One of the ways to “legitimize” the blues scene that is rapidly growing in Toronto is to have blues-centric dances as opposed to having “blues” music (and I use that loosely) at end of a swing night. Luckily for us, Toronto is going buck-wild like a prodigy child about blues dancing and there is a bunch of opportunities for dancing.
Had a great turn out at the first Yonge and Bloor Blues event and you could say it was a bit of success. We had about sixty to seventy people throughout the course of the event. This by itself is not a lot of people compared to our local lindy hop saturday night dance (which...
Here’s the deal. Ever since I moved to Toronto, I have been asking, “why is there never any actual blues dances in the city?”. Sure every now and then we would get a fat dance from local events like the Toronto University Exchange (which btw, is coming up again in January), or late night at...
In many ways, I enjoy these smaller exchanges a lot more than the 300-400 attendance exchanges because you actually get to meet the locals and feel like you are part of the event. The 2009 North Star Blues Festival/Exchange was filled with lots of memories and great dancing. For myself, the exchange really was about...
Here are the videos for the team cuttin’ competition contest finals (split into three parts) between Minneapolis’ “Team Planet” and our group, the “Toronto Cuttin’ Crew“. Representing for team Toronto, we had myself, Shannon Refvik, Tien Le, and Kim Dennill. Minneapolis’ team was led by the one and only Amanda. Northstar Blues – Team Cutting...
I found out that that someone already posted videos up of the solo cuttin’ contest. Thanks to FloridaDave for putting this up. I’m the guy in the brown jacket if you did not know :) For direct YouTube clips: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRSW-M3Ms_s&fmt=6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfoOzg9MkQ&fmt=6
This May I flew to Chicago for a popular blues event, Blues Shout. I met some really welcoming mid-western locals who were kind enough to truck me around for the weekend and got to dance with and gawk at some of the best blues dancers from the US. I ate an unhealthy amount of deep-dish...
