Author Archives: dogpossum

Watching this clip is like the way I think about dancing. I mean, when I watch dancing, I think of it as a series of shapes and lines. Well, I don’t actively, consciously think of that, it’s kind of how I see it.

flight patterns from Charlie McCarthy on Vimeo.

But it’s not just how I see it. It’s also how I feel it, and how I hear the music. The music is like a series of patterns and shapes – each sound is a shape or a series of forms. And they fit together. So you get repeating patterns and you get random moments, but they all work as part of a whole piece of music.
When I watch a really good dancer, I see those shapes and lines that I hear in the music. When I watch a really good dancer, they make me see the music in particular shapes. Their bodies make the shapes, but their shapes tell me how they hear the music at that moment. And it changes each time they dance.
When it’s two people dancing together, you see two people making shapes at that moment. They make the music into something you can see.
When I watch that clip, it reminds me of dancing, because it’s making something moving into something still or constant. It’s like that with dancing – it’s something moving. Your brain recognises the shapes and connects the dots with a sort of line of understanding or meaning. But that line doesn’t really exist, except in your head.
And when I’m actually dancing, it’s like my body makes the shapes of the music. But it happens outside my conscious brain. I can practice and practice and learn to understand how to control the shapes my body makes, and refine the way I use it as a tool, but, really, the best dancing happens when your brain turns off and you just connect your body up to the music in a direct line. A direct current, from the musicians to your body.
I’ve been watching these clips from ULHS and thinking about the way the camera angle has changed the way I watched the dancers.

Blues Finals ULHS

blues finals ULHS

blues finals ULHS
Usually dance clips are shot from the middle distance, not from above. So we see the dancers in tableau, front elevation. They move and turn horizontally or vertically in front you. But these clips are from above, so we look down onto the dancers. And suddenly I see them from a completely different angle. I notice things I hadn’t seen before. In the first clip the follow sits out, her hips back, while she’s in open. I see it from above in a way I wouldn’t have from below.
Watching the later clips, especially of Todd and Peter dancing with their partners, these leads’ propensity for spinning their follows is emphasised. We see the follows spin and spin and spin. From a side or front view, we’d see the different types of spin, and the movements would be more interested, because we’d see more than the tops of these women’s heads.
This simple shift in perspective reminds me that when most dancers watch other dancers or think about dancing, they’re thinking about their own view from the edge of the dance floor. They’re not thinking about other perspectives. Suddenly, opera and traditional theatre with its tiered seating seems more radical than any busted fourth wall.
I do like these three clips from ULHS. I’ve heard a bit of smack talk about them, critiquing the leads as too ‘leady’. Of course they are – these two are the lead-centric leads; it’s just that other leads are suddenly seeing this for the first time. Any follow could’ve told you before, because any follow will have felt with her body the effect of all that centrifugal force. Other comments have been that this ‘isn’t blues’, that ‘it’s lindy’. Which is exasperating. I really hate bullshit lines where people declare a particular sequence of steps indelibly lindy hop or blues. I especially, especially hate it when people declare a song ‘slow lindy’ rather than ‘blues’. Use your fucking imagination, kids.
AND
How the fuck can you be so sure of the boundaries of a dance? When I’m dancing, I certainly don’t think ‘no way, buddy, that’s lindy hop there’. I feel a lead and I might think ‘oh, this feels like tango’ or ‘a nice swingout, here, even at this tempo!’ but I’m not thinking ‘now I’m lindy hopping’ when a lead adds some swingouts to a slow ‘blues’ song.
It’s madness, just madness, to my mind. It is all just movement, and you can make even one single move feel and work as any type of dance – you just have to work with the music and your partner and what’s going on in the music.
I have to stop typing now. I’m typing is so fucking crap right now – all that using a pod and only using 140 characters has fucked up my typing. I need to do more writing.
Blog – attend me!

I like thinking about the American jazz musicians who went to France. I like to think of the African American musicians, persecuted and segregated and marginalised while record companies and promotors made squillions from their music, escaping to Paris where they were appreciated and valued and feted as musical giants.
I like thinking about American musicians meeting French and European musicians in Paris and getting together to make new music. I like thinking of the gypsy tradition getting together with the African American tradition and making music which subverted and transgressed and basically broke all the freeking rules.
I think this is why I like this album. You can hear Django and Stephan quite clearly, and you just know they were having lots of fun. I like imagining these guys getting together in a small back room and playing their hearts out. The locals excited to be playing with American friends they’d admired from afar; the American visitors excited to be playing with the amazing local talent.
I like this album as well. The story behind these recordings is a good one. After Glenn Miller was lost at sea during the war some members of his band were left in France with little money to cover their expenses. So they recorded some action with some local talent, including Django. These recordings are far hotter and more exciting than any of Miller’s later work (though his early gear is fully sick).
I don’t know much about American jazz in France, but I like thinking about it. It also reminds me that Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary sold itself (and its audiences) short with its insistence that jazz is a purely American phenomenon.
This sort of thinking also reminds me of the effects of musicians touring in Australia during the same period. Not to mention dancers.
As I said, I know next to nothing about this. But it’s something I like to imagine. Especially the bit about black American musicians leaving a country where they couldn’t even stay in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants as white musicians, and arriving in France where their music was massively popular and the people were really excited just to meet them.