Sundays – Blues (Brouhaha), Lindy Hop vintage/fast swing night (Swing Connexion)

Tuesdays – Swing (Le Petit Medley), West Coast Swing (Dance Conmigo)

Wednesdays – Lindy Hop w. live music (Les Bobards)

Thursdays – Lindy Hop (Le Rialto, once a month), West Coast Swing (Studio 88)

Fridays – Lindy Hop (Cats Corner), Blues (some late nights at Cats Corner)

Saturdays – Swing (Studio 88)

Original list by Balboa Fred!

Check out when the phrase in the music changes and how the rest of the crowd gets into the groove. Really fun night at our last blues dance with a fantasmical band as always led by Patrick Tevlin.

Some more clips (but this time on vimeo):

• http://vimeo.com/22774873
• http://vimeo.com/22773750
• http://vimeo.com/22772391

Every two to three weeks, my life transforms into a TLC reality show episode – if I had to pick, probably most like DC Cupcakes. There is usually a seemingly easy enough challenge that I tackle head on with enthusiasm, the moment of anticipated shock when that challenge is… well a challenge, the crisis that usually involves some sort of comedic mishap and eventually a resolution with a bow of a life lesson learned to top it off.

In this episode, my partner in crime, Kevin Sue, went to some random event called “Boston Tea Party” (heh) leaving me to run the blues dance solo. Sounds easy enough right, I’ve run this event a bunch of times now that it’s pretty self sufficient… bzzzzt wrong. No cashbox, no cooler, no water, no car, and no emergency engineer to fix things that break. I found out that I had an alarming lack of knowledge of how audio equipment actually works (I’m good at plugging in my iphone to DJ, that’s about it) and I’m pretty sure that the Hobos outside of Habeebas Dance Studio were multiplying in real time as they smelled my stress level increasing.

Unfortunately, that’s just my personality – I sweat the big stuff, the small stuff, and even the non-stuff stuff (don’t ask). Fortunately, my girl Genevieve (who also taught the lesson last night with me) kept me sane behind the scenes by basically running around town with me doing errands hours before the event and reminding me to chill the eff out. This definitely rings true to me one day after the event as I reckon that even if all the big/small/non-stuff stuff didn’t work out, most likely people would still had had a kick-ass time dancing and partying.

I didn’t need an awesome check-in system form (google docs does rock though) that time stamps when dancers arrive, a piece of scrap paper and pen was more than adequate. Ditto for the cashbox (replacement: plastic tupperware), drinks to sell (replacement: “here’s a cup and a pen to write your name on it”), basic knowledge of audio tech (replacement: “plug in everything until it works”) or even drop-in teachers (replacement: me). Those are just nice to have features at a dance but sometimes you gotta just head back to the essentials. And sometimes, you just need a good old TLC episode to bring it back to what’s important.

At our dance venue on Yonge & Bloor, people mess around with the temperature of the studio all the time. To combat this, Kevin Sue installed a case-lock around the studio thermostat so that you would need a key to open the case to be able to have access to the studio heating system. Great idea in practicality, except when the key is no where to be found. So if you went to the drop-in lesson and live blues dance last night (and why wouldn’t you have gone?) and were sweating buckets, there was a greater force at work :-)

But yah what a night eh? Brian Cober and Aslan Gotov, for their first time playing for us blues dancers in Toronto, were great great great. Everybody was walking up to me throughout the night and asking where I found them. Well, actually, my israeli friend Kim found them but they have been playing in venues all around Toronto for a while now (ie. Grossmans Tavern). If you know more great blues musicians, remember to refer them to me!

I’m a big fan of statistics. It allows me to accurate gauge how many people we will have turn out for our blues dances in Toronto (2nd and 4th fridays of the month) as well as provide a good base when deciding on what to focus on next. Some key milestones in the past six months include actually hiring musicians to play for us, expanding to twice a month dances instead of once a month, and having out-of-town instructors to come and teach workshops. Without accurate record keeping for making decisions, I might have been tempted to attempt to grow too fast and too soon. Nobody likes an poorly attended dance.

There are a number of important stats that have pretty much shaped our blues scene to what is today but none more than the image above. 61% of our dancers in the blues scene are females. 47% percent are females between the ages of 18-34. My goal for this upcoming few months is to make whole wack-load of new dance friends. Male dance friends. A daunting task even for myself, but when there is a will (and the dollars and cents), there is a way.

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.

Pictures from the June 04, 2010 blues dance :)