Category Archives: learning

African diaspora and language in lindy hop

Odysseus Bailer has recently posted an interesting request on a number of facebook pages and groups. His piece begins”The Phrase “Black Dance”, “Black music and dance”, “Black Culture” is not the same as “Black American Music and Dance”, “Black American Culture”” and continues to make some interesting points.
His key argument (to paraphrase clumsily) is that we should stop staying ‘Black dance’ and start saying ‘Black American dance’ because the dances from African American communities are unique and distinct from the dances created by and in other communities in the African diaspora.

I agree with this.

There have been some really interesting comments by other Black dancers, DJs, and organisers, and I do recommend taking the time to read through all these discussions. Some of the comments are very, very clever. Kenneth Shipp asks us why do we need to specify Black American?

I mean sure, you can make this distinction, but the etymology and history of Black / Negro in Western culture directly points to Black American culture as a direct line to enslavement (to mark a difference from African nations and parts of the diaspora) and marks cultural progress (like when Washington and DuBois argued for capitalizing Negro, and various popular changes through the centuries, like Afro vs African).
…
My question, given this history: what would functionally change if we explicitly said Black American?

One of the other really interesting comments is along the lines of ‘I don’t think of myself as African American… I am Black, or Black American’. A few people made this comment. I thought this was super interesting to see. And it’s a sentiment I’ve heard echoed in the Teaching Hard History podcast: the speakers are very much invested in the idea of a United States of America that is their country as well. It’s quite different to the discussions by Aboriginal Australians who actively reject the idea of a single country ‘Australia’. But I guess that’s one of the key differences between First Nations people’s sense of nation and belonging and Black American sense of nation. And my own racism is indubitably coming out there, if I just assume that these two very different groups of people would think about nation in the same way! Shame on me!

A lot of white lindy hoppers really like to draw that ‘lindy hop family tree’ as rooted in Africa, and to insist on that connection with Africa. I say ‘Africa’ deliberately, as I’ve seen white dancers argue for learning all sorts of dances from different African countries and traditions, rather than from the West African nations that lost people to white kidnappers and slavery. It seems odd to me to imply that ‘any African dance’ will do. It makes the cultural distinctions between African countries disappear; it makes Africa that ‘dark continent’ all over again.
But I’m not 100% sure what I think about this right now. I need to think more about it. Especially since we can definitely argue that lindy hop might have more in common with dances of…. say, Uganda, than the folk dances of Scotland!

Anyway, of course I chimed in. One thing I saw in some white people’s comments was what seems to be a misunderstanding of the concept of the African diaspora. So I wrote a stupid long comment. I’ve put it here, because writing it helped me put together what I’ve learn listening to the excellent Teaching Hard History Podcast, reading up about 70s and 80s lindy hop, and thinking about the different experiences of Black American and Black British lindy hoppers in that period. And how the Black women on both sides of the Atlantic have been quietly erased from modern lindy hop history.

I’m going to preface this comment with explaining who I am. When we pretend we are writing objectively, we make our own privilege disappear. It’s important that I always remember the privilege I was born with, and to some extent recreate every day. Despite my best efforts.

I am a white, middle class, able bodied woman living in a big city (Sydney/Warane) in Australia. I was born in England, and emigrated here with my family in 1982, after living in Fiji. I chose to become an Australian citizen in the mid 1990s, and have dual British/Australian citizenship. I think I’m the only one in my family who is (my brother and parents are permanent residents with British citizenship). My family chose to come to Australia, and our emigration was relatively easy because we are white, middle class, and British. You could say that we are part of a British diaspora, though we have always lived in British colonies (my father is Welsh and lived in Gibraltar and Kenya as a child and teen).

Friends (especially white people like me) reading along who aren’t familiar with the phrase ‘African diaspora’:
In really simple terms, it means people who are from or descended from people born in Africa. It’s usually applied to these people who no longer live in Africa. So those people can live anywhere in the world.

First important thing: there are 54 African countries, each has distinct languages and cultures. They were/are politically and culturally sophisticated with impressive architecture, systems of mathematics and philosophy, complex crafts and technologies, some of the oldest libraries in the world, etc etc. In many cases colonisation by European nations fucked shit up real bad.

Second important thing: people of African descent living outside Africa
a) may have chosen to emigrate,
b) may be refugees who didn’t want to leave but had to flee,
c) my be or have been enslaved people who were kidnapped and transported to another country,
d) may be the descended from enslaved people.

Third important thing: We can’t talk about the African diaspora without talking about European colonialism and slavery.

The empires of countries like England, Spain, Netherlands, etc were dependent on the labour of enslaved people. Slavery still happens today in many countries. The economic power of countries like England today were built on slavery. White people like me, who were born in England and live in Australia still benefit from the enslaving, trafficking, and labour of African people during the past few centuries. My country is rich because of slavery in the British empire.

Slavery involves:
a) humans being treated as objects to be bought and sold;
b) the labour of these people (ie unpaid work);
c) and usually involves racism: believing that humans can be divided up into ‘races’, and that some of these races are less advanced than others. Sometimes people are enslaved because they belong to a different caste, religion, or ethnic group. Note: the idea of ‘race’ is a white concept. The idea of being ‘half-caste’, etc, is a white concept invented to justify enslaving some people and not others.

