As I travel, take workshops and meet all these great instructors in the dance scene, I started to realize that they have persevered through many of the challenges we face as growing dancers. We all focus to get us to that next level/tier/awesomeness we forget about what keeps us inspired beyond the moves and techniques we learn. So here I ask, to those we look up to what words/advice do you have for us dancers to keep us inspired, or really what do you want to say to all dancers.

At some point, I may refine upon the ideas, but here is what I have collected thus far.

Lastly, thank you to those whom have participated so far: Virginie Jensen, Steven Mitchell, Peter Strom, Naomi Uyama, Nina Gilkenson, Todd Yannacone, Andrew Thigpen, and Karen Turman.

In the last little while, I have felt bombarded with a mess of things to do in the dance scene other than just dance. At some point I will have my chance to do my own Half Year in Review and you’ll see what I have been up to. But, finally, in the last week, I have been able to just pause and breathe for a moment. Usually I am led to one of my favorite summer spots of the year – UBC Robson Square.

Pictured above, Robson Square is one of the main areas for dancing of all kinds to be found here. During the summer months, there’s Friday night Dancing at Robson Square (rotating forms of dances, mainly ballroom) and Sunday Afternoon Salsa. But what keeps on drawing me back is the street dancers who come and practice there every day.

There’s lockin’, poppin’, whackin’, hip hop, b-boys/b-girls, and crews of all kinds that rotate in and out of the area. You’ll find new dancers to some of the best instructors/dancers in the city watching, training, and giving advice to each other. Most of them there, probably because it’s free, open, and perfect for dancing and they are absolutely inspiring to watch. It makes me feel like I should be training as well.

Maybe that’s what I’ll do. Who wants to join me? :)

A phrase that was being thrown around Followlogie this weekend was “dancing from a place of truth”. While I personally do not understand it myself one-hundred percent in the context of the lindy hop world, the way I right now is to always gain inspiration from other dancer’s movements but be proud of your own.

“Dancing from a place of truth” was being thrown around so much this weekend that I was beginning to wonder what had prompted such change within the dance instructor community. My thoughts – as dance instructors and organizers of lindy hop scenes around the world get older and more mature, there is also a parallel gradual increase of … existentialism (?) undertone in their teachings. I mean, who doesn’t want to spread their beliefs to as many people as possible. I feel that dancing in our community (and sometimes communities) is becoming more of a sense of being and purpose rather than just an activity we do for fun and social reasons. This definitely describes majority of people that I know nowadays and applies to me even more so that I can describe here in words. I’ve always admired dancers who display such confidence and surety in their dance such as Frankie Martinez and my new personal hero Alain Wong from Cats Corner. I don’t quite have it yet in me to dance to my ability when the world is *actually* watching, but I’m making strides towards it.

The above picture is by Bertograph.ca from Montreal, a super great photographer who constantly wows me with the sheer amount of quality pictures he posts up from events. And yes, that is my angry dance face ;)

I’ve always thought that majority of hip hop classes that I’ve taken were not actually directly applicable to why I like dancing – people. Most commercial hip hop and jazz (not jass) classes are really about one thing – learning how to learn choreography. The problem is, I’m never going to bust out a sequence that I learned on the dance floor. That is of course, unless the exact same song is spun from the DJ at a club then I’m cursing myself for not paying more attention.

I do believe that learning how to learn choreography is a valuable and unappreciated skill in my dance scene(s) because social partnered dancing’s emphasis on innovation over imitation (and rightly so). However, sometimes I’ve used that way of thinking as a cop out to actually focusing on one style or movement and getting it down really well.

“Groovin’” by Eric Malapad at Harbour Dance Centre was by far my favorite regular class I’ve taken this year. It is probably the only one hour drop-in class that I have ever taken that after the first session I could say to myself that, “I am a better dancer”. The reason why Eric’s class felt so great was because of the simplicity of the class. There were no complex twenty-four count isolation step sequence, quarter-beat hits, and the class was not micro-choreographed to a specific song. Most of the movements were done to a bass-cymbal beat but it was the variety and quality of movement that were being emphasized. No choreography, no set moves, just continual changing movement to rhythm. There were elements of funk, krump, popping, african, and house – depending on what song was playing. If you didn’t get the movement the first time, no worries, we were gonna do it twenty more times.

There was another reason that “Groovin’” was my favorite class and that I can only really compare to the workshop from Shabba-Doo that I took in New York – dancing is better when done as a community. Throughout the hour, you are encouraged to support your fellow dancers so that you yourself can get better. There always seemed to be perfect equilibrium of making yourself look stupid in order to make it look great. Yes, I support a culture of high-fives.

This is what I envision a class I would love to teach one day. A class that would be getting dancers and non-dancers moving to music so that they can go out to the clubs and parties with their friends and just JAM. A class that makes you look good AND feel good.

Blues team competitions are a bit weird. Actually solo blues dancing in general is weird… and awkward. Often times when you see a clip online on solo blues dancing, it doesn’t look as, shall we just say, “refined”, when compared to other dances with solo elements such as mambo, soul, and ballroom. A part of the issue is that there just isn’t enough consistent solo dance classes in the blues/lindy-hop world. If you are lucky, you’ll end up at a out-of-town workshop weekend where they will have a couple of solo classes. If you are super lucky, you’ll be able to go to Stompology ;-) or Herrang. At the very worst, we are all learning from the same ten or so solo blues dance clips on YouTube and trying to replicate the same “vernacular” moves over and over. The other part of the issue is for the most part, dancers, at least in my part of the world, are still trying to *just* learn how to dance with each other to blues music. There’s not as much inclination to learn the solo aspects when the partnered portion of the dance is a challenge on its own.

