I love everything about it. I love those chins, and they way they’re lifted as a sort of challenge/invitation. I love that grace! The sophistication! But also the sheer, testosterone-laden, machismo of it! My favourite part is probably the very end when they raise their arms to accept applause and do the little pantomime with the handkerchief. This is just gorgeous. It’s exactly the type of masculinity I like to pretend I can do when I’m pretending to be a sophisticated mandancer. Except that I suspect I come off seeming a bit more like someone’s unsavoury uncle.
(linky c/o Jerry, who I feel as though I’m stalking with all these links and shares and reposts and such)
This is the sort of post I don’t do very often because I don’t feel very confident of my understanding of dance and movement. There are plenty of people who have a better grasp of these things than I do. And, at the end of the day, I’m of the opinion that no amount of talking or writing or reading about dancing will make you a better dancer. If you’re not actually dancing, you’re not going to improve or understand movement.
The thing that really shifted my dancing from casual interest to solid addiction was the way it required my switching off my brain. This was important to me because I was busy with an MA and then PhD, and spent most of my time in brain and not in my body. I think it also made me a better tutor for uni students – talk less, listen more. Dancing – particularly following, but also leading – really needs you to just tell your brain to shoosh and to get on with being in your body. Strangely enough, Jerry’s just linked up Ruby’s post ‘To note or not to note’ on FB and she asks some neat questions about the value of taking notes or writing and reading about dance. I think that you learn most about dancing from dancing, and from dancing with as many people as possible. I actually think I learn most about leading from dancing with total one-class beginner follows and from working on my own in front of a mirror, trying out all the movements (try all the movements).
But I did that private lesson the other week, I’ve been doing more partner dance work, I’ve done a spot of dance teaching (that whole talking less thing is pretty bloody useful) and an interesting post at Lindy Hop Variations for Followers has triggered some dance-thinking over here in obcon land. So here’s a big long post where I’m really just floating ideas that I’m mulling over at the moment. I’m probably way off base here, but whatevs. I’m a work in progress, right? Never stop learning and all.
One of the things I find most difficult to write or talk about is a definition of ‘swing’. I mean the musical ‘feel’ of a song. Gunther Schuller has all that stuff about vertical and horizontal distances, but that’s really confusing and not entirely useful when you’re looking for a quick, simple image. I’ve often heard people talk about it in terms of a ‘delay’, and I think about it as being chillaxed, not racing towards the next beat, but hanging back and waiting til the very last moment before moving on to the next beat. But that’s not really all that helpful when you’re explaining how a swinging rhythm really works.
When I’m moving my body – dancing, I guess – to swinging music, the timing feels different to when I’m just listening to it. I feel that the ‘bounce’ (or some people call it pulse these days) is the heart of that swinging rhythm. A good, swinging late 1930s song at about 180bpm really feels as though it’s bouncing along. It’s not a jagged up-down timing, but more an arc through the air. I’ve just been reading through some research notes, looking for an article about black bands in the early days of radio and came across this comment about the work song:
The function of this song is to facilitate the task of chopping wood. As is typical of Afro-American work songs, in this song the process of chopping the wood becomes an intrinsic part of the music. The sound produced by the ax creates a component of the music which is essential to the structure of the song. The music, then, is not simply accompanying the work, the work becomes the music, and the music becomes the work. (Olly Wilson, ‘Black Music as an Art Form’ in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed Robert G. O’Meally, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998:91).
For me, this idea of rhythm as part of movement is really important to how I think about swinging rhythms. I tend to think about the beat in this type of song as being like the swing of an axe or a hammer. The upwards lift is quicker and stronger, but the downwards arc is a longer, slower force, directed by gravity. Each downwards arc moves at the same pace (because that’s how gravity works), but we can control both the upwards and downwards movement (I have just gone and watched a million videos of people chopping wood. I am such a nerd).
I think my thinking about dance is mostly informed by my interest in 1930s and 40s lindy hop, by Frankie Manning and by the Hot Shots. Whether I’ve actually understood the things they’ve been trying to teach me is another matter. When I think about ‘bounce’ (or pulse – whatevs), I think of each step or each bounce as a sink into the ground (ie sinking my hips down, with my knees bending, my ankles bending, and my arse going out and back to allow a deeper bend), and then a pushing up from the floor as I step onto the other foot, always keeping a bit of bend in the knee rather than locking it. This means my knees – my legs – are like coiled springs containing stored energy which I use for each step, or for faster reactions. These days I’m figuring out that my arse is actually the most important part of this ‘stored energy’ thing, and that I need to stop working my calves so hard. In a bounce, the movement starts in my ‘core’ (or my guts, or my hips or that network of muscles and things around the lower part of my torso. or my arse.) The depth of the bounce really depends on how much ‘time’ I have – faster songs mean less time.
So my bounce is kind of the same as an axe rising and falling. My muscles engage as I sink, or as the axe is raised, and then the energy is let out or used as I step or the axe falls.
I’m not sure of the physics of it all. The important part for me is that there’s that inevitable, undeniable delay. You can’t change the way gravity works. You can’t fight the swing in a swinging rhythm. This is why I think you need to have bounce or pulse when you lindy hop. You might crunch that bounce up until it’s like a tiny, power-bounce, right in your core and hard to see. But you need that little compression-and-release to dance.
If you’re not bouncing, you’re just walking. And even walking has bounce, if you’re relaxed, your core’s engaged and you’re bending your knees. You get a greater range of movement in your upper body (eg the swing of your arms, or a rotation at the waist) if you’re bent a little at the hips, you push from the arse/core and you let gravity move your arms about (rather than tightening them up). This bend at the hips (not sticking your arse out, but bending at the hips, so your back stays straight) engages your core muscles (eg your back, abs, sides, etc). Bending your knees engages your core muscles, especially if your weight is on the ball of your foot. It’s hard to do this if you don’t have your weight on the ball of your foot. It’s even harder if you keep your legs really straight and your knees locked. Also: ow.
I also think that if you don’t bounce, your timing is off. It always feels as though you’re rushing. I hate following a lead without bounce, as I always feel as though I have to run to get anywhere, particularly if they take huge steps. And if they’re really tight through the shoulders and I can’t feel where their weight is, or where it’s going. I also find that a natural consequence of bounce is less tension in the upper body. I don’t know why, but I always wonder if it’s because your lower muscles are doing the big job of keeping you upright and balanced, so you upper body can get on with doing crazy shit. Like throwing and catching a basketball. Or swinging an axe. And less unnecessary muscle tension means your body is doing less work and there’s less fatigue. And following or leading you is much nicer.
All that stuff about bounce is nice, because to me that’s how you make the swing in the music visible. But, really, I like that little discussion of work songs for the way it illustrates how rhythmic movement is incorporated into vernacular music and dance. Or the way everyday dance and music is about everyday movements and rhythms.
One of the things I’m most interested in at the moment, as a DJ, is how dancers ‘hear’ the beat, even when there isn’t an instrument banging it out. I’ve always had trouble with the way dancers in class speed up if you get them to do a basic rhythm without music. It’s something to do with the way hoomans in a group work – they speed up basic rhythms. But it drives me nuts. It’s as though they let the rhythm outside inflect the rhythm inside their bodies. Yet this idea of shared, increasing rhythm is partly what makes social dancing so much fun – we ‘catch’ rhythm from other people on the floor, and that shared feeling of rhythm kind of echoes and bounces back and forth, exaggerating the feeling. And that’s fun to work with, as a DJ, increasing and decreasing that shared musical feeling.