When we talk about the USA (where lindy hop began), we have to talk about the way people from mostly west African countries were kidnapped and transported to then North American colon(ies) by white traders. The USA was built on the labour of enslaved people and the oppression (and enslaving) of Indigenous people who were there first. After emancipation (the ‘ending’ of slavery in the USA), there were African Americans in the Freedom Movement who explored the idea of ‘returning’ to Africa. That’s a whole other topic, and worth researching.

But the USA is also home to Africans who came to the country voluntarily in the last century or so. Things get more complicated when we talk about people of African descent who migrated to the USA voluntarily, but were descended from Africans who were enslaved in other countries. eg Haitians. If you’re a fan of hip hop, the Fugees are a good example of artists of Haitian descent who were born in Haiti, or born in the USA to Haitian parents. Haiti was a Spanish colony, and African people were kidnapped and transported to Haiti as a source of labour.

There are also people of African descent living throughout Europe (eg France is home to the largest population of people of African descent). Some of them are the descendants of free Africans who travelled to Europe at some point in the last few centuries. Some are descendants of Africans enslaved by Europeans and transported to Europe.
Some of them migrated to Europe during the 20th century from European colonies which had enslaved populations of African people.
When we talk about the ‘Windrush generation’ of Black British people, we are talking about a generation of people who emigrated to the UK on boats like the Windrush from the 1940s. As citizens of the British colonies in the Caribbean (called the ‘British West Indies’ at the time), they were entitled to British citizenship, and came to the UK for work. They were often descendants of African people enslaved by the British and transported to the Caribbean.

And of course, there are African migrants in lots of other countries. eg Australia has more African migrants than African American migrants. Some of these are refugees who’d like to return to their homelands, some are migrants who’d like to stay. My country has always been really shit in the way it treats non-white migrants.
Australia is also home to people who are descended from people who were enslaved in other countries (eg Indians who were enslaved in Fiji by the British), Pacific Islanders who were kidnapped by white men and transported to Australia to work on farms, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were enslaved by white farmers and families in towns.

As you can see, people of the African diaspora have some things in common, but the African experience in France in the 1980s is not the same as the African experience in the USA in the 1700s. It’s important to know and remember these differences. Just as Europe is made up of lots of cultures and people, Africa, and the African diaspora is made of of lots of cultures and people.

Lindy hop is the product of African American cultures and experiences.

The word ‘Black’ became a word of power for African Americans in the Freedom Movement in the 1960s. It is a word of pride and political identity.
It’s also used by people of African descent in other countries in the same way: a political and cultural identity.
It’s also used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia (though spelt ‘Blak’), in much the same way.
And it’s used by people of other cultures as a physical descriptor (eg having black skin) or political identity. This is where things get more complicated and culturally specific, so I’ll leave it there.

I think that Odysseus is asking that when we teach lindy hop (a Black American/African American dance) we refine our use of the phrase ‘Black’ with the word ‘American’, to distinguish the African American experience from the experience of people of the African diaspora in other countries.

The term ‘Black’ has been problematic in the past, and it has been a word of power in other moments. When I speak to dance friends today, I try to use the term they prefer. African American, Black, Black American. It’s just polite.

NB I say ‘Freedom Movement’ instead of ‘Civil Rights Movement’ after hearing Ruby Sales explaining the difference.

I’ve just listened to this episode of Teaching Hard History, “Listen, Look and Learn: Using Primary Sources to Teach the Freedom Struggle” and it’s fantastic.

If you follow the SNCC Digital Gateway to the Black Power entry, you can learn about the way the word ‘Black’ was used during the 1960s in an empowering way.

If you’re researching dance and music history of your local area, this ep of Teaching Hard History is an invaluable resource. They talk about how to use primary sources (eg oral histories and interviews), how to record them, how to archive them.

It’s been really cool to listen to this podcast, then think about the discussions people are having about the role of Frankie Manning in lindy hop history this week. I have been thinking more lately that the latest generation of white lindy hoppers (eg people who started in the last ten years) haven’t been exposed to all the oral histories (ie stories told by OGs) that I have through the last 30 years. Oral histories are really powerful because they personalise history. And a story well told is particularly powerful.

NB I use the word ‘white’ rather than ‘European’, because whiteness is a political and ideological concept, and ‘European’ has more to do with geography. I also think that ‘European’ is problematic because there are plenty of European peoples who experience extreme disadvantage and oppression (hello, Ukraine).

When we talk about whiteness in the context of slavery and racism, we give ourselves a pathway to deconstructing the power and privilege of people who may have pale skin, but more importantly, have economic and social power.

Community vibes – how do you grow a crew?

Ah, that most perennial of questions.

