Today was week 1 of our lindy hop class block, and we had a lovely time doing swing outs and break steps and jazz and stuff. I squeed when they did their first swing outs. Does it ever get old? No. They always feel the feelings when they get out there.
After the class I did a little show and tell with photos and videos. The goal was to explain who Frankie Manning was, and what it was like in Harlem in the 20s and 30s.
I really wanted to position Frankie and the other lindy hoppers as part of that Harlem community. Not individual superheroes. People who were part of a neighbourhood.
So I had photos and vids of dancing and music and community activism and poetry and theatre and art and the New Negro movement and renters’ unions and Harlem Renaissance and clubs and rent parties. I used a mix of photos of people and of huge bright paintings, videos, and gifs.
And videos of people doing mad air steps and swinging out.
Things that were cool:
we did it straight after week 1 class of the new beginner lindy hop block. Peeps were tired, but also relaxed and feeling happy and friendly.
we got to sit down and see the stuff we’d learnt in class done by the kings and queens
we all got to chat and get to know each other in a less formal environment. I used a script with some bits I’d read out (eg quotes from Frankie’s book), but mostly I used a casual chatty style. Because of the crew (my old friends, a bunch of rowdy friends, relaxed happy people) they interrupted to ask questions and point stuff out. PERFECT.
I strongly recommend doing a little film session like this with your students, in their class space. Helped develop cohort, really let them see what lindy hop was like danced by people like Frankie Manning, let them see who the people we talk about look like, etc etc.
I’d keep it to a shorter length (we took about 40 minutes), and I’d aim for a chatty relaxed style that keeps them engaged, rather than a long formal lecture where they fall asleep.
My favourite part was their reactions to the videos!
They’d laugh at stuff I’ve seen other people laugh at – pecking, weird crazy leg stuff, etc. They’d ooh and aaah at aerials.
And a really cool thing – I showed them footage of Frankie teaching a lindy hop class, because I wanted them to see how he taught, and the effect it had on people in the room. They all reacted the same way the people in the class in the video reacted! Laughing, oohing and ahhing, engaging. It was really cool to see.
Anyway, there’s a pic of some of the crew at the top of this post. After this session I found a HUGE projection screen in the storage room. Better buy a projector, aye?
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?
After doing a bunch of reading and digging, these are some of the important things I’ve learnt about lindy hop in the 1970s and 1980s.
The New York Swing Dance Society doesn’t get the props it deserves for running parties that got people out and dancing (including Frankie and Norma and other OGs).
Community spaces – bars, clubs, church halls, social clubs, basements – were where lindy hop lived during these decades. It didn’t die. It was busy.
Norma Miller wearing her Menton Buck Clayton Hat, Photograph by Nancy Miller Elliot, Courtesy Norma Miller
Norma Miller was really important. She was the sort of person who’d make sure people like Frankie went out to dance to a band (1983), and got a whole gang of OGs together for a party at Sandra Cameron’s studio (1983).
“In April 1983, at Norma’s suggestion, Larry Schultz and his wife, Sandra Cameron, had invited about thirty Savoy Lindy Hoppers to a little get-together at their dance studio. It was wonderful to see everybody, and we had a ball catching up and dancing with each other. We were all out there clowinging around, trying to remember our old routines.” (p225 Frankie Bio)
She put on shows with OGs starring in the early to mid 80s, she trained up new Black dancers. She did that thing that still holds lindy hop (and communities!) together today: she introduced people to each other.
Mama Lu Parks was another of those important women, putting on gigs, running performance groups, getting shit done.
The stories I’ve heard in the past about the 1980s were mostly about white men ‘discovering’ Frankie or Al Minns or Norma and convincing them to ‘come out of retirement’. But it was Black women who were keeping relationships alive, bringing people together, and getting shit done. AS PER USUAL.
I’m checking some details in Frankie Manning’s biography, and there’s a section where he writes:
I always agreed with Martin Luther King’s point of view. In 1963, a whole group of us from the Postal Workers Union went down by bus to the rally in Washington, D.C. to support him. When I heard him give his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, I was very moved.” (pg 218)
I’ve heard white lindy hoppers argue that Frankie wasn’t political*. That’s patently bullshit. He was a union member. He went to Washington to support King. It’s also really important to remember that the US Postal Service was (and is) an important site for Black organising and grassroots politics. Margot Lee Shetterly talks about this in her book Hidden Figures, noting the path from postal service to aeronautics for Black workers and thinkers.