But the more experienced a dancer, the more likely they are to be able to feel a consistent beat, no matter what’s happening around them on the dance floor. I’ve noticed that newer dancers tend to have trouble with instrumentally sparse songs. Acapella can be the hardest, but small vocal groups with a guitar (eg Cats and the Fiddle) can be just as hard. And the most accessible and easiest to work with is a large band with a big rhythm section. Conversely, bands with choruses where instruments are doing different rhythms and melodies at once can be really confusing for new dancers.
You can see this when dancers are listening to a song with lots of breaks. Total beginners have real trouble predicting the beats and then coming back in on time. Dancers with some experience but without a real empathy for the music have difficulty doing anything other than standing still during the breaks – they can’t feel the rhythm continuing in the ‘silence’. And more experienced dancers with a sense of the broader structures of a song as well as the basic beat are most capable of adding in rhythms during that break (or of just riding out the break as a quiet point of contrast). Most interesting of all, if a dancer has bounce, then they’re never really standing still, even during breaks, unless they consciously choose to stop bouncing. And isn’t that the point – that we are dancing, not creating a series of tableaus?
So I’m pro-bounce. Because that’s what’s in swinging music. But I’m also for managing bounce to respond to music appropriately. Here, really, it’s not my business to tell other people what to do with their bodies. Dance how you like, how you feel. But for me, it’s fascinating to explore how bounce works in relation to music, and then – even more fascinatingly – how I can manage my bounce when I’m following a lead who doesn’t bounce. Do I abandon it completely? (NO!) Do I moderate it so as not to interrupt the lead? (YES!) The depth and feel of bounce can be a really simple way of responding to the intensity of the music. Big emotional, exciting moment – big bounce.
And, finally, I know I’ve been dancing with a badass, bouncy lindy hopper, because my heart rate is way up and I’m sweating rivers. Bounce simply takes more energy, and turns a low impact slouch-around-the-floor into a serious aerobic workout, engaging all your muscles and kicking your arse. A bouncing lindy hopper simply has a more energised set of muscles, which you can see in their dancing. And that’s the difference between dancing lindy hop and just standing about, right? You’re kicking your own arse and riding the adrenaline to funtown!
Lovely Doris sent me this as a belated birthday present. Doris is the best. She is my no.1 CD supplier, and she always sends the best bands, well before I’ve heard of them. EXCELLENT WORK DORIS.
This is gold. I can’t explain all the levels of humour and piss-taking, because it’s all a bit complicated. But you can just watch this ‘straight’, as though it were a serious documentary. Because it is.
My favourite part: “[that music] was very racey. We called ’em race records”
I’m trying and trying to think of a way to talk about MLX. But I can’t. I’m sorry, I’m getting emotional. Mostly because you can’t hug every DJ. No matter how much you love them.
Right here, I need to make clear my association with the Melbourne Lindy Exchange. I was involved with the very first one in 2001 as a basic volunteer, doing the usual volunteer stooge sort of stuff. That year was the first year a major weekend event with a proper social program was held in Australia. It also featured workshops. In 2002 I was on the organising committee and played a big role in managing the event over the weekend. In 2003 I took a break. In 2004 MLX coincided with Swing City and was huge. It was also the most expensive event in the country at that time.
In 2005 a team made up of previous years’ organisers formed a nonprofit organisation (the MJDA) to run the event, and ran MLX as an all-social weekend. That was the cheapest full pass event in Australia at the time. I was on that team. As the weekend proceeded, numbers at each event increased massively, as locals who hadn’t bought passes were told by their friends that shit was hot, and the interstate visitor numbers were bolstered. In 2006 the same team ran the event, and we consciously decided to step things up in a big way. Two rooms at the late nights. Masses of bands. Serious promotion. The full pass was still ridiculously cheap. Crazy cheap. I think we doubled the pass sales. 2007 was a similar story. It was just nuts.
(a jam at MLX9, while I was DJing!)
Each year the attendee numbers increased massively. The event was run with the clear goals of being cheap and accessible for all dancers, yet also financially sustainable. I was involved because it was a nonprofit organisation, and because it is still stupidly cheap. It has a clear and firm policy of treating all volunteers really well, and the events themselves are very high quality. In 2008 I moved to Sydney and reduced my involvement to just finishing off coordinating the DJs. In 2009 I went to MLX as a punter and DJ and it was GREAT FUN. Same in 2010. BEST FUN EVER. I thoroughly recommend taking time off running your event to just attend as a punter. It makes you realise just how awesome it is, and it gives you a chance to actually enjoy the thing. This year I coordinated DJs for MLX11 and was blown away by just how tight and professional an event it is.
If you asked me whether I’d rather be involved with MLX as an organiser or as a punter/DJ, I’d be hard put choosing. I love going to it just as a punter because it’s an intense weekend in a great city, and total fun just to bum around at. But I also enjoyed working on the event this year because it’s such a big, interesting project. I think I’d be happy with either in the future. Maybe even prefer just DJing/puntering a bit, so I could really focus on DJing and dancing? Argh! What a choice to have to make!
So when I write about MLX, I’m a little biased. But my experience with the event over eleven years has varied so much, and I really feel now that I’m a contractor rather than a part of the core team, so I reckon I can write about it with some objectivity. Who am I kidding. But my love for MLX stems largely from its ethical intentions, its sheer quality as an event and its willingness to try new things and really set an example for other events in terms of music, working conditions for all involved and fiscal responsibility. It rocks.
Basically, MLX11 was the best event I’ve been to in Australia, ever. I’ve never been to an event with such a brilliant list of bands. Every single one was top shelf. And THEN, they ranged across all the best lindy hopping styles. Everything from hot early 30s medium sized band to juicy groovy hammond organ small group win. An 18 piece classic big band (from Perth!) doing arrangements so neat and performing them so well that I kept mistaking the band for the DJ. A chunky little swinging combo doing the sort of solid swinging powergroove/40s/50s swing that makes for brilliant lindy hop. A tight little late night band (from Perth!) made of dancers with a fun female vocalist that was actually really good. There were five bands, and they were all really, really good. I just couldn’t believe how good they were. I’ve never seen an Australian event with such consistently good and appropriate live music. Ever.
Then there were the DJs. I got to organise the DJs for MLX this year, so I able to put together a sampling of the strongest DJs I’d seen during the year (this is one of the reasons I travel a bit to dance events – so I can see who’s DJing, what they’re into, how popular they are with dancers) set them up in good time slots fun combinations, then just let them do their thing. That meant I was hearing my favourite sorts of music. But then things got BETTER! I couldn’t really get over just how GOOD all the DJs were. They’re all specialists in particular musical areas (including old scratchies, modern hot jazz bands, supergroove, chunky blues, classic big band swing), and I’d sort of set them up to do their sets expecting them to do X or Y or whatever it was I associated them with, musically. But EACH of them then managed their sets in the cleverest way, moving between styles and across genres to respond to the crowd’s interest, enthusiasm and stamina. It was just fucking magic. On Saturday night the main lindy hop room was still jammed with people lindy hopping at all the tempos at 5am! Even I was still in there dancing like a fool, and I was BUGGERED! I heard good reports from dancers all weekend, and I’m still getting emails and comments from people about the music. I just don’t think dancers could really get their heads around the quality of the music. I know I’m still kind of amazed. And I’m such a picky bastard, it’s very difficult to please me with every set.
