Category Archives: academia

recent movements in my academic ‘career’

I’ve just had an article published in a special journal issue on music. It’s not the greatest article I’ve ever written, and reading it is kind of cringe-worthy. But that’s not the interesting bit about this issue. The thing that caught my eye (once I stopped cringing) is the fact that I’m the only woman author in the issue.
This is probably just a coincidence, but I was suprised. I’d just assumed that music was one of those ‘everyone does it’ topics. I certainly didn’t think I’d see a reenactment of the whole garage band/music industry scene happening in this issue. I was sure I’d see at least one article on female DJs or something by a woman on something to do with music…
Nah. So I’m the sistah Representing there. Which really is surprising. I’m not actually doing anything terribly feministah – I make a few comments about gender, but not much more than some of the other articles. It made me think, though: surely this bit of cultural studies isn’t a boys-own? Surely?
This kind of ties into some thoughts I’ve had preparing for this course I’m teaching next semester. I’m the lecturer/tutor for a massive introductory media studies subject, on a team of 5 ladies teaching across three campuses and doing about 15 tutes between us (argh!). I don’t have to write the lectures – just present the ones that have already been written. But I’m finding it a bit difficult. I really only have the lecture notes to work from, and the first one in particular was really difficult to work with. It used a few concepts I’ve never come across in 15 years and three universities worth of tertiary education (I’m thinking they’re bullshit, but I could just be misinformed), and I’ve noticed a few assumptions about culture.
The first one is the emphasis on visual culture (well, of course), but this line really jumped out at me:

Images are the most powerful form of representation.

which followed on the heels of

All cultures produce images as forms of communication.

I guess I’m just sensitised to this stuff because I write about it, but I’ve recently spent a bit of time writing things like:

For a people denied the discursive power of mass media, particularly those dependent on the written word, dance became a valuable discursive space. I would argue that access the mainstream public sphere, to mainstream media discourse or the ‘official’ public sphere is a privilege accorded the most powerful members of a community (Fraser 1997). Media power, the ability to contribute to the production and dissemination of media texts and see your own interests and ideology represented in these texts and discourses, is a marker of social power and influence. This social power was not available to African Americans in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Though they were active contributors to music, dance and other creative practices, these contributions were often curtailed by their social position. Black record companies were frequently out-competed or bullied out of existence (a point David Suisman addresses in his discussion of the Black Swan label). In the 1920s black radio stations, though common in the early days of radio in the United States were eventually marginalised by the introduction of broadcasting legislation (Vaillant 2002). Black musicians were neglected by mainstream record companies in the earlier days of recording and what few recordings they did make in the earliest American radio programs were ‘limited to comedy or novelty styles, which established “coon songs” and minstrelsy… Coon songs were a popular style of comic songs based on caricatures of Negro life, usually sung in “dialect”’ (Suisman 2004, pp. 1296). Black men and women who simply spoke out in public were so routinely subjected to violence and murder in the south of America until the 1960s – with legislative protection for their attackers (Gussow 2002, pp.14) – that to speak of mediated power is highly problematic. For many black actors and dancers, the ability to control their filmed image was also beyond their reach, and it is these audio-visual media that texts became the source of revivalists in the contemporary swing community.

(from a forthcoming article in Convergence, references below).
I have reservations about the claim that ‘all cultures use visual images’ and that these visual images are the ‘most powerful form of representation’. In fact, later in the lecture notes I’m reworking, there’s a reference to Aboriginal identity, where one of the functions of images as communication is:

To store the memory of a culture, of a people so it can be communicated/transmitted in the present and future (paintings of indigenous Australians)

I’m not sure what that bit’s meant to mean. It seems to imply that visual images are a) a way of preserving Aboriginal culture, or b) a way in which Aboriginal Australians hare or are going about preserving their culture.
This stuff doesn’t sit right with me, particularly because dance, song and story telling – oral culture – was and is such an important part of Aboriginal culture. Far more important than ‘visual images’. Particularly for semi-nomadic people.
I know I don’t know much about this (and I’d hate to suggest that there is/was no indigenous Australian visual art prior to Invasion), but I do have real problems with the prioritising of material visual culture in this way.
I’m a bit busy about this right now, so I can’t write anything more, but something about all this ‘visual images = most important!’ really gets up my bum. There are so many clear examples of the power and importance of things like oral story, music, dance, etc as really powerful and important cultural practices. It’s just that they’re not as appealing to researchers from such a material, privileged culture.
Fraser, Nancy. (1997). ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,’ in Nancy Fraser (ed) Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition, pp. 69-98. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.
Gussow, Adam. (2002). ‘”Shoot myself a cop” Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” as a Social Text’ Callaloo 25 (1): 8-44.
Suisman, David. (2004). ‘Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African American Music’ The Journal of American History 90 (4): 1295-1324.
Vaillant, Derek W. (2002). ‘Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921-1935’ American Quarterly 54 (1): 25-66.