I’ve recently started teaching lindy hop again, and while mostly it’s been a lot easier than when I first set up a business and class, there are the same usual challenges: how to get students to stay for the whole block, how to be welcoming without making it weird, how to balance the work with the fun for me.
I actually feel ok about the teaching itself, and the marketing and promotion side of things. The interesting bit for me is figuring out where I, my class, and the peeps in my class fit into the bigger local scene. How and when do I look at running social dancing? How do I stop my social dancing being some weird stand alone thing instead of a natural progression from classes? How do I make the right conditions for community?

Or as I said to my friend, it’s like I’m asking myself, “How do I make friends?!” I am not a shy person. I should know this. But I’m curious to see how other people do this.

What are the things about your club/class/party/crew that make it fun and somewhere people want to be?

I know from experience that the way to build a cohort and a little group of peeps is to use my social skills so they can make friends. Welcome everyone individually. Learn names. Ask them about themselves. Drinks and snacks after classes, time to talk and make friends in class. Spend more time on making connections with the students who come to class than with trying to sell classes to people who haven’t come.

Ideally, I’d like to just have them all get into trying out ‘social dancing’ ie, just dancing, in the space right after class. And also taking time to eat snacks (the snack table is where people chat), have a drink, get to know each other. The dancing part is lovely, but the getting to know each other part is essential.

Anyway, Julia Loving just put me onto this fantastic panel session they did in NY in 2019. They spend a bunch of time in the question time talking about how to get young folk, especially young Black folk into lindy hop. Once again, white girl me should be listening to Black elders to learn. The things I see and hear them say:

  • Providing food, Ronald Jones says. A basket of chicken for some kids in a basement. A buffet dinner in the room where the panel is held. This makes complete cultural sense to me from my family and background.
  • Respect the young people, Ronald says. Don’t treat them like babies or fools. Treat them like thinking, responsible people.
  • If you’re a young person, sit with the elders, Mickey Davidson demonstrates. Listen to them, learn from them, earn their respect. ie show respect. And you’ll be gradually included.
  • Play music at the party.
  • Make your gig physically accessible (ie not way over the outside of town).
  • Make some jokes, laugh at some jokes.
  • If someone’s talking to you (whether it’s in a mic on a stage or at the snack table), make the active listening noises: hello! Oh yeah! Whaat? The Black audience listening to the panel session demonstrate. We don’t like a silent, stiff crowd, right?

UQ Press, nostalgia, and writing

This is an important read. I care about UQP because I did my undergrad, honours, and masters research degree at UQ, and UQP was a big part of our day to day. Our teachers and colleagues were published there, we worked there, and we hoped to be published there.

When I was a student at UQ, the English department was politically active. That meant that staff and students were involved in strikes and rallies (on campus and off), we had an active postgraduate group (of which I was on the exec for a couple of years), and staff came to hear postgraduates present papers on their research. And they engaged with them. All these people were published authors, experienced speakers, or aspiring authors and speakers. To participate in public ‘intellectualism’ was an expected part of academic life for all of us. And it was fun.

And when I say politically active, I mean that my colleagues were involved in social justice issues. Sure, there were political party memberships, but group membership was more effectively grounded in unions and grass root community action groups. As postgrads we worked for and published in feminist journals like Hecate, we created our own feminist reading and writing groups, and I dealt with my first report of sexual harassment. Because I was surrounded by active feminist academics, I knew where I should start. That time truly shaped me, as a feminist and activist, but also as a thinker and writer in community.

Because we were in the university in the early 1990s, the years immediately after Bjelke-Peterson’s reign of corruption and suppression (1968-1987), we were all personally acquainted with the reality of oppressive and corrupt governments. We’d either been beaten up by the cops, or knew someone who had been. We knew which GPs would help you get a safe abortion. And we knew where to get a drink after 6pm on a weekday.

We took rallies and protests seriously. Writing about power and community was central to the work of many of us. Even if we’d wanted to stay quietly busy in middle class academia, Joh’s government had reached all of us in one way or another. We’d have laughed about the phrase ‘social cohesion’, because one of the things we did best was argue and disagree. But I also remember two of the fiercest combatants crying and embracing each other when we had news of a student’s death.

The Queensland government’s recent outlawing of the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ smells like the dark old days of the deep north. Not because it’s ostensibly about banning hate speech, but because it is clearly and actually about banning criticism of the government, and of genocide. It seems ridiculous to write that a government would outlaw criticism of genocide. But that is the white Queensland way, with its long and bitter history of Blak massacre and cultural oppression.

Jazz Money is an Aboriginal Australian, and halting publication of her book because of her position on colonial genocide is really just another version of familiar Queensland policy. The decline of UQP as a site (or the idea of a site) for political expression and exploration makes me sad. While it was the organ of a white, patriarchal institution, it still published people who were not white, not straight, and not at all interested in supporting patriarchy. I guess those days are over.

AI, slavery, and being annoying

The thing about the environmental impact of AI data centers (they have huge electricity and water requirements), is that there were already big issues with data centers before AI became a popular media topic. ‘AI’ (as a topic) just pushed it to the public consciousness.
‘AI’ is really just bigger, smarter computers. And we’ve been heading towards bigger, smarter computers for decades.

It’s easy to hate on AI for killing jobs for creatives, or for making the world a little more boring. But the thing that I’m most concerned about is the way the writing that AI does (for university essays or newspapers or whatevs) is not insightful or brilliant.