And of course he choreographed and performed in A BIOGRAPHCICAL FILM ABOUT MALCOLM X. A film that directly visually referenced multiple films that starred Manning and his peers.**
I also want to point out that Frankie didn’t ‘stop dancing’ in the 1950s. He mostly retired from professional dancing, but of course he kept on dancing! Parties, dances, band gigs… all the usual places where vernacular dance lives.
Manning, Frankie and Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop, Temple University Press: USA, 2008.
There are the usual problems with using an autobiography as a source, but this is one of the best-researched and fact-checked sources for information about Frankie Manning.
*What do I mean by ‘political’?
On one level, it’s referring to the mechanics and institutions of a political systems – parties, voting, electoral systems, unions, politicians.
But that’s the very simplest level.
If we define ‘politics’ as being the relationships of power between people, things get a lot more interesting. This is the sort of definition used by feminist and anti-racist activists and scholars.
So ‘politics’ can expand to include the social relationships between adults and children, the collectivist philosophies of unions, the uses of power between men and women, and so on.
Every time Frankie said ‘Think of your partner as a queen’, he was making a political statement: treat your partner like royalty. Show your respect by bowing. Obviously he didn’t think they were actually a member of a royal family; this was about defining relationships between men and women as one of mutual respect, where men invite women to be powerful and love it.
** If you compare the soundie/short film Keep Punchin’ with the scenes in the ballroom in Malcolm X you’ll see characters and narrative elements from the soundie in Spike Lee’s film. This is one of the clever things about Lee’s films: he uses archival material as inspiration, but often also shows them on-screen during the films. I am a huge fan of his films.
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.
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.
We all love Dee, right (yes), and if you haven’t seen Helena dance, you need to follow her on instagram right now. RIGHT now.
Anyway, BLHF is one of the very few organisations in the lindy hopping world which hires only Black artists (and pays them real money, not ‘exposure’), and makes it easier for Black dancers to attend the workshops. They are fucking legit on this. And intensives (ie workshops) are really top shelf. I’ve only managed to be involved in three, but they are just the best.
As a student, I had fun, but as a teacher, I learnt that Black teachers work in a different way. And I learnt a lot about these approaches to teaching. If you’ve been following that recent conversation we had in this group about whether a teaching method can be anti-racist, you’ll find these BLHF sessions really interesting. Because they _are_ the definition of anti-racism work.
This is Helena’s ig account. This video blew my mind. It’s such a clear example of how the history of Black dance lives in Black bodies and Black dance _today_. You can’t talk about lindy hop without talking about contemporary Black culture.
I was sorry to see I’d missed Trisha Sewell’s class on lovers’ rock. I got interested in lovers rock (which is a subgenre of reggae) after watching Steve McQueen’s brilliant film ‘Lovers’ Rock’ in his Small Axe series.
risha is a Black British dancer. She and other female Black British dancers (including people like Angela ‘Cookie’ Andrews) are often left out of stories about lindy hop in the UK. Angela is a truly great dancer. Watching her in this, I just can’t look away. She. Is. So. Good.
Oh, and because there’s MORE, here is a video we all know and love. Featuring Angela and Dee. Cookie told me that she was _judging_ the contest, but just couldn’t help getting in there.
“The ruling went over the history of the ban, and said it “arose out of a concern that, as a result of the rising popularity ‘of ‘Kung Fu’ movies and shows,′ ‘various circles of the state’s youth’ — including ‘muggers and street gangs’ — were ‘widely’ using nunchaku to cause ‘many serious injuries.’”
“New York lawmakers worried that some young people might be using the device nefariously. “
In 1974 ‘muggers and street gangs’ in New York was code for ‘Black kids’. ‘Kung fu’ films, tv, etc was hugely popular with Black kids (you can read more about that here).
The ‘nunchuck’ ban is interesting because it was clearly targeting this segment of the community in a period of economic freefall and city corruption.
I’m fascinated by this period in American history. There’s a really good documentary called Blank City, which looks at the rise of indy cinema in NY at that moment as well (including Lizzie Borden’s radical feminist film Born In Flames).
If you catch covid, you have a 10-30% chance of it becoming long covid. One of the most comment symptoms of long covid is fatigue.
If we work with those assumptions, what does that mean for a community of dancers?