in which i embarass myself with poorly researched comments about other people’s blogs and laugh at spideremo

It suddenly got cold yesterday and today I’ve shut the window so I don’t get cold while I work.
Last night The Squeeze and I went on a date and saw SpidermanEmo 3. It was boring, but it was nice to see Topher, who I think should have been Spiderman all along. Glen talks about it a bit and makes that joke far more effectively than I can.
Then we went to have dinner at Bismi, because I wanted something Indian and with the sort of spices and chilli levels that skips don’t like, and because I’m obsessed. It was goood: best roti in the whole world. Then we walked home (about 30minutes walk) and remembered the days when I first moved to Melbourne and walked everywhere, before I discovered bikes.
The Squeeze and I (in the days of Not Dating) would go out for dinner or a film or something interesting a couple of days a week, walking from my place in Carlton North to the Nova or Brunswick Street or whereever, carefully not touching. Then we would come back to my place, drink a lot of tea and watch some telly. Then he’d go home. It was all very 1950s and quite surprised my friends. It seems we are, therefore, an excellent advertisement for abstinence, because we’re still together four (or is it five?) years later.
Now I’m sitting at the computer, trying to ignore the laundry detergent perfume that’s rising from a pile of clean laundry next to me. I erred when purchasing the detergent, and it’s not enviro-safe. Which seems to translate to ‘way over-perfumed’. I’m also trying to finish editing that paper, but it’s not really happening.
I’m also wondering about notions of vernacularness, especially after reading about Jean’s recent conference experiences and her vernacular creativity on the street post. I really enjoy Jean’s blog and her articles. But I can’t help but giggle at that entry’s post – for me, the term ‘vernacular dance’ is really the same as saying ‘street dance’ (especially a that’s the better-known term with dancers). To see the implied surprise/delight in finding vernacular creativity on the street makes me smile. I like her enthusiasm and genuine pleasure in the drummer on a Boston street, and her sense of affinity, and fellow-buskerness. But something isn’t sitting right. I need to follow up that thought.
I also think I need to read more about this vernacular stuff that those doods have been doing in Brisvegas, esp in reference to flickr. I just know those big brains are saying something really neat. But somewhere, I’m feeling uncomfortable with the way the term vernacular is being used. There is the implication that people are writing from outside a vernacular culture, and all the resistant stuff of ‘vernacular’ is getting lost. I know that’s probably completely inaccurate, but I just… I just feel like I’ve missed something. In fact, I’m pretty certain it’s my error in comprehension, rather than their error in writing, and I need to fix it. But not right now – when I’ve finished this article, ok? Or maybe I should read it all now, before I publish this…
Seeing as how this is what I’m writing about in my paper right now, here’s a chunk where I define ‘vernacular dance’:

Lindy hop began in Africa, where dance was firmly planted in the everyday life of every person. Some ten million men, women and children were sent into slavery to the Americas from Africa – primarily west Africa – between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. They brought with them the music and dance traditions of a number of different African nations and cultures, as well as a history of slavery prior to the European invasions. Dance in west Africa was a significant part of public and community life, and Katrina Hazzard-Gordon writes in Jookin’: the Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture that “We can say without exaggeration that dance competency, if not proficiency, is required of all individuals in west African society” (1990, pp. 4), and she extrapolates from this to site dance in all west African descended communities. Africanist dance forms – dances brought to various other communities throughout the Americas and beyond – not only share steps and specific movements, but also more general tropes in terms of aesthetics of choreography and physiology. They also share similar approaches to the social function of dance. Dance is seen not as a ‘leisure’ activity or ‘work’ or ‘performance’, bracketed from normal life as it is in mainstream Australian culture today. It is in everyday life as rhythmic movement. This everydayness is read as a key feature of vernacular dance, wherever and in whichever culture it is found. A study of vernacular dance as everyday cultural practice seems the natural preserve of a cultural studies project, and in the following discussion I will both refine my definition of the concept of vernacular dance, and therefore its role as a public discourse for the representation of individuals’ identities and ideas and the negotiation of consensual ideology in public space.
The word ‘vernacular’ is commonly associated with discussions of language and dialect, referring to the language used by ordinary or everyday people. In a discussion of dance, the essence of the term is taken to refer to the everyday or ordinary common dances of a particular dance or culture. Though I take African American vernacular dance as my central concern, there is a substantial body of dance studies literature discussing vernacular dance in other cultures, including Sheenagh Pietrobruno’s work on salsa. Vernacular dance is distinguished from concert or theatre dance through its positioning in everyday spaces, rather than existing only as a formalised, and usually choreographed performance of a particular dance on a concert stage. It is intrinsically participatory and happens in all sorts of spaces, both public and private.
Vernacular dance also always exists in a state of constant change, responding to the desires, interests and needs of its participants, reflecting the ideological and social values of a particular community at a particular time. This rhythmic hybridity (to use the term in Stuart Hall’s sense) and mutability offers evidence for dance as social discourse. All dance serves as a public forum for the presentation and discussion competing ideological positions, the representation of the self and the representation of ideology on the social dance floor, in the bodies of dancers. Its mutability and reflexivity allows performers to improvise and rework or introduce new steps to suit their cultural and social needs. Ralph Ellison describes African American vernacular in the following terms in Going to the Territory:

I see the vernacular as a dynamic process in which the most refined styles from the past are continually merged with the play-it-by-ear improvisations from which we invent in our efforts to control our efforts to control our environment and entertain ourselves. And this is not only in language and literature, but in architecture and cuisine, in music, costume, and dance, and in tools and technology. In it the styles and techniques of the past are adjusted to the needs of the present, and in its integrative action the high styles of the past are democratized… Wherever we find the vernacular process operating we also find individuals who act as transmitters between it and earlier styles, tastes, and techniques. In the United States all social barriers are vulnerable to cultural styles (1986, pp. 139–41).

a long dry route

It’s been a slow month or so for me.
The first rush of post-thesis creativity/productivity has ebbed, and I’m not doing any writing at all any more. Plenty of sewing, some crocheting, some quilting, some dancing, some DJing. We’re also getting onto MLX7 stuff – a trifle late, but still, getting on. Slowly. But there’s not been so much of the high-brain stuff lately.
I can’t honestly say I’ve been sitting down to write much lately. But I have a heavy post-exchange cold (of course) where my throat is killing me, I sport a temperature and some snot and generally poor concentration. So writing is hard.
Yesterday I had lunch with a scribbling friend who’s had similar issues. But it’s pictures for scribblers, not words.
But I noticed it’s Big Brother season again (why are all the characters the same person – I can’t tell any of them apart! But I do love listening to them talk crap – it’s like gossip. I love gossip. I love the complexities of group politics and personalities), and that seems to be a good time for writing for me. So maybe I’ll get lucky. Or productive.
I have a couple of zillion papers in the works. The one that keeps catching my interest is about the type of music swing dancers are into, and how this is about jazz – as ‘art music’ or ‘high culture’ – becoming young people music with a physical purpose. It’s there to be used again, not just listened to in silent clubs or theatres. It’s turned up really loud, having a few beers and arguing about room on the dance floor again. It’s thinking about sex, it’s touching other people inappropriately and laughing loudly and rudely. Finally.
So I want to write about how young people are getting into this action, and how they’re developing new relationships with bands. And, somewhere in there, I want to write about how the other people at the band gigs who best appreciate this, and really like it, are not the younger, cooler 30-somethings, but the nannas and poppas, who best appreciate the fact that jazz is about being rowdy and disreputable and having fun. And that black polar necks are really quite inappropriate wear for a jazz gig.
The other paper I’m thinking about is to do with gender performance on the social dance floor, and the way dancers use digital clips to learn ways of performing feminity or masculinity (remind me to tell you about K dancing with C at Perth: amazon lindy!). This is something I should have written about ages ago in a paper, but haven’t. It’s hard to write because I have so much to say. But it’s the sort of thing that feminist media studies people like.
So I kind of feel as though I’m getting a bit closer to being able to write some stuff down again. We’re kind of in the same room again. Not sitting next to each other, but closer.
Hullaball.jpg
On that note, I’ll leave you with a picture from the Hullabaloo ball the other weekend. Those Perthlings give good venue, that’s for sure. If you click on the pic there, you’ll be taken to the larger picture in The Squeeze’s gallery. And, for those who are interested, we love picasa Aperture (sorry) in our house, though it can be a bit resource hungry. It’s a lovely program that organises your photos and helps you make galleries for the internet quickly and simply. It makes The Squeeze all smiley.