‘AI’ is really just a computer reading a heap of things, observing patterns, and then making some informed guesses about the right answers. It doesn’t make intuitive leaps, it’s not creative, and it’s not thinking critically. So you don’t get new ideas. It could be useful for doing things like generating a literature review, but it’s not going to take the ideas from that literature review and apply it to real world situations or real people.

I read an article recently where they were discussing a study on the types of writing AI generated essays produce (sorry I can’t remember the reference). They found that the sort of writing produced by AI tended to preserve the status quo. It didn’t do anything radical, it didn’t have new ideas, it didn’t critically engage with the ideas in the material it assessed.

In other words (speaking as a feminist cultural studies scholar), the students using AI to write their essays are not going to go on and fucking fight the man. Their thinking and writing will not be radical.

Not a huge surprise for feminists who’ve been critical of university-based gender studies. Masters tools, masters house and all that.
The other issue that a lot of us who have been doing creative work for a job (copywriters!) is that the work we do will be done by computers. Again, not a new idea. But if we pull back a bit and look at the bigger cultural landscape, we can see that this change in labour practices is happening all over the place. Companies like Amazon have done a very good job of union busting, destroying collectivism, and reducing workers to slaves. I wish it was an exaggeration.

Modern day slavery is something women and people of colour experience in various contexts – sex work, garment manufacturing, and most tellingly, prison work.

That last one has been bothering me this week. ICE rampaging through fields and factories and kidnapping workers to incarcerate them is one very effective way of developing an enslaved workforce. Prison detainees work for no pay, or for a stunningly low rate. Prisons are increasingly privately run.

All of this has been bothering me since I listened to the first two episodes of the Teaching Hard History podcast. These eps look at the role of slavery in the civil war. I was surprised to hear that many white Americans assume that the civil war was about states’ rights. I’d just figured it was about the north and south arguing about ending slavery. These two eps make it super clear that it’s about the role of slavery in the pre civil war economy. Enslaved people = free labour. Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, people were paid if they ‘captured’ ‘escaped’ slaves. This Law was passed by the US congress, and was one of those issues contributing to the ‘states’ rights’ arguments.

It gets a bit complicated (the podcast is easy to understand though), but it helps understand how ICE and the Trump’s determination to kidnap Black and brown people contributes to an economy which has _always_ involved slavery (from ridiculously low basic wages to indenture and the powers of businesses like Amazon).

Reassuringly (and this is why we teach history), the introduction of the Fugitive Slave Act was met by very angry crowds of citizens. And as the podcast points out, the civil war and the ending of slavery wasn’t something that was done ‘for’ or ‘to’ Black Americans. It was something they actively participated in. In other words: white Americans, you need to pay attention to Black history if you want to fight this shit.

And Australia? Our own history of slavery (from Pacific Islanders in cane fields to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders workers in white homes and on white farms) makes it clear that we white people are ok with slavery.

Incidentally (and to bring me back to my original point), the types of connections I’m making here (looking at social and economic and cultural patterns) to critique the uses of power and technology are things a computer can’t do. So of course it makes sense for a company like Amazon to embrace AI technology.

It’s important to pay attention to the details, and to keep track of those niggling little feelings you have that something isn’t quite adding up. Ask questions. Be annoying.

The revivalist narrative will not die.

I keep coming across white organisations telling a ‘history’ of lindy hop that gives ‘the revival’ pride of place. ie white people claiming the modern lindy hop world as their own altruistic work.
So the term ‘revival’ is problematic because it implies that lindy hop was dead (replaced by rock and roll and/or bebop) before white people came along and brought it back to life. In this narrative, white people are heroes for saving ‘this wonderful dance’ and bringing it back to life.

Black people are totally absent from this story, except as venerable elders who teach eager white people. The white people are also credited with bringing these elders ‘out of retirement’ and back to the dance floor.
It’s all very problematic.

1. Lindy hop wasn’t dead. There’s a whole family of Black social partner dances that are thriving (Tena Morales’ event the International Swing Dance Championships showcases them every year, but white people don’t go to that and aren’t involved, so it must not exist).

2. Because it wasn’t dead, it didn’t need reviving. Declaring lindy hop ‘terra nullius’ (ie no people living in this territory) was white people giving themselves permission to take lindy hop. So the white people who ‘went looking’ for Black elders were pretty much just out on a bit of a colonial expedition. Just like Captain Cook expanding the British Empire, ‘discovering’ a huge big southern continent (‘Australia’).

3. Those Black elders, like Frankie Manning and Norma Miller and so on were still dancing, but in their families and homes and community spaces. Black spaces, to which white people did not have access. The story told most often about Frankie Manning, that his working in the post office was somehow less important or lower status than his dance career is classist and racist. The US Postal Service has a long history as an important employer and union locus for Black communities. It was good, solid work. Norma, of course, was running a dance business (managing troupes), Mama Lou Parkes was still dancing professionally… and so on.

