Someone on fb recently asked:
“Question: has someone made a visual timeline/lineage of Lindy Hop? Is this a good idea?”
I dislike the linear timeline model because:
- It puts Africa in the past, when helloooo it’s not;
- It uses a very western hierarchy of value with a particular dance or people as the apex or cumulation of different dance. Soz but lindy hop has never stood still or existed in a singular ‘true’ form. It is meaning in motion.
- Who gets to decide when the line begins and ends? If it ‘begins’ in Africa and ‘ends’ with the white observer, then that is some fucked up racist social Darwinist crap. Stop, white person. That ways lies revivalist colonialism.
- linear notions of time are white patriarchy.
There are other, far more interesting notions of ‘time’. The Aboriginal idea of the Dreaming is a good one: it is now, then, to come, and always. So, eg, when we tell a creating Dreaming story/dance/song, we are at once telling history and engaging in that act of creating as well.
If we take this way of understanding (the assumption that time needn’t be linear) to jazz dance, we have multiple dances existing at the same time in different and the same spaces. Specific shapes move through time and between generations, but are also moving laterally between siblings of different ages. So different aged people dance the same movements at the same time, but it has different meanings, depending on who is dancing where.
If we use a linear model, elders are in the past, superseded by successive generations of ‘improvers’, all focussed on a single point/form in time: lindy hop.
But we know it doesn’t work like that. Frankie teaching a bunch of white people the electric slide to Easy Does It, at the same time (day, even!) Black families might be dancing it to disco at a party. White people may separate generations and social spaces and learning, but other cultures do not.
So i say no to time _lines_, because they force western ideas and hierarchies of meaning onto Black culture.
It’s more useful to get up and dance, and feel those changes. Or to think of those dancers from all over Africa leaping up to share a step like the ones Al and Leon were demonstrating, all of them ignoring Marshall Stearns’ voice, and sharing ideas and feelings in a single moment of inter-continental, cross-generational immanence.
Africa isn’t in the roots of lindy hop. The nations of Africa are dancing now, in conversation with lindy hop.