rechanneling

Ok, so seeing as how I’m sitting about being bored/depressed/tiresome and cleaning compulsively, I’ve decided to rechannel all that ob-con potential and actually get on with making the thesis into a book. Thing is, I have no clue as to where to start. I have asked the Supes for advice and they have offered some advice. The no.1 publisher Supes (they’re both big publishers and pretty kick-arse career acka types – the types young girl ackas like myself idolise and try to emulate) suggested having a look at the Routledge site.
I’ve also read this guide to making your thesis into a book by MUP. But if anyone has any other suggestions, I’d be very grateful. :)

nothing distracts like the frustration of being a very slow learner

I gots the email monkey. Each time the little red bubble thing pops up to let me know I have a new email I have to rush and check. If it’s come to my ‘official’ email address (ie not one that has anything to genetic engineering gone totally wacked) my heart rate jumps.
I’m waiting word on a postdoc I applied for that is ‘totally me’. In fact, so me it’s like they wrote the application with me in mind. The Squeeze said I should just have sent them my thesis with a short note: “I hear you have a position for me?”.
All this ‘it’s just so perfect for you!’ talk (which seems to have spread all over the continent – friends in Canberra, Perth, Brisbane and Tasmania have commented – the Ps are still being Proud Ps and blabbing my academic achievements to the world) only adds to the pressure. It’s entirely likely that I didn’t write a terribly great application letter, that my CV was crap and my discussion of my current research interests was dodgy. I don’t have enough experience with academic job applications to know what I’m supposed to do. And I’m not very good at being really serious and formal. It doesn’t help that this is a postdoc with a very flash American university. Pressure? What pressure?
Applications had to be in by the 13th February.

Finalists will be determined, appropriate visits to campus arranged, and a candidate selected by March, 2007.

So we’re looking at about two weeks til I hear, right?
God, this is killing me. I don’t really feel like I have a chance (though I look ok on paper, even though I don’t have millions of publications – I have about 5 waiting for paper incarnations but who cares about them when the chips are down?). But I’d really like the job – it’s a job where they want someone like this:

…a scholar in dance history/theory who examines dance forms as cultural practice with relationship to any of the following: international cultural exchange, globalization and globalizing practice, national and/or nationalist formations of embodied identities and cultures, and/or transnational and diasporic practice. We are open to the following geopolitical areas of specialization: Latin America (including the Caribbean, Central and South America), the African Subcontinent, the Middle East, East Asia, and South Asia.

See what I mean? Even the area of geopolitical specialisation applies, as I’m big on African vernacular dance history. It really is like they thought ‘hm, we want this girl. How can we get her?’ That, of course, makes it even worse. I really don’t feel positive about this application, but then, it is a perfect match. But did I communicate just how perfect? I mean, you have to be pretty crap to screw up a job application for which you are perfect, don’t you? I know it’s not helpful to think like that, but with the dentist thing dealt with and the thesis over, I need something on which to focus my irrational fears. Can’t undo all those years of tertiary programing education just like that, can we?
And it’s not like there are many of us thinking about dance as cultural practice, with an interest in dance history/theory (again, I’m both). And who’s talking about international cultural exchange? God, it’s like they read that paper on lindy exchanges and camps as un/national networks. Globalization? Well, more like localised globalisation, but what’s one letter? Embodied identities? Embodied cultures? National or Nationalised formations of said identities? Diaspora? Baby, I got your diaspora right here.
It’s scary. And so I can’t stop checking my email. This is one application I haven’t just forgotten about. It’s bothering me. And no amount of work or music-listening or sewing (three dresses in a weekend, folks – one house dress, two wearing-to-a-wedding options, only a couple of hems and one set of buttons to finish) can distract me.
I think I need some Big Apple time. Nothing distracts like the frustration of being a very slow learner.