The DJs at MLX11 included (in no particular order): Andy Fodor (Melb), Manon van Pagee (Melb), Trev Hutchison (Perth), Jarryd Reynolds (Adelaide), Matt Greenwood (Bris), Kenny Nelson (Colorado), Noni Mae Clarke (Melb), Sharon Callaghan (Melb), Keith Hsuan and me (Sam Carroll, Syd). The hardest part of coordinating DJs is knocking people back, and MLX is the highlight of the Australian DJing calendar, so lots of DJs look for sets at the event. It breaks my heart having to tell people the program is full, or that we’re looking for a specific type of DJ this year. There are still DJs that I’d like to add to a program like that, but we’d really reached maximum capacity this year. The program over all had a lot of live music – 1 band Friday evening, 2 Saturday evening/late night, 2 Sunday evening/late night – and this was GREAT. But it made for less DJing space. I was delighted, though, absolutely delighted by the way the DJs complemented the live music. It’s not often that I squee over a band break DJ’s work, but this MLX each of the band break DJs did really amazing jobs complementing, but not overshadowing the bands. It’s a tricky gig, and you’re really working all night, not just for the short blocks you’re playing music. There are performances, speeches, welcome dances and random interruptions to deal with during band break sets, as well as trying to avoid playing songs from the band’s set list. But these guys were guns.
MLX is generally the best social dancing weekend in the calendar, if you’re into hardcore dancing, but this year far outshone previous years. All through the weekend late night events ran over time. Main lindy hop rooms that usually finish at 4am were still pumping at 5.30am. Blues rooms just kept working and working. The Sunday didn’t end til 6am or something stupid. The venues were just right, the sound set ups were good, the provision of food and drink was important and done well, and the volunteers were cheery and well organised. All this, and MLX is a NONPROFIT event run by a team of volunteer coordinators. A committee. Anyone who’s ever worked on a dance event or on a committee knows just how difficult it is to get things done with a committee. Yet MLX consistently produces the best event in Australia. Every. Single. Year. I thought MSF was giving it a run for its money this year, but MLX pwnd all.
I like MLX because it’s just social dancing, and it tends to encourage random or crazy shenanigans. But not stupid shenanigans that make you cranky because they’re stopping you dancing. Fun shenanigans. I saw quite a few random costumes this weekend (my favourite was perhaps a bloke in a Black Swan costume for the Saturday dance), and I really liked the way the MLX theme (played to introduce the speeches and announcements) was, by the end of the weekend, met with loud singing-along and cheers, particularly as the MC Jarrod began initiating his speeches with some truly inspired interpretive dance. The theme was matched to the MLX theme – Turning it up to 11. I love this theme because it’s totally unrelated to lindy hop, it’s a bit lame (in a big hair way), and it also turned out to be totally fun to dress up for.
I think it’s worth talking a bit about why MLX is such good fun to DJ, and why it manages to get such brilliant sets from the DJs.
Firstly, MLX doesn’t stint on sound gear. We did have some problems on Thursday night this year, but that’s because we were using a gorgeous little hall with very high ceilings and lots of hard, bouncy surfaces. It was a lovely space, but it did make for weird acoustics with recorded music. But the team helped us fix stuff up as much as possible (I was DJing that night and did struggle a bit at first). Otherwise, every venue had the right amount of amplification, a good quality mixer and a good, comfortable space for the DJ to set up with the right lighting. I know that when I DJ MLX I can play any song, no matter how old or scratchy, because the sound gear will make it sound sweet. So I DJ to the limits of my collection, rather than playing it safe.
MLX treats DJs with lots of respect. DJs are introduced, back-announced, regularly cheered mentioned in speeches and listed all over the website. This year I made up a basic ‘Program of DJed music’ and put it up around the place so people could see who was on where and what they were doing in their sets, and it worked really well. The MLX peeps are also quick to buy DJs drinks and check in on them regularly to see if everything’s ok.
MLX pays DJs well, better than any other event in Australia, and gives them free entry to the events they work. There are still Australian events which don’t give DJs free entry to the events they’re DJing, and this makes me FURIOUS. I think it shows how little music is valued, and how little understanding these event coordinators have of the work that goes into DJing. Sure, I think live music is more important, but DJs do actually fill out the bulk of most Australian dancing weekends. And at events where the bands can be quite dodgy, the DJs extra important. Personally, I won’t DJ an event that doesn’t give me free entry, because when I’m DJing, I’m working. I’m also loathe to do gigs where I don’t get paid. My exceptions are for new or nonprofit or charity events, or for my best buddies (ie my really close personal friends) or for house parties. Really, I do so much DJing these days, and I like social dancing so much, I need an incentive to bring my laptop and work for a few hours at a social event. But MLX pays more than other events, and has recently introduced a blanket pay rate for band breaks, which recognises the amount of work band break DJs do, and which no other event does. DJs are also paid for any extra DJing they do beyond their rostered sets. DJs are also paid for the full length of their rostered sets, even if that set has to be cut short. Well done MLX!
MLX plans the DJing slots carefully and effectively. Set start and finish times are staggered, so that DJs can be properly introduced. Sets are at least an hour and a half long (unless there’s something difficult to work around), if not longer. The only challenge with MLX DJs is that they all love social dancing so much I had to stop myself pushing them to do more sets when I was planning the roster!
Probably the best part of DJing at MLX is that they have a creative and innovative approach to programming DJs and events. They’re willing to try new things. Sometimes these new things don’t work out, but most of the time they do. The B-Sides room a few years ago was super popular, and allowed for an alternative to the main lindy hopping room. The B-Sides room was just that – a BSide, where DJs could play whatever they liked and not be constrained by rules bout ‘what’s good for lindy hop’. It was a massively popular room, and has only been replaced in the last few years because hardcore blues dancing has been so incredibly popular. While DJs in the main room are encouraged to experiment with themes, most of them end up doing straight ahead, unthemed sets simply because MLX is such prime lindy hop DJing. DJs don’t need a theme to spice things up for themselves, and just want to PLAY ALL THE THINGS.
To sum up, then, I really enjoyed coordinating DJs for MLX because it allowed me to pick a team of awesome DJs, treat them really well, and set them up to do just do their thing. And they DID that thing. I love DJing at MLX because I know it will be the BEST DJing experience of the year. I’ll be able to play all the stuff I love but might not play at home. MLX brings the fittest, most adventurous, open-minded dancers to the floor, and they’re all willing to just give things a go, even if a song is faster or unfamiliar. And I don’t think it’s just the experienced dancers who are like this at MLX. I see newer dancers getting out there and giving it a go. The event really feels like a good place to try new stuff. And, hopefully, people go home to their scenes as inspired and enthusiastic about dancing as I am right now.
