely offered before Saturday night dances.

"Being single is kind of tough and lonely," he says. "I was trying to get involved somewhere. This looked like it would be a good thing to get involved with. At the same time, I was there all by myself. It was pretty nerve-racking to go in there, to go someplace you've never been before, not knowing who is going to be in there or what it is going to be like. I just remember sitting in the car in the parking lot and praying to God to help me through it."

When Steve entered the ballroom, it was empty. In his anxiety, he'd arrived early. He stayed for the class, then spent the rest of the evening watching other people dance. The next week, he returned. He kept returning. He signed up for one series of lessons, then another. He struggled to master the steps. Like any novice dancer, he also struggled to find the courage to make himself vulnerable by asking a stranger to dance; to not be crushed when rejected.

Steve kept dancing. He became proficient in a wide range of swing-dancing styles and steps, and gained a reputation as a confident leader who could make his partners, whether beginners or experts, dance their best. He became such a fixture on the region's swing-dancing circuit that fellow dancers took more notice of his moves than his face. "I think of myself as normal," Steve says. "If I'm somewhere people aren't used to me, I'm different enough that they look at me. It's nice to be in a place where I'm treated just like everyone else . . .

"All people have the same issues to deal with. If you think God is in control of everything, and things don't work out how you want, you have to wonder, am I going to be permanently angry with God? I had to learn to forgive God. I had to learn to forgive myself for not being perfect, and then try to forgive other people. At a dance, when you go up to ask somebody to dance, and they say no, that's pretty hard to deal with . . .

"My philosophy is that nothing is ever perfect. No matter how good a dancer you are, no dance is ever perfect. You are going to make mistakes. Your dance partners are going to make mistakes. So the best thing to do is practice how to recover. When you get distracted or miss a step, you don't want to stop there. The thing to do is keep dancing so no one even knows."

When the Eight Week Wonders were formed, Steve didn't join the team right away because he didn't have a regular dance partner. Steve thought he'd lined up a dance partner, but at the first rehearsal the woman he'd thought had agreed to dance with him was partnered with another man. "She was very apologetic," Steve recalls. "I don't know what really happened, if she didn't understand what I was asking her or what. So I'm standing there without a partner . . . In that first class they separated the class into the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots, the people without a partner, just circulated among themselves." He didn't go back for a while after that.

Eventually, Steve joined a different dance team with a woman he'd met at a dance class. "Her focus was on perfecting the moves," Steve says. "My focus was on having a good time and getting to know her. She wanted me to perfect the moves. I wanted her to be my friend."

The collaboration didn't last. In 2003, Steve joined the Eight Week Wonders. He tried a succession of dance partners but none of them worked out. So he was without a partner once more.

Last February, Steve was dancing at the Chevy Chase Ballroom in the District one night when he saw F.G. and asked her to dance. F.G. had been taking swing-dancing lessons for only a couple of months, but Steve could tell right away that she was a natural. He felt like a talent scout who'd made an astounding discovery.

F.G. recalls being nervous as she accepted Steve's outstretched hand for that first dance. "I had seen him on the dance floor," she says. "I was flattered and excited, and a little worried that I wouldn't be able to keep up. Of course I wondered about the face, just wondered in that human way what had happened. I was concerned about not being able to understand him when he spoke. But I got used to that pretty quickly. I saw that he was a great dancer. That's what I saw."

F.G. grew up in the rural Alabama town of Fort Deposit, where there was one stoplight and a population of 1,000. Everybody in town knew that F.G. danced on the high school drill team and that way back in first grade she'd been her class representative to the homecoming court. Everybody knew everybody in Fort Deposit. If the police chief spied F.G. walking home from school, he'd tell her to hop into his squad car so he could drive her. Folks in town thought nothing of giving one another a hug, a reassuring hand squeeze or a pat on the back.

"There's a lot of social lubricant there," F.G. says. So when F.G. moved to the District for work, she found it stiff, closed, aggressive-defensive and more than a little hard to take. "D.C. is so transitory," she says. "Nobody is really from here. People move fast. They don't really hug . . . You are scared to death to touch anybody because you might get sued."

Trained as a public-interest lawyer, F.G. is the director of grass-roots outreach for the National Wildlife Federation. During a party at an environmental conference, a colleague asked her to dance and led her through some swing moves. She enjoyed the experience so much that she signed up for swing-dancing lessons last January. It was part of a 2005 New Year's resolution to get out and socialize more.

"I came away from those first nights of dancing just euphoric from the music, the human contact -- body and soul -- the movement," she recalls. "It would take me a good two hours to eat and wind down so I could go to sleep."

F.G. started dancing several nights a week. "I kind of went nuts with it," she says, laughing. She'd roll into work tired at 10 a.m., work into the evening and leave the office just in time to catch a dance class or dance at 8 or 9 p.m. She hadn't kept hours like this since law school, only the library was never this much fun.

She was so happy and grateful when a skilled dancer led her through a rousing swing number that she didn't care if this was Washington, not Fort Deposit. "Sometimes I just had to hug their neck," she says.

F.G. found herself dancing through her days as well. A co-worker once caught F.G. executing a jazzy pirouette at the copy machine. "Nice spin!" F.G. recalls her saying. Waiting for elevators, standing at crosswalks waiting for the light to change or standing at her kitchen stove stirring a pot, she'd practice standing on one foot to improve her balance.

Then, she met Steve at the Chevy Chase Ballroom. After they'd danced together a few times, he asked her to be his partner in the Eight Week Wonders. She hesitated. She was just finishing Koerner and Sternberg's eight-week beginning swing course. She worried she couldn't keep up with the team. "I knew it was going to work out," Steve recalls. "I knew she knew how to follow. What she didn't know, I was good enough I could cover for her."

Turned out he didn't need to.

After one of the new dance partners' first team rehearsals, Steve asked F.G. to join him at the Silver Diner in Merrifield for a cup of coffee. "I was, like, I'm going to ask this beautiful woman to coffee," Steve recalls, "If she says no, I'm going to be crushed."

She said yes. Over coffee, Steve shyly handed F.G. an envelope. Inside he'd placed a photograph of himself as a baby. He'd wanted her to see his baby picture "because I was cute," he says simply. For the next four hours, Steve and F.G. talked. He told her about his childhood cancer. They both talked about their families, their jobs, where they'd lived, what they believed. When they stopped talking, it was close to midnight. Steve felt as if he'd found a rare soul able to see him as he was, not as he appeared. It brought to mind one of his favorite passages from a poem by William Blake:

This life's dim windows of the soul,

Distort the heavens from pole to pole,

And lead you to believe a lie,

When you see with, not through the eye.

"I felt it was a time we connected," Steve recalls. "Our souls connected. That's what I think. It had a lot to do with the fact that I felt I could trust her. I was happy to get to know her and have her know me."

Becoming friends made dancing together richer, F.G. says. Dancing became a fluent conversation between friends able to finish each other's sentences. When they weren't dancing, the partners often traded e-mails about dancing.

Steve e-mailed old movie clips with dance moves he wanted them to learn. They critiqued the previous night's dances. They compared observations on how dance is a metaphor for life and shared thoughts on why their partnership worked.