4. The Black dancers who were involved in lindy hop in the 1980s tend to disappear in these revivalist narratives. Angela Andrew and other Black women have lots to say about the number of Black dancers out there lindy hopping in the 1980s, but they somehow disappear when white people tell the stories.

5. The white ‘ownership’ (appropriation) of Black lindy hop in that 1980s period is not only about selling places in classes and workshops (and thereby ‘creating community’ via economic relationships), but also about the exploitation of Black dancers working for white troupe managers (we won’t go into some of the more troubling accounts from that period).

RE the USPS:
I came across references to the importance of the postal service in Hidden Figures and the way it provided a pathway to the space program for Black women (SUCH a good book).

There’s also Philip F. Rubio’s book ‘There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality’ (which I haven’t read, but have read _about_.
This all makes the US govt’s cuts to the USPS a matter of institutional racism and white supremacy, rather than a push for smaller government generally (though I’d argue the two are the same thing).

The more I learn about the USPS as a site for unionising, civil rights activism and Black community empowerment, the more troubled I am by white histories of lindy hop that devalue the USPS in Manning’s life. If the civil rights elements of this workplace are ignored, then white ‘historians’ can continue with their bullshit about ‘Frankie never talked about racism in lindy hop, so it didn’t happen’. I’d say that Frankie, as with any other Black worker in America then and now, was very much aware of racism in the entertainment industry and in America generally, and was very careful about what he said to white people about it, and when.

As with the workers who continue to go back to places like Herrang, despite unsafe or inequitable working environments, when you don’t have the financial and personal safety of white privilege, you have fewer choices about the work you can do. And teaching middle class white kids to lindy hop might have suited Manning.

A practical covid management plan that is socially responsible

I’m currently working on a covid management plan for a dance school. I’m quite enjoying the process.
Here’s the process:

–The Plan–

Restating the org’s values

  • Which helped me understand how and why the org would develop a covid policy, what issues to focus on, and how to implement it,
  • Which ensured we were all on the same page.

Stating the covid plan philosophy

  • In this context, a philosophy is theoretical or ideological model for addressing concrete issues,
  • Which is basically applying the org’s abstract values to a concrete issue (covid),
  • Phrasing the philosophy as a list of clear applications of values to a specific issue (covid)
  • This could be a list of a hundred items, or a list of two.

Developing two goals for the plan

  • These are deliberately limited in scope (ie this isn’t a govt department managing the health of a whole city or state, it’s a small dance school),
  • They are very focussed and practical.

Putting all this into practical actions

  • There are four ‘actions’ which cover four general areas of covid management,
  • These actions can be phrased as ‘guidelines’ (ie covid rules) for the org, but they can also guide procedures.
  • They deliberately limit the scope of the plan to keep it very local and very practical.

So that’s the whole Covid management plan.
From here, I use the plan to develop:

  • Guidelines (or rules)
  • Procedures (eg if a rule is ‘you must provide proof of vaccination’, who does this checking, where do they check, what do they do if someone doesn’t have proof, what constitutes proof, etc etc)
  • Social media strategy to communicate all this, and also to provide information about covid that will encourage people to participate
  • Website materials (eg a public statement of the guidelines)
  • A handbook that contains all the procedures, contact info, covid facts, etc.

–Developing the plan–

At this point I have a first draft, and it’s been to the org’s boss for comment and approval to go ahead and develop it.
After some tweaking, I’ll send it off to the rest of the org (teachers and staff) to get their feedback, impressions, comments, suggestions, etc.
I’ll also do a model for public comment.

This Plan development process, and the plan itself, are guided by:

A key part of this process is an ethos of community strength, and collectivism. My experiences working on sexual harassment in dance has made it clear that top-down solutions are a) not effective, b) burn out the people doing the work, c) maintain existing power structures that _enable_ injustices like sexual harassment. As I learnt working on Melbourne Lindy Exchange (MLX) for years, you need to develop work practices that allow any one person to drop out or take a break at any time. Which is, of course, what flexible, healthy workplaces are all about.

–A final form?–

A key part of this plan is to be agile. It must be able to change and respond to social changes. Covid will change. The community changes.
An Important thing I learnt from working on sexual harassment stuff, is that we can’t just develop a code and leave it at that. That doesn’t work. We need to update it, to change and develop our approach, as we learn more, and as our communities change.
So putting this plan together, I’m assuming that it will need to be changed and updated regularly; I can’t just post it on the website and forget about it. There’ll be feedback from staff about the processes, there’ll be changes in covid, we’ll see things like the development of new vaccines and healthcare strategies.
This means that the Plan itself, and where it lives needs to mutable.
This is a very exciting idea. It’s a lot like lindy hop itself: you have basic structural elements, but it is, fundamentally, about innovation, improvisation, and responding to the needs of its users.

–Why am I doing all this work?–

I have a long history of writing and researching and lecturing, but I am rubbish at presenting my plans and projects in ways that make it easy for the audience to take my work and do their own projects with it.
So I’m deliberately learning how to:

  • Develop a plan
  • Present a plan to stakeholders who have different types of engagement
  • do good community/group consultation and engagement.