It’s spring here in Sydney (well, summer, technically), and that means flowers and pollen and snot. We’re in a temperate/subtropical zone, near the coast, and we get masses and masses of rain in the spring and autumn months. The European seasons are particularly useless as guides to weather in Sydney… well, for pretty much all of Australia, but I really feel the discrepency most here. The Dharawal calendar makes a lot more sense. Which isn’t surprising, seeing as how it’s the sum of 40 000 years worth of observation and knowledge, rather than 200 years of trying to force a round peg into a square hole. Despite the best efforts of British colonists, we are not England, and they have not made Australia so. But most European-Australians insist on using the European seasons to describe our climate and get all emotional about falling leaves and ‘real’ seasons from a country on the other side of the planet which really only exists in their parents’ imagination. It gives me the shits a bit.
The Dharawal calendar:
January/February/March Burran
Gaalung Marool
(hot and dry)
November/December Parra’dowee
Goray’murrai
(warm and wet)
Right now we’re in Parra’dowee, which means warm and wet. Which is what it is. Big, masive pouring rain for a week, straight-down rain, like a warm, heavy shower. And then things dry out and the plants go INSANE with their flowers, the birds go NUTS with the nectar and pollen in the flowers (especially the rainbow lorikeets, adrenaline-charged sex addicts at this time of year) and the bats get crazy for the fruit coming into season. All this is very picturesque, but by geez it makes for bad hayfever. Snot. Snot. Snot.
But Parra’dowee describes this season – warm and wet – far more effectively than ‘spring’. It’s not as though the little plants are crawling out of the frozen ground. The plants have been steadily growing for the last few months, and really only slowed down during the coldest part of the year. And ‘cold’ in Sydney means, oh, below 20*C at least! I never wear my Melbourne winter clothes, and never need scarves or woolly hats. But I’ve invested in lots more light cotton dresses since I’ve moved here (you can check the average temperatures and rainfall in these graphs).
Melbourne is (sort of) covered by the Brambuk calendar, which is pretty harsh. Very hot and dry in summer, very cold and often wet in winter. Total rubbish. It reminds me of living in Wagga, which was also rubbish, weather-wise.
Living in Sydney is like living in Brisbane or Fiji, but with less humidity and more moderate temperatures. Which is probably because they’re tropical places. I adore Sydney weather. Even in this wet season, the blocks of rain are bracketed by weeks of perfect, gloriously blue-skied days and gentle temperatures. All this makes Canberra all the stranger. Just over a mountain range to the east (sort of), the winters are freezing cold with snow, and the summers are bakingly hot and dry. Sydney is best. Canberra is our closest lindy hop scene, and we are the two closest scenes in Australia, so we visit each other for special events. It’s a three hour drive, or three hours on the bus for a $30 ticket (or $15 if you get organised early enough). One year coming home from Canberrang, the bus drove through snow flurries, then we arrived in Sydney where people were at the beach swimming.
“FIRST, REMEMBER THAT STYLE COMES IN ALL SIZES, SO THE BIGGER YOU ARE, THE MORE STYLE YOU HAVE. AND SECOND, DRAW ATTENTION TO YOUR BEST FEATURES BY POINTING AT THEM, AND CONCEAL YOUR FLAWS BY SUCKER PUNCHING ANYONE WHO MENTIONS THEM.” – Miss Piggy
I just wrote a very, very angry post over on yehoodi (where I never post), then tried to delete it, figured I couldn’t, then just kind of all-capped a cRaZy Lady comment. I WANTED to write about how total bullshit it was that someone can make a rape joke over there but I can’t type the word SHIT or FUCK without it being coyly replaced by ‘bloop’ or something. But I just kind of gave up in a huff.
This is a ballet blog, but this post talks about the difficulties in writing about dance. Not from a technical standpoint but from a creative and social one. I was just talking to Bobby White last night and we talked about the fact that there are some things we can’t talk about because of our other roles in this scene. It’s one of the main reasons why my production has slowed lately.
I immediately wrote this reply, and then deleted it:
I had these sorts of issues when I was writing and researching my PhD on dance. I wanted to write about the gender and class stuff I saw in my own scene in detail (ie labour relations, who does the unpaid work, how credit is distributed, power dynamics in teaching couples in class, etc) but it was difficult because I actually _lived_ in that scene, it’s a pretty small pool, anonymity is impossible, and there would be immediate repercussions for me.
Luckily I had a supervisor who knew about negotiating this stuff, and I had a body of cultural studies and sociological literature to help me out. There’s a body of literature on doing first person ethnographies, and also on things like action-research in sociology (where participants are involved in the research process). These helped me find a compromise between my research goals, my feminist goals and you know, not getting my arse kicked by angry dancers. I drew on some interesting work on doing ethnographic work in dance cultures to help me figure out how to position myself. I remember my supervisor saying to me “Yeah, that guy is going to be cranky that you talked about how the unequal distribution of domestic labour in his house lets him spend so much time on his DJing, but is that more important than exploring the way social power is distributed in your very own community?” And I figured yeah, he’ll get over it. Or he’ll learn to do the goddamn dishes.
Ultimately, I stuck with the principle ‘don’t shit where you eat’, and made tactical decisions about what I said and when. Thankfully, virtually no one has read my PhD. I’m now far more embarrassed by the glaring historical errors than the commentary on my local scene, which turned out to be disappointingly uncontroversial.
I sometimes worry about what I write on my blog, but I figure once you pass 35, who gives a fuck? I’m a chick with a big arse who’s never going to be a ‘cool’ dancer. Why not embrace that? Wear ill-fitting elastic-waisted pants, laugh too loudly, make stupid dadjokes, be the first person to offer a hand when it’s needed and speak up about unethical, cruel or bad stuff. None of that’ll get you laid, but it’ll sure as shit make life more tolerable. I’d rather risk a bit of public humiliation or snubbing than live with myself for keeping quiet about stuff I think is wrong. And I’m much rather risk losing a DJing, teaching or performing gig than pretend I don’t have a brain or an opinion.
My goal is to be one big-mouthed, disreputable, misbehaving, nosy, young-person-embarrassing, loud-talking pain in the arse when I hit 40.
Yeah, yeah, hardly any of that’s a surprise, right. But it got me thinking. Sure, I talk big – I’ll say what I like! – but I don’t always walk the walk. I’m not actually scary at all in real life, and am actually a big babby and not really tough at all. Unless I’ve just seen you be rude to one of the DJs on my team. Then I’m going to take you out to the back room and shout and swear at you til we’re both quite embarrassed and repentant. No, not really. Well, actually, yes really. But the important part here is that I won’t shout at you in person. I’ll wait til we’re in private, where we’ll only embarrass each other. And I’m actually more likely to use the Quiet Voice Of Shame, which my giant, hairy, muscley, fist-fighting brother taught me, and which is far more likely to make people cry and feel guilty for being poos.
This kind of leads me to my next point, which is the crux of this particularly long-winded and confusing post. Say what you like in person, but as we used to say in the Michie Building at the University of Queensland, “Don’t gossip in the stairwell.” Because stairwells are magnificent for funneling sound up and down. And anything you say in there will be broadcast to the universe. And as my Squeeze says, “Don’t put anything in an email or online that you wouldn’t say face to face.” Because the internet is not private. I think this is a very good approach. I have quite a few rules about how and why and what sort of events I’ll work on in the dance scene, but most of them revolve around being cool with my conscience, with working actively to improve shit for everyone and with not being a poo if I can possibly help it. And when it comes to writing or saying stuff in public, I try to remember what my interfering guilt-tripping mother would say, “How would it make you feel if someone said that to you?”
