here we are lining up for breakfast. things are moving slow…. note the cheese. cheese is big with the swedes. we eat a lot of crackers as well. the food is bloody good.
and here we are eating in the tent.
the tents are important features on the herrang landscape. we eat in them, we learn in them, we practice in them. meals are my favourite thing – good food and lots of good company.
things have gotten dire. last pair of knickers. last pair of pants. all else is in the laundry, being washed. it may or may not all come back to me. then i have to get it dried. tricky in this climate. they have these big drier thingies that look like fridges, and they’re pretty good. but there’ll be that moment between getting up and walking the 10minutes across town to the driers where i’ll have nothing to wear. lucky herrang is 24hours a day.
i am so sweaty all the time, i go through clothes at a phenomenal rate. so does everyone.
herrang fashion: loose, comfortable trousers; tshirt, thongs or sandals by day, and the same with dance shoes at night. loose, comfy tshirts for men, smaller, tighter tshirts for women. the dress standards are definitely casual. except on the party nights. then people dress up like fools: check out these pictures.
this one is my favourite. that nursey there is a lovely german boy. and the wrestler is a lovely girl. ah, herrang.
but now i have a cold. everyone’s got it. and now i do too. poop.
didn’t stop me staying up til 7am dancing. the thing that’s really giving me trouble are my feet – the joints in my toes are really really hurting. i worry that i’ve done something nasty to myself… oh well.
the dancing is good. my dancing is now better than it has been in a million years. the dancers are also good – good company, good fun, good music, good dancing. it’s like being on holiday with a couple of hundred totally excellent people who love to dance and do interesting things. …which i guess is actually the situation. i’m still very tired, but now that i’m nocturnal, it’s not so much of a problem. the sun is only down for about 6 hours at night, so it’s not so hard to stay up. i’m super fit again, and have dropped so much weight i have to safety pin my pants on. last week i was doing classes, so that was 4 and a half hours of dance classes during the day, with one or two casual classes and a bit of practice as well. then hours on end of social dancing. all we do here is eat, dance, talk and muck about. and people sleep whenever and wherever they can. in the cafe between songs. in hammocks, in the gym on mattresses, on the grass between classes.
the cutest thing i’ve seen so far has been two swedish girls squashed into a hammock sidebyside, battling with a mosquito net. they were giggling and tired and hidden away under a tree. very sweet.
i am about as boring as boring gets at the moment. i’m full of goob, and trying not to panic about getting well in time to travel…
i’m flying out on the 26th (straight through to the uk… aw yeah, that’ll be excellent fun), so i’ve about 26 days to get the tubes in my head clear so i won’t explode in the plane. speaking of eustachian tubes. guess i shouldn’t have jinxed myself.
things weren’t helped by my dancing like a nut on two seperate occasions over the past week – a wednesday night at a pub, dancing like an idiot for too long, followed by talking and dancing with germ-ridden blues dancers til 6:30 in the morning; and a friday night at a bar (dancing like a complete fool, and without inhibition for about an hour).
it seems i have not only lost the few inhibitions i once had about dancing in public, but also any good sense about caring for ill bodies. it’s that crazy disco dancing. it’s led me astray.
i just don’t seem to care at all any more about what people think about me when i’m dancing. and while i’ve always loved disco dancing, i’ve not always been as prone to spasticity on the dance floor.
the next day i cringe at the memories… it seems there’s no dance move i won’t do, no limit on the amount of dance floor i’ll coopt for my own use, no unsuspecting peer i’ll not rope into dancing with me.
the perfect antidote to swing, i think.
it was crowded, cultish and a bit scary. but i had lots of nice dances, listened to a good band, met some nice people. and took a few photos. note the discrepencies in lighting – i am still learning. but i like the blurs. that’s how it always seems – blurry – when you’re dancing.
Continue reading “i went to the swingpatrol ball last friday”
I realise I’ve not actually given much useful information in my previous entry on rent parties.
Simply put:
In the 30s (and in the prior and later years), people living in Harlem in New York were often short of money. When rent time loomed, people who were short of money might hold a party in their house, invite lots of people, and have them pay to attend. They’d put on music (a band or records), and people would dance.
That’s the short story.
Some more details? Sure.
What went on at a rent party?
Eating, drinking, dancing, music playing, talking, love-making, fighting, arguing, kissing
party stuff.
Who were these people holding the rent parties?
For the most part, the majority of the stories I’ve found about rent parties placed them firmly in the Afro-American community. In the first 30 years of the 20th century – between 1919 and 1926, many freed slaves moved north from the southern states to northern cities like New York, Washington and Chicago. They followed the promise of work, fleeing lynching, poverty and scary-arse southern politics for the more tolerant north. Not that tolerant, but at least you weren’t being lynched.
The 1920s and 30s are referred to as an Afro-American renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance is of greatest interest to swingers (as it is the birthplace of lindy hop).
Harlem in the 30s was a predominantly Afro-American community. Conditions were crowded, there were more people arriving every day, and not enough work to go around. It was also a time of great creative and artistic endeavour (see the links to sites discussing the Harlem Renaissance below), human rights activism and social change.
Rent party hosts were usually ordinary Harlem people trying to raise their rent money. The rent party convention was later appropriated by more enterprising individuals, and often served as a front for brothels or illegal casinos.
Why did people hold rent parties?
During the 20s and 30s an estimated 200 000 people were living in this one neighbourhood in New York. The sudden influx of residents pushed rents higher than most families could accord. Families opened their homes to lodgers and often shared apartments with other families. Despite these measures, the rent was often due before the residents could find the money.
Residents would hold ‘parties’ in their homes, charging for entry or food, and ‘guests’ would come to dance and socialise, often all night. Advertisement was done surreptitiously, so as to avoid the wrong sort of guests, as well as the law, in this era of prohibition. The ‘rent party’ often served as a pseudonym for brothels.
On this site a woman explains why she held rent parties. This page provides a more detailed explanation of rent parties (with links to the site I referenced in my other post).
What did rent parties mean to swing dance?
For swingers, it’s an important time as these conditions saw the rise of the lindy hop, in tandem with the development of jazz. While the night clubs, cabarets, theatres and dance halls were pivotal public places in the development of lindy hop, the rent parties are important as they were private places made public, in a city where crowding and intensely interpersonal social and kin networks dominated. Rent parties fostered dancing and music, not only as fund raisers, but also as a site for individual self expression and the formation of community identity.
The following quote comes from this site.
“The dancers organize little impromptu contests among themselves and this competition is often responsible for the birth of many new and original dance-steps. The house-rent party takes credit for the innovation of the Lindy-Hop that was subsequently improved upon at the Savoy Ballroom. For years, it has been a great favorite with the regular rug-cutting crowd. Nothing has been able to supplant it, not ever the Boogie-Woogie that has recently enjoyed a great wave of popularity in Uptown New York.â€
References:
This link provides an interesting section of the book ‘12 million black voices’, written and illustrated by Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam respectively. The site ‘America in the 1930s’ provides some archival and historical material from the States during this period.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture provides an interesting overview of the Harlem Renaissance period.
Harlem Renaissance has a useful range of Afro-American authors, artists and their works.
spaces and places for lindy hop – a useful reference.
Last night we were on our (reluctant) way to Ballyhoo to hand over some presents for people in Perth (Hullabaloo is on, so everyone’s flying over for that. Except us. :( ), and ended up ditching the swing gig for a fun band.
Continue reading “I’m 100% sick of stupid swinger-run events”