I’m also really interested in how social media management can be employed in social justice work, so I’m quite keen on using things like instagram, facebook, etc etc in new and interesting ways. Which, bizarrely (unsurprisingly?) circles back to my doctoral research and academic research, which was all about how small communities use media in unique ways.

–What have I learnt so far?–

One of the most exciting things I’ve learnt so far, is that if a project like this is equitable in design, it actually fights racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. I think one of the most exciting things about the Camp Jitterbug covid plan, is that it came from the experiences of people of colour, people of a range of genders, people with lived experience doing activist community labour. It’s proof that anti-racist work is good for all of us.

Promoting your dance or jazz music business online

Here are some things I’ve learnt about promoting dance or music related businesses online. I’m not a marketing specialist, but I am a media studies specialist who’s been promoting dance events online for about 15 years now.

You need a website.

You need an email newsletter.

Why?

  • With both of these media, you are the producer broadcasting a message to your readers.
  • Audiences tend to regard these as authoritative sources, unfiltered by social opinion.
  • If a social media platform collapses or moves out of vogue, your data won’t disappear with it.

They don’t need to be fancy. In fact, the simpler the better. A single page website with clear headers and a simple structure is best. A newsletter can be sent out maybe once a month. So long as it’s sent out _consistently_, at the same time each week or month, it’s all good.

What about social media?
Important, but in a different way. Think of your behaviour on social media as your brand (which is the public version of you and your business) interacting with lots of real people and other brands out in public. It’s a way for you to develop personal and professional networks in your community or industry. And social media get used a lot, by a lot of different types of people, of all ages and demographics. Perhaps the best thing about social media, for marketing and advertising, is that it allows you to know who’s seeing your ad, when, and where. Something that was harder to judge before social media. Before social media, a brand used social media to ‘broadcast’ a message. With social media, a brand can interact with audiences in a much more complex way.

Websites are important.
Of the two, the website is most important. If you do a tiny bit of audience research (eg we used a very simple survey to routinely ask all our dance class attendees how they found us), you can see which media are most important. For our dance classes, a ‘google search’ accounted for 90% of our attendance. Even if they saw a post on facebook first, they still used a search engine to actually get them to class (and make the sale).

This is where we talk about SEO. Search Engine Optimisation. It’s not magic, it just means ‘make it easy for search engines like google to find your website’. We know a lot of things about google. We know that when it indexes your website, it pays attention to the words you use. ie it ‘reads’ your code. And google tells you how to make it easier for their search engine to find your site.

What should your website include?

  • Your name. The name you want people to use when they announce you over a microphone or list you on a program.
  • Your contact details. A phone number, and an email address. Right at the top. And in the footer too. Make it really easy for busy bookers, festival programmers, and prospective clients to find you. If someone’s prepared to pick up the phone to talk to you, they want information quickly, and they’re close to making a decision.
  • Some useful key words. What do you do? Dance teacher? Then you need ‘dance teacher’ right at the top of your page. Are you a lindy hopper? A jazz musician? Do you run weekly balboa classes? Then say so, right there in text on the page. Make it easy for google to find you when your audience does a google search.

Pictures?
Most importantly, don’t hide information away in images. Search engines like google can’t ‘find’ your information if it’s hidden in an image. All google knows about your lovely instagram graphic is that it’s a .jpg file, 1080px x 1080px, created on 2 January 2022. Even more importantly, people who use screen readers can’t find your information if it’s locked inside an image.

Do use photos on your website or newsletter, because they look nice, and it’s easier to sell a product if people know what it looks like.

Don’t hide information in an image.
Each image should have a ‘title’ tag, and ‘alternative’ text (‘alt’ text) to that tag. If you’re writing your own website code, that’s easy to do. You just add alt=”the information from your image” to the image element. Most website building tools (like squarespace) and newsletter tools (like mailchimp) offer you the option to add alt text as well. Yay!

As an example, this little graphic is very effective for instagram. It has all the information we need – there’s a party, when and where it’s on, and bring cake!

But without alt text, all your web browser knows is that this is an image, 812px x 812px, called ‘Screen-Shot-2022-04-06-at-2.30.41-pm.png’. No one will come to your party.
If you add alt text like “party time! Monday 3pm, 11 Streetname St, Bring cake!”, then a google search will be able to find the information and serve it up as a result in a google search.

What about a newsletter?
Don’t underestimate the value of a newsletter. People actively choose to sign up for your newsletter, which is a way of signalling to you ‘I am interested enough in you and your product to give you access to my inbox’.

Newsletters give you lots of useful information about your subscribers as well. How many people click on links? Or open the email at all? How many unsubscribe? How many ‘bounce’? All these analytics can help you improve your newsletter: which subject lines convinced people to open the email? Which calls to action in your newsletter got a response?

If you use a newsletter service like mailchimp (and you really should. For privacy, security, efficacy, and ease), you often have the option of displaying an archive of your past emails. Each of these past emails is another tool for improving your SEO: another hundred or thousand times a search engine will read your name on the internet and add that page to its index.

Most of all, a newsletter lets you speak directly to a group of people who are even just a little bit interested in you and what you do. Gold!