I don’t mind if some people in the dance scene don’t want to work with me or give me gigs because they think I’m a pain in the arse (I am, if you’re being an arse). But I would mind if I couldn’t speak my mind, couldn’t express my opinion or demonstrate that I do in fact have a brain, just so I could get a dance/score a DJing gig/whatever. I’m not prepared to do that. As I write this, I’m reminded of my thoughts about uppity women. Every now and then I worry that what I say will stop me scoring dances at gigs. Isn’t that crazy? But I think it’s an extension of what I’ve seen happen so often at dances: women followers will put up with bullshit behaviour from male leaders because they like a) getting asked to dance, and b) they like the status of being asked to dance. Oh man. Here we go again, women feeling validated by male approval.
I think I’d rather be a big pain in the arse that bother trying to figure out how to be approval-worthy.
Jerry’s post originally caught my interest because I’d deleted that comment on yehoodi because I was being openly very critical of a high profile person over there. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have bothered him, but I had that moment of ‘don’t cause trouble’ that seems to be drummed into women and plenty of Australians at birth. I’ve also had some real problems adjusting to the leap in readers my blog’s been getting. It kind of frightens me to think that people are out there, possibly thinking unkind thoughts. But it doesn’t frighten me that much. And, to be honest, I don’t stop and consider all those imaginary people whenever I get the urge to pour out a few thousand words. I just kind of wish they’d go start their own tumblr or dig into faceplant. It was a bit nicer when only a handful of people were reading this site. It was even better that that handful weren’t people I see every week out dancing.
I was also interested in Jerry’s comment because I’ve had the same sorts of thoughts when reviewing books for academic journals. Hacking about in academia also made it very clear that what I wrote wasn’t any where near as important as which arses I kissed. Or more importantly for me, which comments I caught between my teeth instead of shouting out. Eventually I decided I just couldn’t be bothered with all that fakery and pandering and arse kissing. I’m rubbish at being fake.
But then, I think that writing a review or commenting on current events within your own community needn’t involve faking it. You can be honest, and write well, and be clear, and not be an arsehole. You just gotta stop and think about it first. If only I spent more time stewing on blog posts, instead of banging them out and pressing ‘publish’!
You know, of all the things I worry about when I think of people’s responses to these posts, the most troubling is that they (you) might find them too long. FOR FUCK’S SAKE, WOMAN. It’s a BLOG – it’s MEANT to be long and boring. That’s how the word was invented! It might be inappropriate to write really long comments on people’s faceplant updates, but it’s TOTALLY OK TO WRITE ALL THE WORDS! It’s totally FINE to have ideas and opinions! Some bugger’s got to fill up all these intertubes, and it might as well be YOU.
All this kind of comes around to writing and dance (and writing about dance… or dancing about architecture) because I’ve been talking to and hanging with more and more writers these days. And most of them are also book reviewers. So they’re reading and writing about their friends’ and colleagues’ books. This is the sort of thing that routinely happens in academia, though most book reviews in journals are written by the peeps lower down the food chain, which confuses things a bit. Especially as there’s a real art to writing book reviews. I’m talking about reading and writing and writing about writing within one community (ie teh worldz of bookz) because it’s a bit like writing about dance. When I read Jerry’s FB post, I thought immediately of Kerryn’s excellently useful blog post ‘… and a bad bad review …’. This is totally cool because Kerryn is a ninja reviewer (doing lots and lots of reading and reviewing each week), but she’s also a ninja writer. Kerryn’s post gives us a way of writing reviews – reviewing things usefully – without being an arse.
As I write all this down, I’m reminded of an interesting article I read about doing restaurant reviews by a famous restaurant critic (so famous I can’t remember his name). He was talking about how he’s now been barred from a few restaurants because he writes reviews which aren’t always fawning and positive. He tells the truth. And that has made me think about the way food blogging has become the only really financially viable blogging genre in the tubaverse. Dood – they have massive prizes for comps! And they get to eat out! This is all kind of related, because most of us eat, so we all kind of figure we have an idea about how to eat and how restaurants should work and what counts as good noms. But that’s not really the case. Not all of us are good at writing about or talking about eating. Well, in a way that’s much use to people as a review. Reviewing is a skill, and reviewing well takes real talent. But in the restaurant world, a well-placed, well-clicked blog review can make money or lose money for a restaurant (or an ingredient, or a publication or a tool).
I guess what I’m trying to say here is: think before you write. But don’t stop writing, and do NOT stop thinking. As my friend Kirsty says, it’s not possible to think too much, and as NANOWRIMO demonstrates, most of us don’t write enough. Just don’t be a poo when you do it.
…ok, I actually had lots more to say, and I had wanted to edit this post down to coherency, but I’m suffering from major allergies all of a sudden and my sinuses are killing. So, sorry about this. I’ll have to end here.
Appropriation, step-stealing, cultural transmission, imitation, impersonation, copying, poaching….
So my last chunky post ‘Historical Recreation’: Fat Suits, Blackface and Dance has kind of hit like a ton of bricks. Cultural transmission in dance – the movement of dance steps and forms and ideas between and within cultures – is pretty much my core research interest, and I definitely don’t want to leave this topic just yet. I certainly didn’t want to leave things with a fairly despairing discussion about blackface and discomforting appropriation.
This is a very long post, and it’s divided into these sections:
Right. What do I mean when I talk about ‘cultural transmission’. Basically, in this context, I’m talking about the movement of cultural ‘stuff’ – in this case dance steps/rhythms/styling/etc – between cultures. But why stop there? I like writing long posts, and this is such an exciting topic. So strap in.
Wait. I’ve just dated myself. Ok. So another cool example is the way Krumping was promoted in the mainstream by David LaChapelle’s 2005 film Rize. Fark. My cultural references – they are out of date! And I don’t want to suggest that just one film or music video is enough to stimulate the shift of a dance from marginal to mainstream spaces. There’s quite a bit more going on, and quite a few more people involved in the process, from dance teachers to performances by lesser-known dancers to trends in night club cultures and DJing interests.
Basically, we’re talking about dances moving from one cultural context (in these cases queer culture and urban African American youth street dance culture) to another (mainstream, predominantly white-owned and organised music industry). These two examples suggest that this cultural transmission thing is a matter of one rich, powerful culture ripping off another. Maybe. But cultural transmission is more complicated. Not every example of borrowing or step stealing is dodgy.
I often talk about the cake walk as an example of cultural transmission, and I’ve listed a bunch of references for my ideas about cake walk in Dance competitions and policing public space. In this case, slaves borrowed particular movements from the culture of the slave owners. And then fucked with it. This is a bit more transgressive than Madonna having some kids vogue in her video clip.
Power, class, identity and cultural transmission
But I do think we need to keep Katrina Hazzard Gordon’s words in mind: “Who has the power to steal from whom?” What are the broader power relationships at work in the society where this transmission is happening? Who has the most money? Whose opinions and beliefs are most frequently presented in the media? Which types of sexual relationships are presented as ‘normal’? Yes, it is possible for less powerful people to steal dance steps from other groups, but what does it mean when they do?