Let me be clear: I not an epidemiologist, a health specialist, a physiotherapist, or a disease expert. And I’m not sure if this long covid symptom is true across all covid variants and communities. But I am a cultural studies researcher. I have a lot of experience looking specifically at cultural practice within a particular community of people. So let’s start with this: what could happen to a community of dancers where some of the community members are living with long covid, and those people are representative of the different groups within the community? Teachers, performers, organisers, students, new dancers, experienced dancers, old people, young people, cancer survivors, volunteers, business people, trans people, everyone.
We’ve already seen the consequences of managing covid risk: massive financial loss, spacing requiring larger (more expensive rooms), crowd size management, no partner changing, no partner dancing, mandatory masks (and the effect on vigorous exercise), no social dancing, increased workloads for organisers, etc.
But what about the effects of one symptom of covid itself, specifically, fatigue?
Fatigue is not just being tired, where you can push through. Fatigue means you sit down to eat your breakfast, but afterwards you’re so tired from eating you can’t get up from the chair. You have to sit there for a couple of hours. Meanwhile your body cramps and you’re in pain. But this exhaustion is mental as well – you cannot concentrate, cannot follow ideas, and so on. What does this mean for a dancer?
If you’re a professional lindy hopper (a teacher or performer, or someone working in film or television), living with fatigue from long covid, then you cannot dance. You cannot work. Your income is gone. You cannot perform, you cannot choreograph, you cannot practice. Your body, already affected by illness (respiratory illness being the least of it), loses muscle tone and fitness. Your memory and ability to retain choreography disappears. That ‘muscle memory’ stuff (which is actually your brain working) dissolves. Not only can you not train for the hours every day your work requires, you cannot even coach other dancers and earn an income for choreographing for other people. Living will illness, and being separated from your support networks result in serious mental illness. Depression. Anxiety. And it’s impossible to do creative work living with an illness like this.
If you’re a new dancer who has to live with long covid, then you simply stop dancing. And probably never return to it. New dancers are the bread and butter of most dance classes and dance schools today. Dance organisations often fund their social events and weekend events with income from beginner classes. Without that cash flow, the parties dry up. Work for musicians and DJs dries up. The ability to play for dancers dries up.
What does this mean for dancing in the rest of the community? Even if those dancers falling ill are local teachers rather than traveling professionals, all that accumulated teaching knowledge, which lindy hop is notoriously poor at retaining and sharing, will be lost. All that historical and cultural knowledge is taken out of the community. The musical knowledge and dancing knowledge is gone. Not only in that one person, but in all the people they taught, danced with, inspired, and provoked into rivalry.
This is a little like having the Black men removed from jazz music and dance by conscription during the second world war. Whereas jazz music and dance at that time were actually real social practices, happening in sustainable social spaces (families, neighbourhoods, thriving businesses, cross generational gatherings), modern lindy hop in many scenes is not socially sustainable. It collapses when just one or two key people in a local community disappear.
Most lindy hop communities are small*, with perhaps a few hundred dancers, and classes and events run by two or a handful of people. Lose one or two or a handful of those, and that local scene will crumble. If that scene is socially sustainable, with different aged people, a sharing of power and responsibility, etc, then it may be fine. But we have seen over the past ten years, particularly in discussions around sexual assault and racism, that the modern lindy hop world in most cities is not socially sustainable. Patriarchy (and late capitalism) is doomed to collapse under its own weight.
But is it so dire to see a community based on white supremacy and patriarchy break down? Nope. But the thing about covid is that it infects everyone. Even rich white men. The real, serious difficulty with covid is that vaccination and risk management is much harder when you’re poor, you’re disabled, you’re homeless, you’re marginalised.
When a local cultural community collapses, we also see innovative and new types of work in that local field disappear. The modern lindy hop world is dominated by the concept of historical reenactment, with the implication that the best lindy hop is old lindy hop. This ideology in practice (as many people have pointed out elsewhere) is racist, as it privileges the white people who’ve been lindy hopping the longest, and marginalises (discredits! devalues!) living modern Black culture. As Thomas DeFrantz said in his Collective Voices for Change talk, Black dance is a medium for change, for innovation, for action and activism as well as cherishing history and preserving legacy**. Long covid threatens this new and radical work.
Cancelled in 2121 by the rising Omicron wave, the Belgian event Upside Down has determinedly shifted online. But though online fun is still fun, the face to face necessity of lindy hop suffers.