Take this seriously
If you’re going to stand up on stage and play, or run a class for people to learn to dance, you have to let people know. Even if your business runs mostly via word of mouth, having a solid website can work just like a nice business card. Something that means a lot more in a world where most people have a smartphone in their pocket (or hand!)

If you need a hand with this stuff, drop me a line I can give you some tips. For a very reasonable rate :D

Spreading stuff in families, workplaces, and other networks

“Lock Down Smarter, Not Harder” (DANIEL REEDERS 24 AUGUST 2021) is a really great article by a very clever friend.

Of course, as soon as I read Daniel’s original tweets on this, my brain started thinking about the way dance steps/styles travel between communities. Dance steps are units of meaning, ways of communicating ideas, who we are, and what we value. In Australia our local lindy hop scenes are separated by huge distances (the two closest scenes are a 3 hour drive apart; most are ~1000km apart), so they tend to have distinct local flavours, even with The Internet. We can think of these as functioning the way a workplace does. For many of us, these are our workplaces. Our germs and dance steps circulate within that local community, which expands into our homes and family circles.

When we travel to meet each other and dance together at exchanges, we literally exchange a whole bunch of things. Dance moves, strategies for preventing sexual assault, hospitality, songs, germs. We make jokes about things like ‘exchange flu’ or ‘Herrang flu’, but this is precisely how covid works: we move out of our own bubbles (local networks) and interact with people from other networks. Boom, new dance steps, new musical trends, new germs.

Daniel’s article does some fantastic work explaining why each local network is different.

Estimating transmission rates depends on understanding the network landscape, and that’s exceptionally difficult to map in real time. You can’t do it using the abstract mathematical models that dominate our public debate.

You and I, lindy hoppers, could do a very good job of explaining the internal relationships of our dance communities. The number and types of classes and parties. The formal dance troops gathering regularly to practice. The casual ‘sessions’ where people get together to jam and practice. Regular live music gigs where we interact with nondancers, venue staff, and musicians. Friendships. Romances and hook ups. Employer/employee gigs. After-dancing snack spots. And so on.

When I was doing my doctoral research, a big chunk of it was ethnographic mapping of local and global dance scenes (pre fb and youtube). To get an accurate picture of how a scene worked, I had to do participant-observation, and then have community members engaged in the ‘mapping’ process. I went from very big survey samples, to a series of smaller focus groups and discussions. Because each human is different, and each local community reflects not only the society in which they function, but also the particular dynamics of each local scene.

If I went in with the assumption that every local scene relied on live bands for social dancing, I’d have no way of describing places like Seoul. If I went in with the assumption that every scene had only male-female dance partnerships, I’d miss… every single dance scene that actually exists 😃
The way lockdowns are enforced in Australia at the moment, there is the assumption that every local community works in the same way. This ‘way’ reflects a particular type of family and culture: white, middle class, suburban, patriarchal.

As Daniel says, the structures within a local network are even more complex than a dance scene. Particularly migrant, outer-suburban communities. People taking turns bringing elders food. Sharehouses where everyone works at least 2 jobs in an ‘essential’ industry. Crowded apartments where more than one family share a shower, kitchen, and common areas. Informal childcare arrangements. And so on.
In the white nuclear family model where four people live in one house in the relative isolation of a suburban house, the father/husband goes to an office job, and the mother/wife stays home to look after the kids. This fits very nicely with the lockdown model. You can order people to work from home, to order groceries online, and stay home together, getting some sun in the garden every day.

Extended family networks don’t look or act like this. So they need different models. Curfews, cops on corners, and other draconian lockdown features won’t (and can’t) stop these people meeting.
The truly interesting part of Daniel’s article is where they point out that a relatively limited number of germs circulate within a smaller network. Even if you’re caring for nanna, living in a crowded house, or going dancing every week, practicing with your buddy, you’re only interacting with a set number of predictable people.

The difficulty comes when you go to work. In workplaces we see a number of the contained networks overlap. People from different networks interact and share germs. And not just on a one-to-one basis, where one father-worker shares their germs with another father-worker and his nuclear family. Boom. Exponential sharing.

In a dance scene, this might be a dance class where not only does everyone learn the new dance step from their partner, but everyone learns how to dance with a million other people. ‘Learn how to dance with’ = become more open to sharing and learning ideas (both physical ideas and creative ideas). Then they get onto the social dance floor and this sharing of moves and movement goes superexponential.

If workplaces are where smaller networks interact, then workers need safer workplaces:
– Shorter shifts, so they are exposed for less time;
– Better pay, so they need work only one job, and at that job for fewer hours (ie 8 hours a day);
– Paid sick leave, and leave for testing (or on-site testing) so they can go get those covid tests;
– Job security, so they aren’t fired or lose income if they miss a shift.
But none of these things are present in casualised work, or workplaces that have been de-unionised.
As a sort of extension of my doctoral work, I’ve found that a top-down response to sexual assault and harassment in a dance community is highly ineffective. Simply having a code of conduct where organisers lay down the ‘don’t rape people!’ rule does not prevent sexual assault.