"Steve is the perfect lead," F.G. says. "He's very clear on what he wants you to do. He delivers enough force to help you get wherever he wants you to go, but not so much that it throws you off. I want to realize as accurately as possible what he's going for. I like it even better if I throw my own thing in there and surprise him. There is a little negotiation going on. But it's all good. It's spontaneous. It's creative. It's just so joyful it's hard for it to ever be bad. Each dance is something we've created together."

F.G. is the perfect partner, Steve says. "One of the objectives of the lead is to get the follower to smile," he says. "It means you are pleasing the other person. If you are dancing with someone who is looking around the room and not paying attention to what you are doing, it's, like, why are you here? I don't ever have to work too hard to get F.G. to smile. I could dance with her all night."

F.G.'s step is as light as her spirit. Sometimes, when the partners dance, Steve says, "I imagine both of us floating on a cloud up to Heaven."

In the first months of their partnership, Steve and F.G. danced together so much she had to start icing her knees some nights. She jokingly implored Steve not to feed her addiction to swing by telling her about new dance venues. "I'd say don't tell me about any more nights I could dance!" F.G. recalls, again laughing. "I'd say 'La-la-la-la-la. I'm not listening.'" When the Eight Week Wonders took photos, Steve and F.G. each mailed copies home so their moms could see the two of them together hamming it up striking dance poses in their team costumes.

"My mom has hers on the refrigerator," F.G. says.

"My mom has one on her refrigerator, too," Steve says.

On a night less than a week before the competition, with F.G. out of town on business, Steve has to dance the Virginia State Open routines with substitute partners. Leading these less familiar partners takes more effort mentally and physically. By the end of the second number, Steve is winded.

"F.G. is the best partner I know of," he says afterward. "We know each other's moves. We know how to react. We know how to recover. If she's there, I'm dancing the routine with the best person. If she's not, I'm dancing with someone else. It's not the same."

But it is something Steve will have to get used to. Not long after Steve and F.G. formed their dance partnership, F.G. began dating an experienced swing dancer. Recently, F.G. has begun learning the Eight Week Wonders' latest routine with her boyfriend as her partner. She's still going to compete in the Virginia State Open with Steve, and be his dance partner for the routines they've already learned together. They will still dance socially together several times a week. Still, not having F.G. as his partner for each of the team routines feels like a loss to Steve.

When Steve and F.G. dance together now, he says, he sometimes feels like he's Fred Astaire trying to woo Ginger Rogers.

"I'll be on the middle of the dance floor," he says. "I'll see F.G. We'll see each other. She runs up to meet me. We stand there for a while in closed position. My right arm is around her waist. And then the band starts playing. I listen to the introduction of the song. F.G. and I get connected with the rhythm. We start shifting from one foot to the other, just getting in the rhythm.

"I just zone out," he says. "It's just she and I on the dance floor . . . We both understand where we are. I want romance, and she doesn't. She's, like, Okay, we'll be friends and that's fine. I'm, like, Oh, let's have romance. That gets into the dance a little bit. It is like Fred and Ginger, how Fred is trying to bring this girl over to his side. I don't ever want to be disrespectful of her, but it is kind of a fantasy thing. So I'm watching her to see if she makes eye contact. I keep watching her face to see how she's reacting. If she figures out I'm feeling too romantic, she puts her finger up in the air and does a funny little shake to her finger. She does that just to break any romantic notions I have. I can tell. That's the kind of thing she does. She just tries to make it fun. It's her way of telling me, 'It's okay, I understand what you are doing, and we have to look at this as fun, don't we?'

"But at some point, a dance could get a little boring if you are not going to be romantic about it. So I'll lean over, and in her ear I'll say, 'Okay, you are Ginger and I am Fred.' She'll laugh. I'll try to ham it up a bit more. I'll imagine that I am Fred Astaire doing all these wild fox-trot moves I see Fred do in the movies. Fred always has his arms stretched out wide. It's kind of like an eagle I guess. He has his arms outstretched in a semicircle arrangement so that Ginger feels like she's in the arms of her partner and she's safe."

"Everybody in!" Koerner says. "Everybody in." In a corner of the ballroom at the Dulles Hilton hotel on a mid-November afternoon, Koerner and Sternberg stand at the center of a tightly packed circle of Wonders. More than 30 people, dressed in sailor suits and suspenders, strain and stretch to reach into the center of the circle and touch hands. "Go, team!" Koerner says as the dancers touch their gathered hands, then fall back and await their turn to perform.

There are five entries in the swing team-dancing category of the 2005 Virginia State Open. The Wonders, shameless, have entered twice. They'll perform one routine as the Eight Week Wonders and a second one as Son of Eight Week Wonders, a ploy, Koerner cracks, that positions them well to capture fourth and fifth place.

The Wonders trot onto the dance floor and form two parallel lines facing the judges. As they await the musical cue to launch their first routine, the dancing lawyers and salesmen, scientists and bureaucrats look as thrilled and nervous as high school thespians on opening night. F.G.'s hands feel like ice.

The competition stage is almost as unadorned as their usual practice room, with just one strand of glittery fringe strung against a back wall lined with four fake potted trees. As the Wonders skillfully execute the moves they've practiced so many Sunday nights, the crowd hoots and hollers approval.

The Wonders form a broad circle and begin a kick-stepping Charleston pattern to move from one partner to another. Morra kicks so enthusiastically he knocks over a potted tree. But the crowd is cheering so loudly for the local team that the tree falls silently, and the other Wonders don't miss a beat.

Near the end of the routine, Steve spots dancers he knows grinning in the audience, and he gets distracted. He starts to lead F.G. into a maneuver from a different routine. Sensing his error, F.G. gently places her hand over Steve's and moves it to the correct position on her hip. For once, it is Steve who instantly responds to his partner's lead. He's grateful and proud of her.

When the music stops, the Wonders file off winded and happy. "It lifts my heart," says Schwartz, the court administrator from Bowie.

The Wonders' next routine doesn't go nearly as well, but none of them seem to care. Most of the Wonders don't stick around to hear the judges announce that the team placed third and fifth.

"I defy anyone to tell me who won the contest last year without first checking the Internet," Frank Morra cracks as most of the Wonders head off to a nearby restaurant to celebrate a team member's birthday. "It's very transitory information."

Steve and F.G. stay behind for the open dancing. They are both still keyed up from the rush of the competition. They want to dance, just the two of them, to unwind like sprinters who've crossed the finish line and need to walk to cool down. Steve offers his hand, F.G. takes it, and he leads her onto the dance floor for a mid-tempo number. As they dance, Steve gets a leg cramp. F.G., worried, wants to know if he needs to sit down.

"No," he recalls telling her. "I'll be all right. I just want to keep dancing."

One week after the competition, F.G. sends Steve an e-mail with the subject line: "bam." She's been offered a job as director of the National Wildlife Federation's regional office in Atlanta. She hadn't sought the move, but will consider it, she writes in her message. Moving to Atlanta would put her within driving distance of her Southern relatives.

Steve tries to send an encouraging reply but admits he is at a loss for words. The next morning, he e-mails F.G. again: "This year, one thing I am so thankful for is you, and your friendship and your kindness . . . Y'know when I read 'Atlanta' . . . I realized how deeply I would miss you. Always, I have to keep reminding myself that God is in control, and He's my source of all that I need. Okay, enough pondering . . . You always have a place in my prayers."