I mention Upside Down for a few reasons. It is rooted in live music, with the organisers working closely with local musicians. Musicians who are some of the best and most talented in Europe. These musicians lose a weekend of work. Upside Down features some of the most creative promotional design, art, and social media engagement in the lindy hopping world. But while some of this might flourish online, the face to face element (the decorations, the unusual party structures, the creative energy and excitement) does not. Upside Down focusses on its local city, and on local dancers. It’s smaller scale (a few hundred rather than a thousand), and it aims to be environmentally sustainable. It’s also responded to the Black Lindy Hop Matters movement by asking its staff and attendees to engage with race and history and social power. This type of energy and enthusiasm is staggering under the pandemic. And individual cases of long covid in key personnel could be disastrous.
The greatest consequence in the cancellation of events like Upside Down is not in the loss of the event itself. It is losing those moments of creative catalyst that result in waves of new thinking, new creativity, new activism, that spread out into the wider community beyond Ghent. Photo of Jazz Dance Continuum dancers at Jacob’s Pillow May 19, 2021. Photo by Cherylynn Tsushima.
Think of the Jazz Dance Continuum project spearheaded by LaTasha Barnes and her crew. I’m knocking on wood and tossing salt over my shoulder as I type, but imagine an actor like Barnes catching long covid? The woman is a force of nature, working in so many areas of jazz dance, and the wider creative world. She’s also a social agent of good, working with the Black Lindy Hoppers Fund, Frankie Manning Foundation and beyond. And what if Julie Living in New York, or Tena Morales-Armstrong in Houston became ill? These women are the backbones of their local and wider communities (once again, fucking hats off to Black women for being true forces of nature… and hardcore professionals). If we lose these types of people, the truly innovative work will be lost.
If you’re a Black American, catching covid is a very, very dangerous thing, for you and your family. The disease is bad enough, but the American ‘health’ system has never been kind to the Black community. The people most likely to be exposed to covid (the breadwinners and caregivers in the family) are removed from the family structure. Feeding nanna or putting food on the table gets harder. And if you catch covid, you still have things like long covid to consider. Individuals are going to be devoting what little energy they have to sustaining family, neighbours, parish, school, and friends. So the Black dancers and Black culture which have begun to make a difference to modern lindy hop are once again marginalised. This is, of course, a familiar consequence of racism. Racism makes people sick. Racism reduces life expectancy. Racism destroys communities.
I’m writing this now in Sydney, where our government has decided not to enforce lockdowns or other restrictions. Our covid case numbers are higher than they’ve ever been before, and we are behind other countries in vaccination. Two years into the pandemic, the national lindy hopping community has been fragmented into local, capital city based scenes. The live jazz scenes in the bigger cities is also suffering. I fear for the future of lindy hop and jazz dance. Mostly because I think that any future ‘revival’ will be based on the white dominated communities of the 80s-2010s, as we move further and further away from the swing era.
Wear a mask. Get vaccinated. Avoid crowds.
*If most lindy hop communities are small, them most teachers are teaching locally for smaller groups, most DJing is done for local crowds and smaller crowds, most of the live music dancers listen to is played by local musicians, and most of the venues they use are smaller. The budgets are smaller, most labour is unpaid, and most of this unpaid labour is conducted by women. This is is something I learnt during my doctoral research (pre 2006), but which has remained the case in the following fifteen years.
If most teaching is done locally, then the most valuable teaching skills center on attracting and retaining newer dancers, or local people (rather than margeting to the more experienced market for weekend events). This type of teaching must, by necessity be locally specific: catering to the culture, values, and people of it’s home society.
**This idea of Black dance embodying opposing forces like preserving the past and fostering innovation is not new. Embodying ‘hot and cool‘ is a feature of Black dance, as DeFrantz, Malone and countless other point out. It is, again as Malone points out, almost the stamp of a vernacular dance to take elements of the past and rework them for current needs and wants. In other words, lindy hop wants to preserve the past and innovate and create. It is the quintessential modern dance of the 20th century.
Note: this article contains some important key references to other works on this topic. Content warning for descriptions of sexual violence, racism, medical violence… heck, all of it.
DeFrantz, Thomas ed. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance. Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1996.
—. “Stripping the Emperor: The Africanist Presence in American Concert Dance.” Looking Out: Perspectives on Dance and Criticism in a Multicultural World. Eds. David Gere, et al. New York: Schirmer Books, 1995. 95 – 121.
Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. “African-American Vernacular Dance: Core Culture and Meaning Operatives.” Journal of Black Studies 15.4 (1985): 427-45.
—. Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Malone, Jacqui. Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
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)
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.