If we’re going to do informed thinking about this, we have to recognise that societies and relationships are structured by class, by gender, by sexuality, by age, by ethnicity and so on. The choices we can (and are allowed to) make, the way we dance, is affected by who we are, as social beings. If you totally believe that none of this matters, and that the individual is simply who they have made themselves, then this is not the post (nor the blog) for you. I’m not saying that we are powerless to change our fates, but I am saying that it is naive to assume that we are just the sum of biology or individual choices. Social animals, yo.
In my work I’ve argued that cultural transmission involves some sort of ideological and structural reworking for the thing or practice being transmitted. Dance steps aren’t just carried, whole, to new cultural locations and traditions. They get changed a bit. They’re usually toned down for conservative mainstream audiences. There’s quite a bit written about this, stacks talking about hip hop, but quite a bit on partner dancing. For example, Jane Desmond talks about mambo and its popularity in white communities in the 1950s, and Sheenagh Pietrobruno discusses salsa classes in Montreal. But this repackaging of marginalised practice for mainstream consumption isn’t restricted to dance. Rosetta Tharpe’s guitar playing was retuned for white audiences. The recent remake of Hairspray pretty much undid all the badass subversion of the John Waters original – folks got whiter, language got cleaner, dances go duller, drag queens got undragged.
It’d be easy to just give up, to dismiss cultural transmission as indelibly marked by class and power and ethnicity and the work of The Man. But then, you’d be giving up before you got to the good part. Yes, the commodification of dances like mambo and lindy hop can be read as the appropriation of street dance by elite groups in the mainstream. But cultural transmission doesn’t work in only one direction. We hoomans, we’re complicated beasts. And terribly creative. Cultural transmission can be subversive and exciting.
Cultural transmission via Star Trek fans
I developed my ideas about step stealing and cultural transmission by way of fan studies. Or, more specifically, by way of textual poaching, Camille Bacon Smith and women SF fans. Women who wrote slash fiction. The idea here, is that fans of the Star Trek television show imagined whole new lives for the heroes, Captain Kirk and Mr Spock. Whole new relationships. In the tv show Spock and Kirk are platonic friends. Very good friends. But in the imaginations of fans, they could be so much more.
I really like this idea that characters in a story have entire lives we don’t see. I also really like the thought of fans – people who are painted as helpless consumers – totally fucking up the myth that they are victims of aggressive television. Basically, I took this idea of textual poaching (where fans ‘poached’ characters or stories from mainstream media texts) and applied it to dance. Thing is, I wasn’t the first person to get up on this idea. Frankie Manning himself had a reputation as a hardcore step stealer. Someone who’d copy your steps, then pull them out himself. Of course, the trick lies not in creating an exact copy of that original step, but in remaking it and performing it a new and unique way that makes people SQUEE. And Frankie certainly made people SQUEE. Nor was he first at this. It’s a feature of vernacular dance generally.
Cultural transmission between generations
I’m also very interested in the transmission of dance steps and forms across generations. It stands to reason that young people gonna do young people things, and there are types of dances which they’ll invent to suit their needs and interests. Lindy hoppers totally understand this. We regularly tell each other stories about how the swingout was an adaptation of the European partner dance format. Or, to be clearer, there’s a story about how Shorty George Snowden and his partner broke out into open during a dance contest, and totally blew people’s brains. And of course, there’s also the story about how Frankie Manning and Freda Washington, keen to bring something new to win a dance competition pulled out the first air step and blew people’s brains with that.
Vernacular dance happens in cross-generational spaces, from homes to street parties and church dances. There’s quite a bit written about this: Katrina Hazzard Gordon has a book called Jookin’, LeeEllen Friedland talks about this in reference to tap dance and hip hop. As a result, dance forms do not simply die out or disappear when the current generation moves on to something else. ‘Old’ dances live on in the dancing bodies of older people in the community, and are regularly revisited and ‘borrowed’ by younger people.
Jonathan David Jackson argues that black movement traditions are ‘choreologically contemporaneous’. That’s another way of saying that new dance steps and styles (like lindy hop in the 20s/30s, breakdance in the 70s/80s) develop at the same time as old fashioned steps stop being popular with young people. Jackson argues that rather than disappearing, replaced by new steps, old steps are recycled.
principles of physical, spatial, aural, and qualitative action are passed on from one tradition to the next (41).
This is pretty exciting stuff. It means that lindy hop didn’t die out in the 1950s. It just changed shape. This also means that older dances are continually revived and rediscovered by younger people. How? By watching old folks dance, by learning from old folks. But also by the fact that principles of movement (balance, spatial awareness, everyday rhythmic movement) persist in a community. They don’t just disappear.
I really like this cross-generational aspect as it encourages a relationship between young people and older people which is based on mutual respect, and cements the role of older people in our community. I once gave a talk at a conference on cultural transmission in dance where there were some young Indigenous Australian dancers from Bangarra in the audience. I ended up talking about this idea of learning dance from elders with a young koori woman choreographer. We were both excited about the idea that our dance cultures were so community-rooted, but we each also had frustrations about how this could limit what we did as women dancers. In her case, there are some warrior dances which women aren’t allowed to learn, but which she found particular exciting and inspiring. So there are limitations to this cross-generational stuff as well.
Improvisation, making stuff up and dance-as-discourse
Yet this cross-generational ‘choreography’ also implies and responds to social change within the community and wider society. Lindy hop was a response to the development of swinging jazz and the rise of the Harlem renaissance: new music demanded new dance steps. Jazz, at its most fundamental level, combines improvisation with formal structure. For me, this is the most exciting part. Jazz music is vernacular music (or it was – I’ve been meaning to write about jazz’s shift from folk or pop music to ‘art’ music). Jazz is also all about improvisation – making stuff up. Innovating. Changing. Being flexible enough to bend and respond to the user’s needs and ideas. So jazz dance has to be the same way. It’s all about innovation, improvisation, change, response.
Improvisation, making stuff up and ballet
So, if innovation and change are essential parts of vernacular dance, what about concert dances like ballet? I’d argue that they’re all about managing change and in many cases restricting it, preserving dances as they are. But even there, choreographers and dancers are innovating. And it’s certainly true that vernacular dance is also carefully managed. There are, for example, some dances you wouldn’t do in front of your parents. Frankie Manning used to tell a story about his mother going out to dance in a way that she didn’t think was appropriate for a young boy to see (let alone do). This is an example of how dance at once reflects cultural and social mores, but is also regulated and managed by community values. Just like ballet, only it’s done in a different way.
George Balanchine is a good example of a ballet dancer and choreographer who brought African American movements and aesthetics to ballet, pushing some barriers (not without challenges) and introducing new ideas to a fairly resistant culture.
(Katherine Dunham, 1943 Life Collection) Katherine Dunham was a dancer and choreographer who did similar work, stretching concert dance with movements and shapes and ideas from other cultures. In this case, we can see clearly politicised goals at work – Dunham was making it clear that ballet and ‘elite’ white mainstream art dance was enriched by contributions from other dances and other dance cultures.
Pearl Primus is another example of a black woman dancer moving into ballet/concert dance and bringing with her quite radical ideas about movements and types of movement.