:(

Today is a sad day. I can no longer access the databases and online journals at LaTrobe via the internet – my library membership has expired with my lack of enrolment.
:(
Researching this article is suddenly a whole lot more difficult.

holy smokes

I’m kind of in shock.
My guest post has been published over here and frankly, I’m having trouble breathing.
I’ve cross-posted the post here. This is the title Henry gave it (as I forgot that part when I sent him the copy. Doh).
Are You Hep to That Jive?: The Fan Culture Surrounding Swing Music
This is a clip of the Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers dancing a Big Apple routine (choreographed by Frankie Manning) in the 1939 film Keep Punchin’. In the last section of this clip they dance lindy hop on a ‘social dance floor’.
And here‘s footage of dancers in the US dancing the same routine in 2006.
If you follow this link you can listen to the Solomon Douglas Swinged playing the same song on their recent album.
Both dancers and musicians have painstakingly transcribed what they see and hear in that original 1939 clip.
Lindy hop – the partner dance most popular today in swing dance communities – developed in Harlem in the late 1920s and early 30s by African American dancers. Over the following years it moved to mainstream American youth culture, carried by dance teachers and performers in films like Keep Punchin’ and in stage shows, and then moved out into the international community, again in film and stage plays, but also with American soldiers stationed overseas. Though it was massively popular in its day, by the 1950s changes in popular music, where jazz was replaced by rock n roll or became increasingly difficult to dance to with the rise of bebop, saw lindy slipping from the public eye.
In the 1980s, dancers in Europe and the US began researching lindy, using archival footage like Keep Punchin’ but also including films like Hellzapoppin’ and Day at the Races – popular musical films of the 1930s and 40s. The aim of these dancers was to revive lindy hop, to recreate the steps they saw on screen. Learning to dance by watching films, particularly films that were only available at cinemas or in archival collections, was unsurprisingly, quite difficult, and these revivalists began seeking out surviving dancers from the period. Among these original lindy hoppers were Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, Al Minns, Sugar Sullivan and Dean Collins.
Twenty years after these revivalists began learning lindy, there are thriving swing dance communities throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and Korea. They come together in their local communities for classes and social dancing, and also travel extensively for camps and lindy exchanges. My research has focussed on the ways these contemporary swing dancers utilise a range of digital media in their embodied practices. This has involved discussing the way DJs in the swing community use digital music technology; the way swing dancers use discussion boards (Swing Talk, Dance History), instant messaging and email to keep in contact with dancers in their own community and overseas and to plan their own trips to other local scenes; and the ways in which swing dancers have use a range of audio visual technology. These uses of audio visual technology include the sorts of revivalist activities first practiced in the 1980s, but continuing now in lounge rooms and church halls in every local scene, but also to record their own dancing and local communities and also performances (on the social or competitive floor) by ‘celebrity’ lindy hoppers.
The Big Apple contest from Keep Punchin’ is a useful example of the ways swing dancers make use of digital media in their embodied practices. But it’s also the focus of my own dancing obsessions at the moment. I’ve been dancing lindy for at least eight years, and dance a few times a week in my local, Melbourne scene. I’ve travelled extensively within Australia to attend dance events, I’ve run events in my own city and I’ve travelled overseas for large dance events (such as the Herräng dance camp). This year, having just finished my Phd, I’ve decided I finally have time to work on my own dancing, in the sweaty, embodied sense, rather than the academic or abstract.
Writers in fan studies like Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills and Camille Bacon-Smith have discussed being a scholar-fan (to use Matt Hill’s term), where you’re a member of the community of fans you’re researching. This approach is fairly standard in much of the dance studies literature – it is notoriously difficult to write about dance and dancing with any degree of convincingness if you don’t dance – it’s a little like dancing about architecture. I’ve also found that combining my academic work with my everyday, making my everyday experiences my work, has been a satisfying way to extend my fanatical obsession with dance into every corner of my life (a little like Henry’s writing about Supernatural, a program I also love, here on this blog).
So when I decided I needed to get back to some level of dance fitness, to end the thesis-imposed hiatus from hardcore dance training, I chose this Big Apple and a number of other ‘vintage’ or ‘authentic’ jazz dance routines as my focus. I’ve learnt the Big Apple and Tranky Doo (another venerable jazz dance routine choreographed by Frankie Manning) before, but this was to be my first solo mission, using clips garnered almost entirely from the internet, though also making use of sections of an instructional DVD produced by a famous teaching couple.
Dancing alone is an essential part of lindy hop. The dance itself revolutionised the European partner dancing structure with its use of the ‘break away’, (which you can see danced by the last couple in the film After Seben), where partners literally broke away from each other to dance in ‘open’ position. In open, partners are free to improvise, and the most common improvisation in that historical moment and today, is to include jazz steps from the vast repertoire of steps developed by African American vernacular dance culture over centuries in America. Learning to dance alone not only offers dancers the opportunity to work on body awareness, fitness, coordination, individual styling and expanding their own repertoire (a point upon which I was relying), but also encourages a creative, improvised approach to music which they can then bring to their lindy hop for those 5 or 6 beats of the 8 count swing out – the foundational step of lindy hop.
