Lindy Hop Dancer Frankie Manning Would Have Been 102 on May 26, 2016

Posted on May 31, 2016 by WildBill

Frankie Manning didn’t invent the “Lindy Hop”, but he was instrumental in making it popular. The Lindy Hop was a “street dance”, i.e., something invented by the dancers themselves, rather than more elite dancing instructors. (In that respect it shares with the sophisticated Argentine Tango, which grew out from its origins in brothels.) It was being developed at the Savoy ballroom in Harlem (a black ghetto in New York City), and got named the Lindy Hop by one of the dancers there (Georges “Shorty” Snowden) when he was asked by a journalist what its name was, who groped for an answer and found it in the headlines about Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. Lindy went national and became higher class (and its name was changed to Jitterbug), particularly with Benny Goodman and big band swing starting in 1936. Frankie Manning wandered by the Savoy in 1929, and soon became a passionate Lindy dancer and the ambassador for it … to the extent that he was worshipped around the world for his artistry. Frankie’s favorite song was Count Basie’s “Shiny Stockings”, which seems slow to Wilddancer for Lindy Hop, but you can see hundreds of folks doing it in a tribute video made on his 88th birthday. We at Wilddancer had been dancing for 10+ years when we saw a swing dancer do a back flip onto his hands, and back onto his feet during a “For Dancers Only” program at Stanford University on April 14, 2000 by Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. It must have been Frankie Manning, who would have been “only 86” at the time. And he was 89 when he astonished a crowd in Sweden.

The Gresham’s Law of Social Couples Dancing Today

Posted on January 7, 2016 by WildBill

Gresham’s law is an economic principle that is commonly stated as: “Bad money drives out good”. But this principle has much broader applicability. For example, to social couples dancing.

Human beings have a long history of dancing in some form, be it as individuals, couples, or groups. The first couples dance Wilddancer recognizes that is still being taught and done today in most western countries is the Mazurka, which started in the 1500’s. The first Waltz (the Volta) dates back to 1556, with many variations since then. The Ländler arrived in the Austrian countryside about 1690, then moved to Vienna and a variation became the Viennese Waltz. After these came (in historical order) the couples dances Bolero, Paso Doble, Polka, Merengue, Habanara and Milonga (now Tango), Foxtrot, Rumba, Samba, Lindy Hop (later called Jitterbug), Cha Cha, Mambo, East Coast Swing, Jive, West Coast Swing, Texas Two-Step, Hustle, and Nightclub Two Step.

People who have danced for many years will tell you that the Twist killed touch dancing. If so, the “Freestyle” that people have done for the last few decades (essentially waving your butt while shifting your feet a bit) has danced on its grave. Its two main virtues are that it does not take any training and it doesn’t take much space on a dance floor (assuming that the dancers are not too drunk). But it really isn’t a guy-gal couples dance, as one sees a lot of gal-gal couples (either the guys are in short supply or have two left feet). But the net result is that the unskilled dancers are monopolizing the dance floor and displacing the skilled ones, ergo Gresham’s Law of Social Couples Dancing.

Even worse, according to an essay entitled Dancing Properly by noted British philosopher Roger Scruton, Freestyle removes the sociability of the physical contact, and perpetuates the bad manners so rampant in current times.

Sunday in the Park with … Lindy

Posted on May 10, 2015 by WildBill

Social dancing is where you find it. In our persona as Wilddancers we have danced in large public squares and parks in China (as the only Caucasians present–and with the background of a bunch of dance lessons–we naturally drew a crowd, all of whom wanted to dance with each of us). And this outdoor dancing happens in the U.S. as well … especially in places like San Francisco where the weather is usually good. (A little chilly sometimes, but when you’re doing the fast-tempo version of swing called Lindy Hop you get warmed up pretty fast.) Not only is it free, but from a small group with a boombox nearly 20 years ago it has expanded to a group as large as 200 on some Sundays, complete with instructors. This all takes place Sundays from 11am to 2pm on the sidewalk behind the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park.

Annual Dance Conference Excels

Posted on August 12, 2013 by WildBill

The dance world is rapidly reaching critical mass, if developments at the combined conference of the World Dance Alliance-Americas (WDA-A) and the Dance Critics Association (DCA) held at the one-of-a-kind Scotiabank Dance Center in Vancouver, BC, Canada during July 29-August 4 are any indication. Highlights included world-class innovative dance routines, strong coverage of the burgeoning urban dance category, a brand-new dance journal, expansion of the WDA to Europe with a fully worldwide conference in Angers (France) in 2014, and a massive government effort to catalog and measure dance in all its forms within Canada. The event was all the more noteworthy because the two organizations are all-volunteer ones, so all the heavy lifting was being done as a labor of love. WDA-A Conference Committee Chairman Scott Martin was everywhere, and did a terrific job before and during the event

The conference focused on dances that are performed for audiences, so the only participants who actually dance are the performers on stage, who take part in “concerts”. In social couples dancing, which—with the exception of Wilddancer—was essentially unrepresented at this conference, there is no audience, everyone participates, and the events are called “parties”. But the WDA-A seems happy to include all forms of dancing, so we will likely see and hear more about social couples dancing in the future, with support from Wilddancer. And with the strong feeling that the organization wanted to be inclusive, to welcome all forms of dance, and to chronicle changes in the dance world as they happen, the WDA-A is in a strong position to grow and adapt. We expect that social couples dancing will be the beneficiary as rhythms and movements from other categories, or even whole new dances, are integrated into what is already being practiced in ballrooms and club venues. We are particularly interested to see what, if any, changes will come via a flow from urban dance (AKA hip hop or break dancing), which is already a social phenomenon but not specifically for couples.

(During the DCA portion of the conference veteran critic George Jackson pointed out an interesting overlap between ballet and lindy hop. Pioneering dance critic Carl Van Vechten wrote in 1930 that the new Lindy Hop would likely follow the pattern he had observed with the Cake Walk, Bunny Hug, Turkey Trot, Charleston, and Black Bottom, in which roughly every decade a black dancer would invent a new step that would become popular with black (and sometimes with white) dancers. Whether or not it was ever done, Van Vechten pointed out that the Lindy Hop “could be danced, quite reasonably, and without alteration of tempo, to many passages in the Sacre du Printemps [Rite of Spring] of Stravinsky” (see Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars, by Joel Dinerstein, University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.))