Cultural transmission in dance as politics
These are all examples of ethnicity and concert dance as a place for cultural transmission. I talked a bit about the specific changes and differences between these different dance traditions in gimme de kneebone bent. I’m really excited by the idea of dance as a product of culture as well as physiology. Our sense of aesthetics in dance is informed not only by our cultural values and who we are, as social beings, but also by our ideas about gender and beauty and art generally. This is partly why I get so worked up about shoes. High heel shoes make feet seem smaller and pointed, and the leg seem longer and straighter. Legs in heels aren’t some sort of objective marker of ‘beauty’. Feeling that legs in heels is ‘sexier’, ‘more feminine’, ‘better’ than legs in other shoes is a product of how we are raised, of social/economic class, the culture we live in, and how we think about bodies and beauty. And not everyone shares these ideas. I simply think it’s a mistake to box ourselves in with limited ideas about what can be beautiful or skilled dancing. We are capable of such wonderful things; why limit ourselves to just one small corner of that?
So change (often through individual improvisation and innovation), is a necessary feature of vernacular dance. Re-presenting everyday life in dance lets dancers express themselves, and engage with the ideas and powers of their local community and wider society. This become especially important when the dancers involved do not have access to the ‘official public sphere’ – to newspapers, films, mainstream media, public lectures, the education system and so on. Dance can give disempowered folk a chance to recreate gain ‘control’ of their often hostile everyday life.
Everyday life and cultural transmission in dance
Vernacular dance – street dance, folk dance, rather than concert or stage dance – are responses to people’s everyday lives and environments. So you see types of movements in vernacular dance which echo the dancer’s everyday movement and lifestyle. LeeEllen Friedland talks about rhythmic movement in day to day life, arguing that when you live in a culture where music and dance are part of everyday life, there’s no clear line between ‘dance’ and ‘rhythmic movement’. So, for example, the basic charleston step which we lindy hoppers are nuts about, is structurally very like walking. The arms swing, the legs move forwards and back, the bounce which generates energy in the movement originates in the torso (or core) travels out through the body, to the arms and hands. Just like when you walk. More specifically, there are plenty of jazz steps which are deliberate references to everyday activities and movements. For example the ‘cherry picker’ (or I’ve heard it called ‘praise allah’) looks just like reaching up to pick cherries, then down to put them in a basket.
One of the things I’ve especially liked is the thought of dancers imitating real live people in their neighbourhoods. Or ‘types’ of people. The pimps in Harlem. Sailors on the docks. Plantation owners. For a people without access to the mainstream media, dance offers a right of reply, a discursive space for the thrashing out of ideas, the resolution of conflict, the management of public identities and social norms.
What all this then means is that dance becomes an extension of everyday life, rather than a discrete, separate activity.
Cultural transmission in modern day lindy hop
That’s pretty much what my research was about. Except I then went on to talk about what happens in modern day lindy hop contexts. Because I was grounded in media and cultural studies, I was particularly interested in how dancers today use digital media to do all this. I talked about digital video clips and learning dance steps and sharing dance ideas cross-culturally. I also talked about online talk and developing and cementing international and inter-scene relationships via online talk. And I talked about DJing using digital tools.
Ok, so let’s go there. Let’s talk about modern day lindy hop and cultural transmission. If we can agree that black American dancers imitating and step stealing and poaching is empowering and subversive, what does it mean when modern day dancers start doing this stuff? I think it can be highly problematic (as I described in ‘Historical Recreation’: Fat Suits, Blackface and Dance. But we can’t stop there. What about Korea? What about Japan and Singapore? What about black American dancers today learning lindy hop? What about Asian-Australian dancers imitating Dean Collins? Shit is wacked, right? I mean, we can’t just write off the modern lindy hop project as fucked up appropriation or racism. For every blackface performance there’s stuff like this:
This is, of course, a group of Korean lindy hoppers making a birthday greeting for Frankie Manning, combining traditional Korean song and dance with the shim sham. It’s the ultimate mark of respect for an older man, a teacher, and a hero for these young Korean people. It’s also a brilliant example of cultural transmission, combining all sorts of musical and dancing influences. I think Frankie would have adored it. I know I do. It makes me tear up with its sincere respect and affection for Frankie Manning.
And we have to think about the Two cousins video clip. Neither of the men in that clip are African American, but they are of African descent, and they are thoroughly grounded in the history of this dance, both creatively and politically. I remember Ryan François talking about how important it was a young black British man to discover lindy hop and Frankie Manning. This recreationism can be suspect, but it can also be wonderful and empowering and exciting.
I’ve talked a lot about race and ethnicity here. But let’s talk about gender and sexuality.
Historical recreationism, gender and having a clue
I have some reservations about a hardcore historical recreationist approach to lindy hop today. Mostly because, hey, we don’t live in the 1920s, 30s or 40s. Yes, the costumes and the music and the dances are fun. Super fun. And it’s totally ok to spend lots of time and effort into recreating them. But the 1920s, 30s and 40s weren’t terribly awesome places to live. Particularly if you weren’t white. It was even a bit shit if you were a woman. I mean, I like the right to vote, to own property, to divorce. I like having clean water and food, and good solid health care. I like knowing my child won’t die from polio or that I won’t die from a botched abortion on a kitchen table because I didn’t have access to safe contraception. And I’m a white woman. If I’d been black, in America or Australia, things would have been way shitter.
I don’t want to recreate those days. I don’t want to pretend that they were so wonderful and great. And I think that if you’re going to get into historical recreationism, you need to be very aware of your own privilege and power, and of the broader historical contexts of the clothes and music and dances you love. I mean, a Pearl Harbour dance, today? Not so cool. Blackface? Again, you gotta have a think about what that meant at the time, and what it means now. This is why I’m really not ok with WWII themed dances. I’m not at all ok with planning a dance – a good party time – based on the idea of conflict that killed so many and to which my own grandparents were so seriously opposed. Sure, I think we should remember these conflicts, but I also think we should think about those wars and the meanings behind the symbolism we just mash into our dance events.
Being right on and doing historical recreationism: fan SQUEE
Ok, so how do I reconcile all those misgivings with my absolute passion for the dances and music of the period? How do I do recreationism without giving myself the shits? Firstly, I go for the intent and the ideas behind and within these dances. Lindy hop, jazz dance, vernacular dance can be so subversive. Think of that cake walk, the mocking of slave owners, the thumbing of the nose to the oppressor. That’s an excellent idea. Think about impersonation and derision dance – speaking back, responding to bullshit politics on the dance floor. This is exciting for me because it is non-violent, creative activism. But it can also just be plain good fun. I mean, it blows my BRAIN that leading in lindy hop can at once be so incredibly subversive (a woman making decisions? a woman, complete without a man? unpossible!), but is also (and more importantly) so much FUN.
I’ve always thought that while getting angry about injustice is useful for galvanising the self, it’s also bloody depressing. Eventually, I need to get active and to empower myself. And I see being physically strong and capable (to the best of my ability), being creative, finding pleasure in my self and my own body as the most exciting way of fucking over the patriarchy. I mean, the sweetest, finest revenge is simply being happy and confident. Particularly in my culture, where the ‘beauty industry’ is all about trying to make me anxious and self-doubting. I choose not to waste my time and worry on what my hair looks like or whether I’m pleasing some man. I choose to spend my worry and time on getting that goddamn swingout as fine as it can possibly be.