"I didn't want to do this over e-mail, but don't want to tell you at a dance either, and don't want you to hear it from anyone else," F.G. writes to Steve on December 8. "I've accepted the Atlanta job: We can talk about it later. I've been crying all morning, but that will pass."

"Strange," Steve writes back, "but I felt a strong sad feeling in my heart earlier this morning."

Six days later the Wonders perform at an employee holiday party for Exxon Mobil at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner. F.G. tries joking that her colleagues at the Wildlife Federation would "skin her alive" if they knew she was dancing for the Exxon Mobil executives. But neither she nor Steve feels much like laughing. They figure this will be their last official performance as partners on the dance team. After the team dances, Steve and F.G. look for a quiet spot to sit. The mall adjacent to the hotel is closed and desolate. They sit on a bench there for what they will later describe as a wrenching farewell. "It's hard to separate," Steve says. "Hard to close that chapter."

Sitting in the desolate mall, Steve presents F.G. with a Christmas present: a framed photo of them dancing. The photo records a fleeting moment of triumph. Steve holds F.G. aloft. The dance partners beam. Steve placed the photo in a frame emblazoned: "A true friend is one of life's greatest gifts."

On a cold December night, red and green Christmas lights are strung around the Chevy Chase Ballroom. Along one wall, would-be dancers sit on benches and folding chairs. They are waiting to ask someone to dance or be asked. They are waiting for their next chance at the romance of a well-executed dance.

Steve is in a familiar position, looking for a new dance partner. He jokes, glumly, about posting a notice that he's holding auditions.

Some of the tunes the deejay spins are seasonal and lighthearted, but Steve looks stony as he steers one thick-waisted woman around the dance floor. The woman is perfectly proficient in all the expected steps. But she's no Ginger Rogers -- and she's no F.G. She's a mere mortal. When she dances, her feet touch the ground.

Steve is struggling, he later says. He's an emotional wreck from saying goodbye to F.G. just a few days before. Yet he keeps on dancing. All around him, other dancers swivel, kick, jump and swirl. Clasped hands lift together. Arms arc. Linked by light touches and the rhythm of the music, men and women move together and apart, together and apart.

In one of the last songs of the evening, Steve can be glimpsed deftly leading a young woman through the happy throng of dancers. The woman, who wears her light brown hair in a ponytail, moves well. She and Steve move well together. As the song ends, Steve grasps the woman in his arms and dips her backward, ever-so-briefly, in the classic finale to the three-minute romance of a dance. They both smile.

 

by Daniel Newsome

I’ve taught a fair amount of classes in my day and time and again one of the most common questions I get is “Why is there 6 count steps, when the music is clearly 8 counts”.  Over and over again, I’ve tried to give a quick answer but I really needed more time to explain it thoroughly.  While It’s a multi-faceted issue that can’t be summed up in a sentence or two, it can be clearly explained.  I’ve created this blog entry as a place to point newer students to so that they may understand why we don’t just dance 8 count steps over and over to swing music (though we could — we do not, and there are good reasons we do not)

Partly as a product of our education systems, and partly because so many of us have science, computer or engineering backgrounds, we have a strong desire to categorize and systematize. We desire to put everything in a box… to create rules around what we do.  It’s tempting to want to say “the music is in 8s, therefore the dance should be in 8s and never deviate”, But this desire is terribly limiting. Music is art, dance is art, and we need to be able to match the art created in the music with the moving art that we create with our bodies.  The people who created and innovated our swing dances understood this, and it’s a good thing they did, because our dance is so much more interesting because of it.

Basically, this is whyIn short, there is really nothing about a rock step that make it “go with” the beats 1 and 2 any more or any less than a triple step would, or a kick step, or anything else for that matter.  Inherent in the question of “why don’t we just always do 8 count all the time, starting on the 1” is an assumption that something about the music dictates that a rock step goes with 1/2, a triple with 3/4, etc.  In fact I can think of only a handful of songs that use that rhythm. So, clearly we need more flexibility in what we do… at the same time we need simple starting points to teach and understand the dance from, and common kinesthetic language so we can dance with people from around the world.  So we have a divide between what we do and how we (initially) teach the dance.

When we execute one or more 6 count moves (or 4, 10, or 12 count moves) all of the sudden the rock steps and triple steps fall over the dance in different places with respect to the music. Do an eight count, then a 6 count, and all of the sudden the next rock step is on a 7/8.  This makes the dance reflect the improvised nature of the music much better than a formulaic approach, and allows us to place improvisations, points of emphasis and moments of whimsy in the place within the music that you want to to be.  It opens up space for us to emphasize different things, and to make the dance look far less planned than it would if we were entirely predictable by beginning everything exactly with the “1”.

Why it sounds like the music is in 8 countsSwing music is written in a signature know as 4/4.  This means that the music is divided into groupings of 4 beats, and that quarter notes are to be counted as a single beat.  It’s fairly straightforward, and that’s why it’s known as Common Time.  Something like a waltz is notated in 3/4 time… this means that there are 3 beats in a measure and a quarter note is again, one beat.

Lyrics and melodies are written, (and solos often reflect the same structure) in a way that sounds like 8 counts.  Probably because it’s hard to say a meaningful sentence in 4 counts, and also because at an early time in jazz/blues history, there was not a difference between the two musical forms. Stories as song are a part of how most of our classics are composed, even though we see hints of things like call and response, comedy (Slim Gaillard) and even incredibly complex compositions (particularly from Duke Ellington, who was a composer before he wrote any swing music).  Since the beginning of jazz song-writing, lyricists and composers have made melodies that take place over 8 counts, with almost every 1, 3, 5 or 7 having a note or a word attached to it, at minimum.  That’s a key difference between swing and blues, where blues has a lot of “slides”, and slurring and blending of notes, also known as “blue-ing” a note, where the music gets it’s name from (source, The Blues People, LeRoi Jones). That’s why things like Charleston and Boogie backs work almost all the time to reflect swing music — because they hit the 1/3/5/7.

At the point in history when Jazz was being invented, the influences of European trained musicians, African-born musicians mixed together with different meters and approaches to rhythm that made swing-jazz polyrhythmic. Meaning that there can be, and often are, several rhythmic ideas going on that a dancer can hook into. Listening to a New Orleans front line (trumpet, clarinet, trombone) all work together and you can see this quite clearly.

As an interesting side-note, on a recent trip to Africa, I learned about African musical notation systems. They use circles, with rhythms marked around the perimeter of the circle. While we use a time line in European notation, they use a time cycle. When you overlay those time cycles, it’s easy to see how their music can convey some very complex polyrhythmic ideas, and it lends itself to a layered effect more readily.

When you become aware of this type of sound, you can start to hear it in Swing music. Certain versions of Caravan, Sing Sing Sing and the Slim Gaillard All-stars intro to Hellzapoppin’ all come to mind as songs with strong influences of African percussion style. 1940s pop songs like In The Mood lack this influence and that’s why they seem sterile and “sing song”, compared to some of the grittier, earlier swing.