Even though blues dancing on your own looks (to me) awkward and a bit weird, I have a confession – I love awkward dancing. It really is my fave.

Sometime in early summer of this year when I decided to bring another team to Minneapolis for North Star Blues, I asked myself if it was worth the organizational headache of trying to coordinate people’s schedules to get together for practices/rehearsals. At the end of the day there were three primary reasons why I got interested and involved in in blues team again:

1) to get my friends involved in an activity that I love.
2) to have an excuse to work on solo blues dancing in an collaborate environment.
3) to have something intermediate blues dancers in my scene to work on.

(Just an FYI for the 3 people who view this blog, the Toronto blues dance scene is still in its infancy stage. It’s only been this year where we have had a regular blues dance night and consistent beginner lessons.)

The Process

A big concern that I had when creating dance choreography for the team cutting competition was representing the dance in a “authentic” way. Now, there really aren’t very many clips of vintage blues dancing, so I can only speculate as to what constitutes “vintage” or “authentic”. There are a set of vernacular steps such as the mooche, low downs, snake-hips and to some extent even rocksteadys that we could imitate, but for the most part, our historical journey really just consisted of scouring the internet/youtube for blues performances and adding in elements of our own personality and dance background. Now before we get into a academic discussion as to what constitutes blues aesthetics, I just want to point out that I’m still in the learning/experimental stage myself.

One major inspiration that I had this summer for solo blues dancing is the Barrel House Blues video.I really took this video to heart because of how simple and elegant the dancing was. There was no splashy dance tricks and flips. The male dancer in the video is very controlled and poise while still having a very distinctive masculine flair. We even just flat out paid homage to this clip by lifting a sequence directly from the clip. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, right?

In terms of adding in our own personal dance flavour, I tried to go for movements that were already familiar to the group – afro-cuban, mambo shines, and of course my favourite – wild arms flailing (aka wackin’+locking+more wild arms flailing). There were three types of choreography movements that I looked into for learning purposes which were really just divided up based on length – one phrase, half a phrase, one eight count. Here are some early practice videos of some of the moves we were playing around with:

For practices, I tried to break it up into three components: body movement/isolation exercises, “learning moves/choreography”, and improvisation. The main challenge for the particular group that I was training this year was getting them used to “learning choreography” together as a group. Learning how to learn. For this, we used video to record all the instructions for particular sequences of moves so we can compare and analyze the movements and make changes as necessary.

My philosophy in dance training is that what you are doing should always be slightly more than you can handle. That way, you know you are constantly pushing your techniques and movement to the limit. What I learned this time around was that not everybody can take or are willing to take that amount of drilling for a for-fun dance competition. I had to take a step back half way through the training “camp” and ease up on my dancers – after all, most of them were extremely new to all of this. It’s good to have people around you who you trust and that trust you enough to be able to make suggestions for improvement not just in dance but also for the process.

What I Really Learned

At the end of the day – something is only really worth doing if you really love doing it. Solo blues dancing is a negative return of investment – you won’t get fame nor would you get fortune doing it. The number of hours dedicated to learning a dance style that does not have readily available resources will never be recouped financially. However, the personal journey of pursuing a dance style that not very many people have ventured is a reward on its on.

I get to practices on time.

If you loved music and you loved dancing, the Savoy was the place to go. At the Renaissance, going to the Savoy was our one ambition because they had the best bands and the best dancers. It had been on our minds for a year or two, but we were afraid to venture there because we put the Savoy on a pedestal. Nobody but the greatest dancers went, or at least those who thought they were.

The entrance of the Savoy was at street level. You went down one flight to check your coat, then you walked back up two flights to the ballroom, which was on the second floor. As I was climbing the steps that led to the ballroom, I could hear this swinging music coming down the stairwell, and it started seeping right into my body….

The Savoy was the ballroom because it had the best orchestras, and from that they got the best dancers. Even though a lot of people went to ballrooms just to listen to the music, back then bands played for dancers. After all, they were called dance bands.

These were the depression years (which didn’t make that much difference to my family since we were poor anyway) and dancing was an outlet for people because there wasn’t much else they could do. We all stayed in Harlem, but you could find someplace to step out every night of the week. Going to a ballroom became our social life.

Even though we were poor, we always dressed up. People in Harlem felt that they’d get more respect if they dressed well. Guys felt that the better they looked, the more likely a young lady would be to dance with them. I only owned two suits, but I always wore them with a shirt and tie and nice shoes, not two-tones, just black or brown ones. This was the fashion, and everybody dressed that way.

- Frankie Manning

A genuine question. I’m always being introduced to really great dancers in my various dance worlds here in Toronto – from lindy to mambo to hip hop. However, in the actual social dance scenes (not including hip hop), rarely do I see much solo dancing or even group solo dancing (does that make sense?). We started having “solo dance jams” as part of our events but right now it’s a bit of novelty than an actual part of the dance. I want to advocate solo dancing because as the old saying goes, “you have to dance by yourself before you can dance with another person”. Suggestions or ideas?