Again, if we want to control a negative factor, we need to get highly specific, we need to give individuals the power to make decisions about their own lives and actions. Rather than a top-down, blanket order to ‘stop touching each other!’ we need to give people the freedom to avoid contact in ways that preserve their local support networks (families, or peer groups), and even more usefully _use_ their local networks to spread information, resources, and support. The agility of the Sikhs delivering meals safely. The authority of an aunty putting teenagers to work. The collaboration of girlfriends stepping in to divert a creeper from a new dancer. And so on.

Capitalism, patriarchy, however you like to think about these bigger, authoritarian hierarchies, are bad for people’s health.

Doing antiracism in lindy hop

image source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01883-8

I’ve been chasing down as many of the antiracist groups in the lindy hop world as I can find. I want to make a list here, so people can have it as a resource. And by people I mean me, and by have, I mean share.

I’m thinking the groups that are specifically anti-racist in ideology and practice (rather than groups that have inclusive policies but other goals – eg Mobtown, Swingopedia, etc), and groups that focus on Black dance.

So far I’ve thought of:

  • Balboa In Color
    (FB group for balboa dancers of colour, focussing on balboa)
  • Black Lindy Hop Matters
    (based in Baltimore, USA, including Black board members, focussing on linking up Black jazz dance resources)
  • Black Lindy Hoppers Fund
    (based in the USA, Black board members, focussed on fund raising for Black artists and presenting dance workshops)
  • CVFC – Collective Voices for Change
    (international group, including Black board members, focussing on presenting anti-racism talks)
  • Guardian Baltimore
    (based in Baltimore, USA, Black board members, focussing on Black dance culture and history as a site for social change)
  • HellaBlackLindyHop
    (based in USA, Black board, focussing on Black dance orsm)
  • Integrated Rhythm podcast (based in USA, including Black board members, focussing on discussing race and Black experience in jazz dance.) NB no website/fb, but podcast link
  • MOVE TOGETHER: Dancing Towards Inclusivity & Global Social Justice
    (based in the USA, including Black board members focussing on hosting discussion forums and fund raising)
  • Obsidean Tea (based in the USA, Black staff, focussing on Black culture and dance today)

I’ve also been thinking about what we do with all this information. There’s lots to read and learn, but integrating it in our teaching practice can be harder. Especially if you’re not teaching at the moment.
I’ve been thinking that it’s good to combine one of the practical dance classes with one of the talk-and-think classes. eg the Harlem Renaissance link from Guardian Baltimore with a tap dance class from Josette Wiggans; Black Lindy Hoppers Fund with Collective Voices for Change. There are also some great Black DJs doing sets at various online parties (Global Online Social, Track Town Swing’s online party, etc etc), and they frequently speak a few words between songs. And of course, there’s the Blues In a Flat fundraiser/collab with Maputo Swing.

I’m feeling it’s essential to get up and do something, rather than just thinking or listening. Thinking and listening quietly is a very Anglo-European (settler) approach to learning. Getting up learning-through-being-and-doing is a cornerstone of Black dance culture. Most of the modern lindy hop world prioritises white ways of learning, where the ‘lesson’ is spelled out explicitly. It’s worth undoing that by taking a class or dancing to a set with Black artists, to undo that.

So my feel, generally, is that simply ‘adding Black history’ to your dance class isn’t anti-racist. It doesn’t change anything. To be really anti-racist, you need to make radical paradigm changes. And the most important one of those is for teachers to take classes and to focus on learning. Because the idea that a teacher is beyond learning is not only a BIG problem, it’s also really dull.

As I write this stuff, I’m super conscious of who is reading, and who I am, writing. I am a white woman. So I need to engage with that in my own thinking and practice. It’s a sad fact that most of the members of this group are not Black. So most of us have a lot of work to do; most of us need to be questioning everything we think we know about lindy hop and about teaching.

But what if you are a Black teacher or dancer? I know that there is an argument for decolonising your own thinking, as a Black artist. That might mean unlearning the ways of teaching you’ve learnt as a student in white-run classes. Which carries with it all sorts of risks. And I do not want to encourage Black dancers to doubt themselves!

I feel supremely uncomfortable writing those sorts of suggestions, as a white woman aware of my power and privilege. But perhaps Audre Lorde’s piece ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ is the best piece to read for more on that. I’d like to end by saying to Black dancers: trust yourself, and trust your history and culture. You know much more about it than someone like me does. And I’m happy to clear a space so you can do what you need to do.

nb this is a useful unit drawing together some of these ideas in Black feminist thinking.

triangles

I’ve just asked myself ‘what is the optimal pitch for an A-frame roof in a location* that gets snow’?
I have never lived in a climate where this sort of snowfall is likely or possible. And I have never built a house….
…out of anything but paper.
I’ve just spent far too long googling ‘what type of triangle has two equal sides and angles’ and ‘how do you find the perimeter of an isosceles triangle?’ Maths 1 is so many years ago. And there’s a 50/50 chance I didn’t pay attention in that unit.
*Rotterdam, and the year would be pre modern climate change, ie 19th century or earlier, when the snowfall was far heavier than it is now, but also not as heavy as somewhere like… Stockholm.