The fact that we can do all this in public is also pretty damn good. Dance is a public discourse. It’s an engagement with ideas and social forces and structures. It’s a way of expressing our own ideas. Our own selves. That is why I’m so keen on the idea of diversity in dance, and in not enforcing a particular way of dancing as a woman or a man. We are all the more richer for our differences.
What do I find so great about this? First, it’s great dancing. I like what I see. It’s historical recreationism to the nth degree. These are two modern day dancers performing choreography inspired by a particular film sequence, wearing costumes inspired by that same sequence, using the sound from that sequence. SQUEE! But unlike the Day At the Races routine, we’re not seeing any dodgy fatsuits. Race is still happening here – these are two white kids performing a routine danced by two white man. Whiteness is race, is ethnicity. I think class is also at work (and a central theme for the original routine, of course). But the gender stuff is what I get most squee about.
I really really like it that Sarah has co-opted the part of a male actor and dancer. So many of the solo jazz routines danced by women around the lindy hop world have them in some sort of sexeh frock, doing teh sexeh ladee dancing. But in this case, Sarah is wearing trousers, a blouse (rather than a shirt), flat shoes, and her hair is tied up. She definitely reads as conventionally female, but not in a spangles-and-sex sort of way. More importantly, she’s dancing virtually the same steps as her male fellow performer. I especially like it that this performance works in complement to her existing ideas about shoes and whatnot. I think it’s particularly subversive that she can do all the gender stuff.
Dancing in drag
I’m quite keen on this idea of dancing in drag, or of performing gender in this way. I mean, I often think about my own dancing in this sort of way. I make extensive, and thorough, use of historical clips myself. I use them as a source for new steps, for ways of holding my body, for styling, for attitude. But I’m using both the male and female dancers for this. When I’m dancing, I frequently think to myself “I’m Frankie!” or “I’m Al!” or even “I’m Skye!” It’s not that I’m actually imagining I’m these men in particular, or a man in more general terms. I’m very happy with being a woman. And with femininity (just not that boringly conventional heteronormative ladygirl femininity). But sometimes, in those moments when I’m dancing, I can imagine that I’m occupying that space that is awesome dancing and freedom of movement and creativity that I associate with my male heroes and role models. I want to occupy that Al Minns Leon James attitude, that Frankie power and excitement, that Skye dancing-squee enthusiasm. It makes me feel confident and happy. I know I’ll never dance like them, nor do I really want to be just like them, but it can be important to me to put on that identity like a costume. So when I’m dancing, I’m wearing that attitude, and it gives me confidence. Also, playing dress up and make believe is bloody good fun.
So when I see Sarah in that clip, I think ‘Yep. That works for me.’ It’s a moment where the dressing up and recreation is super fun and exciting. I don’t have to negotiate dodgy race politics. I can just enjoy the subversion of a woman ‘dancing man’ but owning it in her way. I guess, though, that this is how hegemony and patriarchy work. The smooth fit of class and race seems ‘right’, and anything else is kind of jagged and unsettling. We’re used to seeing these sorts of images of healthy young white male bodies being athletic and creative, ‘speaking’ and articulating a clever commentary on social relationships. Not much is being challenged by the original sequence. Really, the best part is Sarah’s occupying the male character and reworking it to accommodate her own gender.
Eccentric dance: where I’d like to live
I think this is why I’m very interested in eccentric dances. I had this sudden moment about a year ago, when I was doing lots of solo work, when I suddenly thought, watching videos of myself “Why am I trying to be ‘beautiful’ or ‘cool’ or otherwise conventionally attractive or ok? These guys aren’t.” You know that moment when you first watch yourself dancing on video and you cringe? Well, I realised that I was trying to get rid of that feeling by conforming to the sorts of ‘cool’ dancing I saw in modern day comps. I gradually realised that it wasn’t really possible for me to look like that. I’m not tall and thin; I’m kind of square with some round parts. I’m not hugely athletic. I have a round belly and lots of jelly all over me. I have big slabs of muscle in my legs and arse, and my arms don’t quite get straight. I’d been thinking of these as problems to overcome. But then I decided that these could become my strengths. No one else is quite my shape, or moves quite my way. I don’t need to please the people watching me – I can make them uncomfortable. Or nervous. Or embarrassed. Or – goddess forbid! – make them laugh.
This is when I started getting serious about using archival footage for finding role models.
Snake Hips Tucker: in the 1930 film Crazy House. It doesn’t seem possible to do what he does, but watch his hands – how does he contrast their light fluttering with the crazy stuff in his joints? Or the way he makes walking interesting in Love in the Rough in 1930. He was a frightening, aggressive, violent man who could do amazing, mesmerising things on stage that wouldn’t let you look away.
Al Minns Leon James: does more with his face than with his body, but at the same time, his movements are so precise and so carefully planned, they make you watch every second.
James Barton: in 1929 film After Seben. There’s that moment at 2.08 when he stops to wipe his shoes, where it feels like he’s disrupting the flow of the routine, and doing something silly and inappropriate. How can I use that idea of disrupting narrative ‘flow’? And he’s a white man in blackface: how can I unravel that and make it tenable? Is it even possible?
And my latest obsession, James Berry in Spirit Moves. I like the way his movements are just so strange, especially compared with Sandra Gibson. In this film, I want to be Berry. I’ve seen sultry woman dancing a million times before. But how often do you get to see strange woman dancing?
There are heaps of other clips to reference, and lots of women dancers to reference as well. I really like eccentric dances, because they’re about finding your own way of using your own body to do your own stuff. I could get really into reproducing the stuff I see in films exactly. And I do. But ultimately, what I’m really trying to do is find my own flavah flave. I want to be utterly unique. I find inspiration in all sorts of dance clips, but I don’t want to be a carbon copy of something from ye olden days.
But this post has gone on long enough. To sum up, I want to say that cultural transmission is such a complicated thing. It’s inflected by all sorts of issues, and it’s just not very interesting or useful to dismiss it all as ‘appropriation’. There are ways of negotiating good stuff, here, and I’m not ready to let it go.
References:
Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Series in Contemporary Ethnography. Eds. Dan Rose and Paul Stoller. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
Bacon-Smith, Camille. Science Fiction Culture. Feminist Cultural Studies, the Media and Political Culture. Eds. Mary Ellen Brown and Andrea Press. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Desmond, Jane C. “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies.” Cultural Critique (Winter 1993 – 94): 33 – 63.
Desmond, Jane C. ed. Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. London: Duke University
Press, 1997.
Friedland, LeeEllen. “Social Commentary in African-American Movement Performance.” Human Action Signs in Cultural Context: The Visible and the Invisible in Movement and Dance. Ed. Brenda Farnell. London: Scarecrow Press, 1995. 136 – 57.
Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. “African-American Vernacular Dance: Core Culture and Meaning Operatives.” Journal of Black Studies 15.4 (1985): 427-45.
Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Jackson, Jonathan David. “Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing.” Dance Research Journal 33.2 (2001/2002): 40 – 53.
Pietrobruno, Sheenagh. “Embodying Canadian Multiculturalism: The Case of Salsa Dancing in Montreal.” Revista Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses nueva época, número 3. (2002).