Interestingly, African music also has a quality, known as “melo-rhythm”, where one should hear melody in the rhythm, and rhythm in the melody… I believe this to be present in good jazz, and it gives us a good opportunity to experience the music in more ways. Listen to Cottontail, or Flyin’ Home with Ben Webster and you can really hear this quality. Listen to meandering solos of a modern-ish jazz band, and it is not as present.

This polyrhythm is why you can walk in time with the beats, half time the beats, triple step or double-time what’s going on and still be doing something fairly reflective of the music. One can almost think of the song, and the dance as being filled with pieces of random length, just like the hardwood floors we dance on. A consistent approach to the dance that’s filled completely with pieces made of 8 counts simply wouldn’t do justice to the musical form.

So, beyond the influences we have the uniquely American form of Jazz, and if we knew nothing about how the music was written, we would probably hear groups of 8 beats, tied together in groupings of 4.  The time signature is just a product of history. We can approach dancing to a phrase of 4 eight-counts with things like

• 4 eight count movements
• 4 six count movements and an 8 count movement
• 2 eight count moves, a six count move, and a 10 count move

So you see that when all is said and done, we’re still dancing with respect to the larger musical structures, if we mix these up, and as a bonus we get a nonstop succession of movement that looks fluid, has momentum that moves in time with the ideas of the dancers creating the dance, and isn’t anchored or constrained by having to come back to a rock-step on the 1/2.

Groups of two beatsSo that’s what’s going on in the lyrical center, but what about the rhythm?  The lower end of the music “swings”, meaning it has a quality called rhythmic displacement.  The amount of time between any even and any odd beat in relation to a set tempo. This is what we can think of as the “hoo-ha”, “whoo wha” or “boom-tick” of the music.

Over these two beats, we can do two beat movements, like rock step, we can kick step, we can triple step or any number of other things (slip slop, lowdown, chug, hop hop, step step, kick hold, etc.  As you string these together in ways that match the music, you are creating your own moves on the fly.

Really, 6 count, 8 count and Charleston are all just “suggested”  groupings of these 2-beat parts.  

As we group these two-beat parts together, we essentially have three choices

• Use standard groupings, like swing outs or passes.
• Improvise a standard pattern, ie do a pass but finish with a stomp-off
• Completely improvise, i.e. shaka-shaka slip slop skate skate skate skate hold mini-dip.

We need all these modes to fully express the phrases, solos, rhythms, drum breaks, tags, phrases, and points of emphasis. A fully 8-count-only-mode wouldn’t give us all the tools we need to make a picture of the music with our bodies.

Points of emphasisSwing and jazz music can be thought of as multi-dimensional.  There are places where the melody has a strong “attack” with respect to the tempo, meaning the notes in the melody give energy, a rushing feel. Conversely there are places where it relaxes, giving even a fast song an easy going jaunt.  There are places where it has a higher volume. Conversely, there are places where there is more relaxed feel, a relaxed volume. We also deal in breaks, which are essentially stops or holds in the music which serve to create interest and to keep the tempo from speeding up.  In order to be able to react to these points in the music (which can happen on any beat, though likely a 1, 3, 5, or 7), we as dancers need to be able to extend our movements so that emphatic moments in the dance can be, well, emphasized.  Most Lindy Hoppers have experienced extending a movement so they can hit a big break in the song. Extending patterns with the 1/2 (twists) or the 5/6 (rhythm circles) are easy because they are based on a “step step”, and they return your weight to the foot it was on before, essentially making it the most neutral of improvisations.

Arthur MurrayA long time ago, before dance schools, social dancing was not canonized.  There wasn’t a set way to teach things. The concept of a dance studio or dance school didn’t really exist for partner dances widely until the late 30s (there were some in the late 20s, but not many), and they didn’t teach a lot of Lindy Hop.  Foxtrot was a far more popular dance, as was Latin dance, and of course the dance crazes like Big Apple. Dancing was passed along from person to person, or in informal settings. At the Savoy, they had taxi dancers that would teach you steps for a dime a song.  There was no such thing as “East Coast” or “West Coast” swing, mostly because neither had been invented yet.

As things like the musician’s strike and the end of World War II propelled people toward rock and roll and solo dancing, there wasn’t as much market for partner dancing.  The people who patronized dance studios were an older, wealthier set. They demanded easy answers and black-and-white sylabii that didn’t dive into the confusion and grey areas that dance truly does when one pursues it as an art form.  Dancing as a 6 count only form (i.e. East Coast) was a simple invention of dance schools in the 1940s that made dancing easy to learn.   Nowadays, East Coast swing as an entity in and of itself separate from Lindy Hop is something that has infiltrated many dance communities all over the world.  Some people teach “East Coast Swing” and “Lindy Hop” as if they were different things and not just an easier-to-understand mental construct.

The only compelling reason for us to teach classes of only a single mode like 6 or 8 count is to make things easy, progressive, digestible for students.  Kind of a “paint-by numbers” scenario.  Just as Groovie Movie said, “having learned the basic steps, you now forget them completely”. Fluid movement between 6 and 8 count vocabulary is step one on the journey to being a competent social dancer.  Step two is being able to invent movements of any even-numbered length on the fly to match the music you are hearing.

Some movements just need less timeAnd, in a way, perhaps it can be thought of very simply.  Typically a move which has one change of places does not need more then 6 counts.  It has a start, a middle and an end, all of which need about 2 counts.  This is one way that a follow can make a fairly educated guess about whether a movement will be 6 or 8 count — if the lead has their hand on the follow’s back on the count 4, then you can give a reasonably high probability that the movement will be 8 counts. Telegraphing leverage into a triple step is another way we can prematurely and/or accurately cap movements and ensure a six count feel.  Some follows are really savvy and rearrange “step step triple-step, step step triple-step” to be “step step triple-step triple-step, step step” when they are unsure, in case they need to truncate their movement early, into a six count. Of course there is always rolling through your rock steps (adding an “and one” rhythm to a rock step), a great way to turn an incorrectly assumed 8 count into a 6 count.

When dancing used to “sometimes” be on 7It is told that at one time, it was common or even preferred to start a swing out on the 7/8 or the music with a rock step.  Sometimes they would start movements on the “1”, but mostly it was 7/8.  7/8 makes a lot of sense.  The point when the two bodies come together has a ton of energy, and is therefore a good match for the point of the music that’s most emphatic (the 1/2).  This was hard for people to understand during the swing revival and it ended up being standardized to start on the 1/2.

When rock steps happen in different places in the music than the “1 and 2”, it adds a great deal of visual interest to the viewer and the dancers involved.

How to use this all to your advantage in the danceAll this is lovely and moderately useful information, but how do we apply it to the dance?

First, I think that we can move away from patterns if we think about using the beginnings we create as places to start improvising from.  We don’t have to always think about trying to make things fit to the 8s. Try letting yourself begin a move then throwing out of your mind the idea that it needs to end at some point.  Try keeping it going through a random grouping of 2-count syncopations like step-steps, triples, hitches, chugs, skates, twists, anything you feel.

Another way that you can apply this is to think about your dance as being never ending. You’re just doing long sequences of two count moves. In other words, if your 6 count ends with some rotation, continue that rotation into the next movement. Try to blur the visual line between your 7/8 triple step and your 1/2. This can be hard for teachers who spend hours breaking things down for students, only to find the cookie-cutter approach affecting their own dancing.