I’ve written a great deal about the gender dynamics at work in lindy hop, a dance which prioritise the heterocentric pairing of a man and a woman, beginning with my own discomfort with a dance where the man leads, the woman follows, and traditional gender roles prevail. But I’ve also written a great deal about the liberatory potential of lindy. The open position and the emphasis on improvisation are an important part of this – in those moments both partners are expected to ‘bring it’ – to contribute to the creative exchange within the partnership. Lindy, as it was danced by African American dancers in that original creative moment, also embodies a history of resistance and transgression, as a dance with its roots in slavery and created during a period of institutionalised racism and oppression. One of my own research interests has been the extent to which the resistant themes of lindy hop, of African American vernacular dance, have been realised by contemporary swing dancers. The fact that most of these contemporary dancers are white, middle class urban heterosexual youth goes some way to discouraging my reading of contemporary swing dance culture as a hot bed of radical politics and revisions of dominant ideology and culture. Yet I have also found that lindy hop and African American vernacular jazz dances like the Big Apple structure and the Tranky Doo offer opportunities for the expression of self and resistance of dominant gender roles.
As a woman, and as a feminist, I’ve found that archival footage such as that Keep Punchin’ clip offer opportunities for reworking the way I dance and participate in the public dance discourse. When we watch that Big Apple clip, while we can clearly see that each dancer is performing synchronised, choreographed steps, they are also clearly styling each step to suit their own aesthetic, athletic and social needs and interests. We see the personality of each dancer as they execute a set piece of choreography. The very concept of a Big Apple contest involves dancers performing specific steps as they are called, and being judged not only for their ability to dance the correct step in time and with alacrity, but more importantly (in a setting where dance competency, as Katrina Hazzard-Gordon has written, is demanded by the social setting – everyone can dance), for their individual interpretation of the step. This is a performance of improvisation within a socially, collaboratively created structure. The representation of individual identity within a consensual public discourse. This is the sort of thing that jazz musicians do – improvise within a given structure.
And man, is that some serious fun.
For contemporary swing dancers, the idea of taking particular formal structures and then reworking them to suit their own discursive needs extends from the dance floor to the mediated world. Online, swing dancers upload digital footage of themselves dancing, edited to best display their abilities. Or they edit whole narrative films like Hellzapoppin’ and Day at the Races and edit out the sequences they’re most interested in – the dancing. And dancers like myself are still watching these edited clips, recreating entire routines, and then, even more interestingly, editing out particular steps and integrating them into their lindy on the social dance floor, or into their own choreographed routines.
The notion of step stealing is not new in African American vernacular dance – it reaches back to Africa. And Frankie Manning himself is often quoted as saying ‘dance it once and it’s yours, dance it twice and it’s mine’. For me, as a dancer, this is exciting stuff. If I put in the time and effort, I can learn these steps (well, some of them – watch that Hellzapoppin’ clip and you’ll see what I mean). And if I practice, time it properly and really bring it, I can pull that out on the social dance floor. Perhaps. Contemporary dancers enact that philosophy on the dance floor every day -stealing steps that catch their attention on the social dance floor, or ‘ripping off’ moves they see performed in footage of dancers in competitions or performances or in social dance settings all over the world. Or from seventy years ago.
For me, swing dancers’ tactical use of digital media in their embodied use of archival footage is not only a source of academic fascination, but also a very practical skill to develop. I have had to learn how to watch footage of dancing in a way that lets me apply my knowledge of dance to separate out distinct steps, then figure out how they work, practically. Learning to poach dance steps from archival footage is a useful skill for lindy hoppers. But the testing of my skills is not online or in my ability to write and talk about these things. The real challenge to my creative and critical faculties comes on the dance floor, when I have to bring it – to bring the right step at the right time, but with my own unique, creative twist.
Bacon-Smith, Camille. (1992). Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
—. (2000). Science Fiction Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Clein, John, dir. (1939). Keep Punchin’. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Frank Manning and Hot Chocolates. USA.
Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. (1990). Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hills, Matt. (2002). Fan Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York and London: Routledge.
Kaufman, S. J. (1929). After Seben. Short film. Perf. “Shorty” George Snowden. USA.
Potter, H. C., dir. (1941). Hellzapoppin’. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers and Frank Manning. USA.
Solomon Douglas Swingtet. (2006). Swingmatism. USA.
Wood, Sam. (1939). A Day at the Races. Perf. Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. USA.