I posted a question in the Teaching Swing Dance fb group:
Shag and talking about race and ethnicity
So I know very little about collegiate shag, only a tiny bit about St Louis shag, and nothing about Carolina shag.
But if we’re talking about the first two, are they dances that started in Black communities like lindy hop and charleston and blackbottom?How/if do shag teachers talk about race and ethnicity in their classes?
There was lots of toing and froing. At one point I was in a discussion with a person talking about west coast swing and its Black history. This is how I replied to them. I’ve removed their name because I don’t like dragging people into my blog posts without their consent.
I guess this is the point of my original post: are shag(s) a Black dance (yes), and then, how do we talk about/teach this in class?
Even though everyone ragged on that man’s comment (justifiably), he made one decent point: people come to dance, not stand still and listen. So people come to class _expecting_ to dance and move their bodies, not stand still and listen to a lecture for 20 minutes.
This fits in with what we know about teaching dance: talk less, dance more.
Doesn’t mean we can’t have sessions that are more about talking.
Doesn’t mean we can’t have talking bits _in_ our classes.
Doesn’t mean we can’t use _other methods_ for sharing the Black history and present of Black dances. ie show, don’t tell.
From a pedagogic perspective, I’m of the opinion that we:
– Talk less, dance more
In other words, give very simple instructions rather than than looooong explanations, then have people dance it immediately. Which of course also involves having students figure stuff out and problem solve on their own or with partners, rather than have it all explained to them.
Or restructure classes to be longer, and include history chunks, bits of choreo, etc etc. We go to a hip hop class that is 90 minutes long and involves all these bits and pieces. We often need a break to listen to a little story because it’s so physically demanding.
This rethinking of teaching and learning spaces is a part of rethinking how we commodify Black dance in the modern lindy hop world.
– When you namecheck an elder, note their ethnicity.
“Norma Miller, a Black woman who lived in Harlem,” “Dean Collins, a jewish man living in LA”, “Jewel McGowan, a white woman working in California.” White people tend to make whiteness the norm, make it invisible by _not_ pointing out that whiteness is ethnicity too. By not pointing out when an important figure (a professional, an artist, a businesswoman, a hero) is _not_ white.
So, when you mention Arthur Murray: “orgins unclear, eventually documented by Arthur Murray”, next time perhaps say “Arthur Murray, a white business man who made a lot of money from selling dance classes and instructional books, reframed the history of Black dance for white audiences.” This asks us to think about what he had to gain from documenting Black dance in the way that he did.
And it’s also worth noting that this idea of ‘origins unclear’ is very much something white people say when they don’t know something. Are these origins really ‘unclear’, or do white people just not understand something? The whole ‘revival’ myth is like this. If a dance is declared ‘dead’ or ‘unclear’, white explorers (imperialists) can justify going on an expedition to ‘hunt down’ the ‘facts’ and artefacts. They can go ‘interview’ (hassle) Black elders, they can dig into (largely white institutionally owned and produced) archives to ‘collect’ newspapers, magazines, and booklets produced by white people for white people. It’s no accident that the people doing big info dumps about shag history in these comments are white men.
And while I’m going on, I always think about the fact that elders like Norma Miller deliberately didn’t tell white people everything they knew about lindy hop. They might have told young Black people, but they didn’t give that knowledge to white people. Similarly, people like Al and Leon could tell white people like Marshall Stearns a whole heap of big fat lies about Black spaces and dance. And have that published in a book white people treat like a bible. While white youth might have been able to sneak into a Black space to steal the big apple (a Black dance), and white people might have access to a desegregated Savoy ballroom, Black elders like Norma could still make sure white people didn’t get everything.
I just LOVE these facts: white people got stooged.
These tactics of resistance to white supremacy are a) fucking awesome, and b) another example of how Black dance is an extension of Black culture. If you don’t talk about and understand slavery, segregation, convict leasing, and all that white supremacist history of the USA, you can’t understand why subversion, resistance, derision, and elders as custodians of knowledge are essential parts of Black dance.
– Show, don’t tell.
This is the bit that I’m excited about. If we just namecheck Black dancers then carry on with a very white, middle class ‘class room’ type experience, we’re not being anti-racist. We’re not addressing how specific teaching tools and practices reproduce racism.
So how do we do this, especially if (like me) we’re white, middle class people who don’t live in the US?
– Take classes with Black teachers.
And not just in lindy hop/swing dances. How do they teach? What is important? How do they speak to students and each other? What are their values? etc etc. This is also a way of ‘paying the rent’.
– Learn about Black pedagogy (there are sources for this).
Both historically and in the current moment. This is one of the reasons I’m so interested in the Black Panthers’ approach to education. They saw education as a key force in liberation. And they believed it should be free, center the Black experience, and conducted in Black spaces.
I’m also all about the Teaching Hard History podcast (produced by the beleaguered Southern Poverty Law Center), because it shows us exactly how to do this: how to teach Black history in dance. And it’s produced by Black teachers with a specifically antiracist, liberatory mission.
– Watch footage of Black dance teachers at work.
This one is a bit problematic, because it’s filtered through white cinematographers, editors, and collections. But it can be a start. As an example, I’m always struck by the way Frankie Manning used ‘external cues’ in his teaching: rather than saying ‘engage your core, fire that glute, commit your weight’ (ie exclusionary jargon), he’d say ‘bow to the queen. But don’t show her the top of your head’. That bow creates nice lines, it frames the swivels, looking up helps your balance, which then helps your timing, and so on.
– Take learning out of a formal ‘class room’ and into social spaces.
The social dance floor where friends jam. Lounge rooms where peers practice and do self-guided learning. We can respect elders and knowledgeable people, but we can also decenter ‘teachers’ in learning.
– Ask students to work hard.
We can be kind, but we can also provide spaces for students to work hard, struggle, and maybe not always succeed. It’s really important for white people (and privileged people) to be in places where their privilege doesn’t automatically grant them success. This space can be supportive, and we can help them persevere, but a class needn’t automatically guarantee success. This last one is very much attached to how we market and commodify dance classes.