Lastly, you can adopt a mindset such that there is no mistakes in your dance.  No missed movement, only a missed two count, and you can keep moving from there without hesitation into the next thing.  When we dance to patterns, the though that we are breaking a pattern breaks our concentration and our sense that the move is “right”.  Try thinking of a constant flow, free from mistakes. It can really de-stress the dance.

Finally, I’d just like to say that these dances all had to be invented by someone.  They are born from the music and when our bodies react to the music in a way that makes sense that’s more right than anything that we can figure out with our mathematical or scientific selves.  Feeling over limitations, instinct over imitation.

We teach some applicable concepts in our class “Amazing Phrasing”

Also, big shout outs to Paul and Sharon, the people who introduced me to any concept of “musicality” and were the first to show me what it was. Keith Hughs who taught the first class where I learned about phrasing, Carey Rayburn, my trumpet teacher, Elliot Reed and Pascal, my swing guitar teachers, and all the others I learned from along the way.


http://danandlainey.com/8-count-dance-6-count-rhythms/

Great partner dancers may not know it but they are masters of space, time and Newton's laws of motion
by Andy Connelly

A journalist looked out over a crowded dance floor in Harlem and asked a nearby dancer, "What do you call this dance?" The dance did not yet have a name, but it was 1928 and Charles Lindbergh (nickname "Lucky Lindy") had just "hopped" across the Atlantic, and so the "Lindy Hop" was born.

This may be an apocryphal tale but it has some truth in it, because this form of swing dancing certainly emerged from the ballrooms of Harlem at this time. The Lindy Hop was a coming together of tap, the Charleston and the Breakaway, and was danced to the swinging jazz rhythms of the time. The recent resurgence of swing music has put this dance firmly back on the dance floor. In fact, dance floors all over the country seem to be filling new Lindy Hoppers who are unknowingly becoming expert physicists.

For thousands of years, dancing was primarily a group activity with men and women dancing separately. When people danced with partners it was mostly in open hold, with just their hands in contact. There were exceptions, such as an Elizabethan court dance called the Volta, and a much earlier alpine turning dance called the ländler. Both involved the man lifting the woman from the ground, which obviously required a close connection – in the case of the Volta, this involved a male thigh under the female buttocks. Then, in 1814, the Waltz exploded onto the dance floors of Vienna. The ballrooms of Europe and America would never be the same. The Waltz was a "close hold" dance, with the man and woman's bodies in almost constant contact.

These close hold partner dances were highly controversial. They were often viewed as a "gateway sin" – something that could lead on to more serious sins, such as gambling and fornication. Despite the negative press, however, partner dancing continued to grow and many new partner dances swept America and Europe. There were the ragtime animal dances of the 1910s, including the Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot, and the Grizzly Bear. Then, in the 1920s, the energetic and leggy Charleston emerged with competitions, marathons, and a new democracy in dancing. No longer was position on the dance floor dictated by social status, but by merit. Women could choose whom they danced with and how they danced. Close or separate. Having learned a few simple moves anyone could dance, and dance they did. From this ferment the Lindy Hop emerged.

Lindy Hoppers work their magic with the laws of physics in the film HellzapoppinLindy Hoppers developed a range of moves as varied as swing music itself. However, like any dance, these complex movements could only occur if an external force was acting on the dancer. For example, the turn of the Waltz is only possible due to friction between foot and floor and contact between "lead" and "follow" (traditionally, the man and the woman). The characteristic lift of the Volta is only possible as the lead dancer applies a vertical force to overcome the weight of the follow.

This requirement of force led, in part, to the traditional roles in the dance: male's lead and female's follow. The reality is more complex. The average man's greater strength and height are said to give an advantage when leading the more physical aspects of the dance. However, the lead must also be sensitive to the interpretation of the dance by the follow, responding to the subtleties of their timing and style. The average female's greater flexibility is said to allow for a greater range of body positions as a follow. Follows must also provide much of the physicality in the dance and must have the courage to throw themselves into potentially dangerous positions. For these reasons, I believe, dancing is the science of lead and follow not male and female.

For instance, when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced cheek-to-cheek in a close turn their two bodies achieved a beautiful line impossible for any individual. Dancing like this is a conversation inphysics, where the bodies of both dancers are required to master the forces involved.

In close hold, bodies are joined at the hip and hand. The follow exerts an equal and opposite force through arms and body in response to the lead. These equal and opposite forces, in accordance with Newton's Third Law of Motion, allow the follow to dance in synchrony with the lead: as a mirror image. This symmetry can only be broken if the pairs of forces become unbalanced, causing one or both of the dancers to accelerate away from the other. For example, the lead may provide a subtle signal indicating to the follow to reduce the resistance, accept the transfer of momentum, and move away into a backwards step.

This, and all forces, cause a transfer of momentum (which is the product of mass and velocity). So, when the lead applies a net force, momentum is transferred to the follow. The more of the lead's mass (body) moves as the force is applied, the greater the transfer of momentum and so the more the follow's mass will move. Also, the longer it takes to transfer that momentum the smoother the ride. This is the difference between the slow gentle acceleration and deceleration of a careful driver, and the painful jarring of rapid acceleration or an emergency stop. The constant contact and gentle tension between the bodies of dancers means that momentum can be transferred at any time and over any time period.

This is beauty of partner dancing. When dancing alone you are constrained by your abilities and by the physical reality of friction and gravity. These forces are reliable, adaptable and predictable, but unchanging. When dancing with a partner these forces are countered by two different minds and bodies, each with its own interpretations, motivation, timing, strength and style.

Lindy Hop dancers spend a lot of time in open hold with contact only through the hands. This allows both lead and follow to play with the forces, to add variations, to create a feeling of elasticity – of freedom. The follow may sit back on to the lead's arm and kick out into a jazz step using the tension and elasticity to give the movement energy. This tension is not created by brute strength but core body muscles, body weight and the elasticity of joints and muscles.

The lead may equally bring the follow into a rapid but smooth version of the Twist. To do this the lead twists their body, transferring momentum to the follow's body; the elasticity of joints and muscles cushions the momentum transfer, giving a beautifully smooth ride. Brute force of tense triceps and biceps would lead to insufficient momentum being transferred too quickly and the motion being jerky and unpleasant. This open hold also allows the follow and lead to improvise, to create art from their bodies or just make each other laugh.

Dancers often seem to get addicted to dancing, even feeling a visceral need to dance. There are many possible reasons for this. It could be due to neurotransmitters such as endorphins, serotonin and dopamine that are released as a result of the physical exertion of dancing. These chemicals do tend to improve people's moods, but then they are released during most forms of exercise. Another possibility is that dancing with a partner increases the levels of oxytocin in the blood. The science of oxytocin is still unclear but most studies seem to suggest that within a safe environment oxytocin increases trust and our sense ofbelonging to a group. Maybe this is what keeps us coming back for more.

This increased level of trust may also allow moves on the dance floor that would otherwise feel unsafe: moves such as air steps. These are the most spectacular part of the Lindy Hop. Bodies, usually the follows', fly through the air with seemingly little fear of falling. This can only occur when the applied force upwards exceeds the downward pull of gravity. This gives an initial upwards acceleration. But as soon as the lead leaves the ground this would become a deceleration and she would slow, stop, and start to fall – unless her partner boosts her upwards momentum allowing her to reach new heights impossible to gain alone.

A skilled dancer can manipulate their partner's momentum with the application of only a small force and so change their momentum in any way they wish. Thus, with minimal effort a small jump can become a "honeymooner" with the follow finding themselves in the lead's arms like a newlywed; being spun around and then gently placed back on the floor.

A more sedate form of momentum transfer is Lindy Hop's version of a pirouette. It seems a simple move: the lead provides a torque, a rotational force, and the follow accepts the rotational momentum and spins. Luckily for the follow they have much more control over the move than that. If a follow sticks a leg out they can slow themselves down; by moving a mass away from the central pivot of the spin they increase their rotational mass (or inertia) and so slow down. The opposite is also true and so an ice skater can spin more quickly by moving their arms in. Alternatively, if a follow starts a spin with a leg out the lead must apply more force to start the turn but, when that leg is brought in that extra momentum is released and so velocity increases.

These spinning dancers seem to enter a world of their own where balance, speed and style are the only things that exist. But no world is so simple. We must add time and space to this world and the symmetry of these dimensions. It is not only the couple in close hold who are dancing in symmetry. Many moves have an element of symmetry and many others can be created using symmetry. Moves can be performed forwards as well as backwards in space, both clockwise and anti-clockwise. They can be translated by a degree or distance; each translation generating another set of possible moves depending on footwork and balance.

Moves can also be reversed in time. If you watch a video of a dance backwards a whole new set of moves appear, moves you can recreate on the dance floor. However, there are exceptions to this time symmetry, where the second law of thermodynamics becomes involved. For example, in a foot slide the foot is placed on the floor away from the body and drawn in. This creates friction and so generates heat. If you reverse this process, sliding your foot outwards, it does not cool the floor and so this move is not truly time reversible.

This world of time and space is a dancer's to manipulate, up to a point. Yes, to dance is to create – to create your own world within rhythm – but even here the laws of physics must still apply.

When Frankie Manning helped bring the Lindy Hop back to popular attention in the 1980s he was a postal worker and an incredible dancer. He was also as much of a scientist as any laboratory worker. He took advantage of the science of time, space and biology and we can all do this, wherever we are. On the dance floor as in the laboratory, laughter, frustration, and tears run together for all of us who can hear the music.

Thank you to Alistair and many other Lindy Hop friends for their scientific input and the dances!


http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/05/science-magic-lindy-hop

Q & A with Skye Humphries Pt.1

October 24, 2009 at 3:50 pm (Dance, History, Jazz, Lindy Hop, Skye Humphries) 
Tags: Lindy Hop

The following is a questionnaire that Skye Humphries filled out for an article entitled “The Party’s Just Begun” that appeared in August 31, 2008.  It only used a few sentences out of the 12 page response that Skye sent back.   It’s a print magazine, so it’s not available online.   Skye sent this to me last summer just to read. I thought it was too interesting not to share so I asked him permission to post it here.  Since it’s pretty long, I’m chopping it up into four parts. You can findpart 2 here, part 3 here, and part 4 here.


How were you introduced to dancing in general? Were you a trained dancer before going into swing?  If swing was your first exposure to dance, what drew you to it/ made you want to become a dancer.

I always had an interest in movement- though not necessarily dancing.

I used to want to be a clown.  I loved the old movies of Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd.  My brothers and I would recreate slapstick scenes, walks, and a million other little motions we watched in those old movies.  I loved the way those guys moved, I loved the way their specific movements felt when I watched them and later when I tried them myself.

Chaplin can make you laugh, and then cry, and then cheer all without saying a word.  He is devastating.  I loved the way he can bring out the essence of some small action.  His work is dancing- pure dancing- practical and elegant and beautiful.

My mother danced Lindy Hop.  She always thought I would like it.  She used to show me old dance clips from films like “Hellzapoppin‘” and “Day at the Races.”

I was blown away by the films and was interested in the dance, but I was young and never really thought that guys danced.  It certainly wasn’t something that was considered cool.

Finally she convinced me to try it.  Bill Borgida was giving a class for teens (I was 11 or 12) and I went with some friends from my school whose parents also danced.

We went to a school called ACS (the Alternative Community School) [where] we were encouraged to pursue our own interests and develop our own ways of learning.  We started teaching a class at our school almost immediately and brought our friends into the dance.  Our school gave us space and time to practice, and allowed us to shape our curriculum to reflect our interest in the dance.

History, sociology, politics, media- our teachers were very encouraging and allowed us to find the connection between dancing and the rest of our studies.

There was an amazing community of dancers in Ithaca who created a great atmosphere and ran great dances.  We started going out and dancing socially all the time.  ISDN (Ithaca Swing Dance Network) also put on great workshops with the top international dancers and teachers, and they were always supportive of us kids.

My friends and I went out together dancing, and then Bill started a little performance group and we started doing gigs around town.

Soon we started running and directing our own group, and started performing, competing, and eventually teaching on our own.

Personally, I felt very uncomfortable in classes at first.  I was a slow learner and had trouble understanding what the dance was about; Lindy Hop is so open-ended and personal that it can be quite difficult to learn in a traditional class setting.  I had a hard time learning the counts and remembering all the steps.

But I remember the frustration of classes just melting away when I started to go out dancing.  I grasped very quickly the freedom of the dance once I was on a dance floor.  I saw how I could turn my weakness at recreating or remembering the movements of the teacher in class into strengths on the dance floor.  Where I couldn’t do some part of a step, I learned to find my own way through things.  I learned quickly how to make things my own.

For me it was my mother, my friends, my school, and the strong community of dancers in Ithaca that got me to dance; and once I started it was the incredible freedom of the dance that kept me dancing.  It was the way I was able to find my own way of dancing that encouraged me so much.  Lindy Hop encourages individuality and self-expression through embracing community rather than rejecting it.

Of course I found the dance intoxicating as well.  Lindy Hop brings people together to music and that is a classic combination.  Humans have been doing that forever.  There has never been anything more potent than that.


 

Q & A with Skye Humphries pt. 2 October 29, 2009 at 12:03 am (Dance, History, Jazz, Lindy Hop, Skye Humphries) 
Tags: Lindy Hop

The following is part two of  a questionnaire that Skye Humphries filled out for an article entitled “The Party’s Just Begun” that appeared in August 31, 2008.  It only used a few sentences out of the 12 page response that Skye sent back.   It’s a print magazine, so it’s not available online.   Skye sent this to me last summer just to read. I thought it was too interesting not to share, so I asked him permission to post it here.  Since it’s pretty long, I’m chopping it up into four parts.  You can findpart 1 here, part 3 here, and part 4 here.

What are some of the “core moves” of the Lindy Hop?

The basic of the Lindy Hop is the Swing Out: a circular step done in eight beats in which the partners come together and then move apart.  I have never seen anything so perfectly put together, there is no more versatile or meaningful basic in any dance I’ve seen.

Charleston is another important step- the famous dance step from the twenties is crucial to Lindy.

There are other classic steps and classic combinations of steps, but for me those are the most important.

Lindy Hop is a cumulative dance, it bears little imprints of all the things that have come before it.  And today it continues to accumulate bits and pieces.  It is an expansive dance that has space to encompass many things.

Are Lindy Hop moves improvised?  Planned?  Both?

Lindy Hop is both planned and improvised.  There is any number of ways to dance the Lindy Hop, but there is always room for both improvisation and planning in the Lindy Hop.

I would say, and most dancers would probably agree, [that] there is more of an emphasis on improvisation, and certainly traditionally, the dance is more of an improvisational than a planned dance; but there can be planning as well.

A great many moves have been passed down, or taken from old clips and formalized, but many moves are improvised as well, or – like the Swing Out in which the partners come together and then break away – there is space for both.

The Swing Out has a basic shape that brings the partners together and then takes them apart.  When they break away there is room for improvisation.  The Swing Out embodies and reconciles this tension in the dance:  the connection between the partners when they come together and their freedom as individuals when they break away.  Many people point to that “break-away” as the central innovation of Lindy Hop.  Certainly it-and the freedom it allows-is integral to the basic step, and from there, informs the rest of the dance.

Lindy Hop, like the music to which it is danced, is based on a simple structure; a structure that should be limiting, but in fact is quite the opposite.  The simplicity of structure allows for great complexity.  Lindy Hop is so refreshing because it has certain structures (partners, a basic step, a consistent and simple rhythm) that allow for great communication.

Is there such a thing as a “mistake” in the Lindy Hop

It is very difficult to make a “mistake” in Lindy Hop.  However, I would differ from other people in this:  I think the great appeal of Lindy Hop is not it’s lack of right and wrong, but instead is this simplicity of structure.  By having [a] clear structure the dance allows [for] great improvisation and communication.

Improvisation isn’t about doing away without all rules or all structures or all forms.  It is about subverting those rules, reworking the structures from the inside, allowing one’s self to fill the form of the dance and then refashioning it.  Improvisation comes from mastery of structure not its dissolution, and this is one of the real beauties of Lindy Hop.  Its form is an incredible achievement.  Its basic step is a complex negotiation between the couple and the individual.  It leaves so much space.

To me the only mistake is to approach Lindy Hop as formless or structure-less [by] ignoring the rhythm, ignoring ones partner, ignoring the music, [or] ignoring how the dance has been done in the past.


 

Q & A with Skye Humphries pt. 3 November 3, 2009 at 8:27 am (Dance, History, Lindy Hop, Skye Humphries) 
Tags: Lindy Hop

The following is part three of  a questionnaire that Skye Humphries filled out for an article entitled “The Party’s Just Begun” that appeared in August 31, 2008.  It only used a few sentences out of the 12 page response that Skye sent back.   It’s a print magazine, so it’s not available online.   Skye sent this to me last summer just to read. I thought it was too interesting not to share so I asked him permission to post it here.  Since it’s pretty long, I’m chopping it up into four parts.  You can find part 1 here and part 2 here, and part 4 here.

In the last decade, swing dancing in general has seen a surge in popularity – what accounts for that?  Can you explain the time line?

Well certainly Neo-swing in the 90’s gave a certain form of the dance and music a new kind of visibility.  Clubs put on Swing nights, young people flocked to bars and clubs and dance classes.

While the scenes co-existed, (with more or less overlap in different regions) they were never identical.   When Neo-Swing faded, Lindy Hop had gained new enthusiasts but didn’t disappear.   [Lindy Hop] had been around before and continued after.  Many young people were exposed to it though college started Swing clubs and the demographic began to shift towards a younger crowd.

I think the Internet also had a large impact.   Message boards like Yehoodi started to create social networks that served to draw people deeper into the dance and the increasingly international community of dancers.

Recently, I think Youtube has had a very large impact as videos become widely distributed and the video watching habits of people change.  There wasn’t a venue or a style of watching short videos that showcased dance until Youtube came along.

Some of the most famous Lindy Hop clips were made for viewing in nickelodeons back in the day.  Youtube has recreated an environment in which people watch clips like they used to in the earlier days of cinema.  I think it makes them receptive to watching something like Lindy Hop, which is so good for viewing in that context and then pursuing [as] an interest.

Of course partner dancing seems to be gaining in popularity these days, and that certainly seems to be fueling some of the renewed interest in Lindy Hop.

Why is the Lindy Hop an important art form?

Jazz is one of the most (if not the most) important art-forms to come out of American culture in the last 100 years.  Jazz music stands as a crucial cultural achievement of the 20th century.  In America and in the world there is little that can challenge its stature.i

I would argue Lindy Hop is crucial to understanding Jazz.  It is intimately connected to Jazz music–to its development, to its appeal, and to its popularity.  The way that people made sense of Jazz music for at least 30 of its most crucial years is by dancing.  The dancing co-evolved with the music and I would argue the pinnacle of that evolution was reached in the Lindy Hop.

It is a modern American Art-form- an urban folk-dance that allows the individual an incredible degree of self-expression while linking that expression to the expression other people.  The individual finds expression but must grapple with their community-must take into account their partner and the music and the dancers that have come before them and the dancers that are around them.  It fosters an incredible sense of community without sacrificing the unique identity of the individual.

Lindy Hop is an important art form because it is a form that has manage to persist and grow for the last 80 years; because it is as applicable today in Russia and Korea and Australia and Sweden as it was in Harlem in 1930.

Lindy Hop is an important art-form because it is the working class equivalent of the cultural flowering of the 1930’s and the Harlem Renaissance.

Coming out of the African American community in Harlem, Lindy hop has spread around the world and continues to thrive.

It is art-form that is open to everyone and makes sense of the life of an individual in a modern urban context.  As such it is still as meaningful and useful as when it was created.

It is an antidote to modern urban technological isolation and ennui.  It is an art-form for the people and by the people.

Many historical accounts of the Lindy Hop allude to its African roots.  Can we consider the Lindy Hop to be a way to record history?  If so, how?

Lindy Hop carries its history with it.  And it pulls together what came before it as well.

Lindy Hop has no rules.  Its identity is based on continuity rather than a strict set of rules or techniques.  Lindy Hop is in some ways just an innovation on earlier dances like the Turkey Trot and the Texas Tommy.  Lindy Hop changes organically, but to still be Lindy Hop it needs to maintain some connection to the past.

Rather than conserved from above, Lindy Hop changes from the ground up and is constantly looking back to move forward.  Lindy Hop is the perfection of the notion of a usable past; it provides a pragmatic link to history.   Lindy Hop doesn’t just record history, it puts it to work in the service of the present.

Charleston is a perfect example.  [It was] a popular solo and partnered dance before Lindy Hop came on the scene.  [Then] it became an integral part of Lindy Hop- though dramatically altered and tailored to fit the music of the day and the feeling of the dance- it is still Charleston.

Lindy Hop comes from Harlem, and it comes out of the Harlem Renaissance.  It is an important petal in the greater cultural flowering that was occurring at that time.  It was the art and recreation of everyday people- working class African Americans- at an incredibly important juncture in their history and the history of America as a whole.

The fact that the dance has spread all over the world and continues to thrive and grow 80 years on is testament to the power of that cultural achievement.


 

Q & A with Skye Humphries pt. 4 November 5, 2009 at 12:17 am (Dance, History, Jazz, Lindy Hop, Skye Humphries) 
Tags: Lindy Hop, ULHS

The following is the fourth and final part of  a questionnaire that Skye Humphriesfilled out for an article entitled “The Party’s Just Begun” that appeared in August 31, 2008.  It only used a few sentences out of the 12 page response that Skye sent back.   It’s a print magazine, so it’s not available online.   Skye sent this to me last summer just to read. I thought it was too interesting not to share so I asked him permission to post it here.  Since it’s pretty long, I’m chopping it up into four parts.  You can find part 1 here and part 2 here and part 3 here.

Let’s talk about the places where you can Lindy Hop – If I wanted to start, how could I do that?

Most major cities have a Lindy Hop scene.  The best place to start is the internet- finding the local dance and going out.  Of course lessons are a helpful way to get a handle on the basics, but the most important thing is to go out and start moving to the music.

People have been teaching themselves to Lindy Hop for years and years.  All it takes is a little practice, and with Lindy Hop, practicing and doing are the same thing.

There are some great camps, and most organizations put on a few workshops every year.  These can also be a great way to start to work on one’s dancing.

The dance can be a little intimidating and a little overwhelming at first but the important thing is not to be frustrated.  It is a very friendly scene, and people are usually more than happy to dance with someone new.

International competitions:  Could you tell me why the competitions are important?  What is going to one of those like?  Which competitions are the most important on the circuit?

ULHS, Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown, is the most important competition right now. it happens in Minneapolis in October.  [ed. note:  ULHS has since moved to New Orleans, LA]  Showdown is mostly a big party for dancing with periodic contests during the course of the dance.

Showdown is the most successful because it has made the biggest effort to move away from a model of competition based on Ballroom Dance rules and conventions, and [tries] to develop formats that reflect the unique nature of the Lindy Hop.

The spirit of the event reflects what many people feel are some of the core attributes of Lindy Hop:

• Innovation not conservation
  
  
• An emphasis on personal expression over perfection of patterns.
  
  
• Improvisation
  
  
• Musicality
  
  
• Partnership
  
  

Competition helps push the dance and the dancers to new places.  I’ve always liked the forum it allows for dancers to really watch each other and push themselves to do new stuff.  Because Lindy Hop is a social dance, there is actually very few forums in which we can show each other what we are doing and get new ideas.

Of course Lindy Hop is also a very exciting dance and it is always great to see great dancers dancing their hardest.

Under pressure something new almost always comes out.

We’re a teaching magazine, so I wanted to speak about your work as a teacher of dance for a bit.  First, what goes in to being a good teach[er]

For me the feeling comes first, so I think a good teacher is someone who inspires people to dance, helps people find the joy of dancing, [and] lets the technique be a means to an end; not the end in itself.

From my experiences as a student and a dancer I have always appreciated the individuality of Lindy Hop, so a good teacher for me is someone who helps people find their own ways of moving- helps people find ways of expressing themselves rather than giving them static patterns to adapt to.

When people start dancing for the first time they have a tendency to throw away all the knowledge about movement they have accumulated from walking around.  I think a good teacher helps people use the knowledge they already have to dance- encourages people to find their own ways of dancing based on the shape of their bodies and their natural movement patterns.

Who have you taught and who have you learned from?

My most important teacher was Steven Mitchell, his classes also inspired me as a student, as a social dancer, and later as a teacher myself.

As a dancer, do you have heroes?  If so, who?

• Steven certainly first and foremost.
  
  
• A man named Frankie Manning who is one of the original dancers from the Savoy Ballroom, an amazing dancer, and a real gentleman.
  
  
• Dawn Hampton
  
  
• The group of people I started with, Minnie’s Moochers,
  
  
• and now the Silver Shadows.
  
  
• My dance partner Frida Segerdahl
  
  
• Charlie Chaplin
  
  
• Bob Dylan
  
  

What are you thinking about while you’re dancing?  Are you counting?  Are you thinking about what you’re going to do next, etc. etc.?

What I love about Lindy Hop is that it doesn’t need to try to be anything else.  In Lindy Hop, styling is practical.  Nothing stands for anything else.  The movement fills out the music. Form and content are one and the same.

It’s a very practical, pragmatic dance, and it is that simplicity and directness that I find so meaningful and complex.

At the end of the day it is about two people holding each other to music, and that is very beautiful.

The partners and the music are there in the moment with movements that have been done for 80 years, and they are simply trying to make them true in that moment- do them in some way that allows them to make sense then and there.

I am always trying to reach that place where thinking stops- or I should say [where] thoughts are simply replaced by motion.

“The way I like to write is for it to come out the way I walk or talk. Not that I even walk or talk yet like I’d like to. I don’t carry myself yet the way Woody, Big Joe Williams, and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves.”

– Robert Zimmerman, A.K.A. Bob Dylan (interview with Nat Hentoff- The New Yorker, October 24, 1964)

To me this quote says it all.  The connection between history, dancing, and self-expression.  I am just trying to dance the way I walk.  The challenge is walking as great dancers before me have- not copying their motions but instead carrying myself as they have.

 

Wikipedia -

In the late 1920s, when Leonard Reed and Willie Bryant were with the Whitman Sisters troupe on the T.O.B.A. circuit, they danced what they called "Goofus" to the tune Turkey in the Straw.[1][2][3] The routine consisted of standard steps: eight bars each of the double shuffle, crossover, Tack Annie, and falling-off-the-log.[1][3][4]

In early 1930s, the Shim Sham was performed in Harlem at places like Connie's Inn,[3][4] Dickie Wells's Shim Sham Club,[1][3] the 101 Ranch,[5] the LaFayette Theatre,[1] and the Harlem Opera House.[1]

At the end of many performances, all of the musicians, singers, and dancers would get together on stage and do one last routine: the Shim Sham Shimmy. Tap dancers would perform technical variations, while singers and musicians would shuffle along as they were able.[3] For example, flash dance act Three Little Words would close their show at Connie's Inn with the Shim Sham, and invite everyone to join in, "and the whole club would join us, including the waiters. For awhile people were doing the Shim Sham up and down Seventh Avenue all night long," according to Joe Jones.[4]

According to tap dancer Howard “Stretch” Johnson the word "Shim" was a contraction of the term "she-him", a reference to the fact that the female chorus line dancers at the 101 Ranch were played by men.[5]

In the modern Lindy Hop community, the Shim Sham is commonly performed as a line dance during dance events.[6] Despite the existence of many variations, the dance has spread around the world, as was featured in the 'Global Shim Sham for Frankie' – a tribute performance for dance legend Frankie Manning's 95th birthday.[7] As such, it has emerged as an emblem of the international nature of the swing dancing community.[

Wikipedia -

The Tranky Doo is a Jazz Dance choreography. It was choreographed by Pepsi Bethel and first appeared at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem during the 1940s[citation needed] .

At that time, it was danced to Tuxedo Junction, however many modern day performances of the dance use other swing jazz songs. It is most common these days to perform the dance with the song "Dipsy Doodle" by Ella Fitzgerald because the dance appears in the Spirit Moves documentary film with a playback of the song. However the film originally had no sound, and the song "Dipsy Doodle" was artificially superimposed on that section of the film.

It was common to Lindy Hoppers, like the Shim Sham.