At TUX (the best small but big lindy hop event in Toronto, amiright), there were two competitions – a newcomer jack and jill and an open jack and jill. I was honored to be asked to judge the open jack and jill though I have a sneaking suspicion that I was only asked to keep me from drunkenly smashing into other dancers during the competition (the first step is admittance). One of the judging criteria for both competitions was “spirit” or the essence of lindy hop. The question of the day during my bus ride home – given all things are equal from a competitor skill level point of view, how does one even judge “spirit”?

Is it like this?

But obviously not everyone is going to be as awesome as the Harlem Hotshots…

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 ;)

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.

Angie Fadness (Madison, USA) and Randy Pante (Toronto, Canada)

Two men enter, one man leaves

From the BluesShout website:

Solo Blues Cuttin’ Contest – This is a solo dance contest – no partner required. You may dance in any style of Blues dance. The music selected by our DJs will span the range of the Blues genres and tempos. Judges will select finalists from the preliminary rounds based on Blues Aesthetic, Musicality, Creativity, and Interaction, but the finals will be audience-judged. Please note that dancers in the preliminary rounds who do not respect the social rules of a cuttin’ contest will be judged accordingly

Joe and Nelle's solo (but together) dance class

Beer before the class... ;)

Ruby Red showing how it's done

Low down battle!

Amanda and my man John Joven

Sexy Mamas!

Check out Tina's reaction..

Joy Orico, blues dancer extrodinaire

Listening to competition rules

Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator. But it won’t wait for you. Inspiration is a now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work.

Stop what you are doing right now and watch this clip. Don’t worry, I’ll wait until you’re finished watching. ;-)

So if you did not know, this is a clip of the “spotlights” for the BluesShout 2010 Ballroomin’ division. It’s kind of a big deal. Ballroomin’ competitions are usually danced to new orleans style or big band jazz bands playing blues tunes. In this particular competition, you are able to choose your own partner but the song played is not known until you are actually on the dance floor.

Watching this live and then watching it on video gives me the CHILLS. My mind races with possibilities and ideas of how to “incorporate” what each of those dance couples bring to the competition into my own dancing. At the end of the day, that is the reason why I spend the moolah and time to get to events like BluesShout – to be INSPIRED and continue on with my own dancing.

Hey, check this out…

deeply humbled and honored to be considered on this list

WHAT THE???

I was just a sliver away from being in that clip? What no way! Seeing that list was probably one of the highlights of my weekend. I know that I personally do not have enough blues experience to be anywhere near the level that those dance couples are but I’m learning and sweatin’ away. Slowly but surely! To be acknowledged by my peers and instructors to be even remotely close to that top echelon group of blues dancers makes my heart FAT. <3 <3 <3.

Special kudos goes out to my wonderful dance partner Shannon Woods whom I met through a discussion thread for those needing competition partners. This weekend was the first time we have ever danced together and honestly it could not have gone any better.

Solo charleston. How I fear and adore you at the same time. Every time I think I have you figured out, that we have finally come to an understanding, you kick (get it?) me down a couple of notches. As if to remind me that I still have much, much more to learn.

This past weekend, I bussed through the cold chills and landed at Rochester New York for the North East Girl Jam. This is only my second “girl jam” type event, having just recently gone to “Followlogie” last fall in Quebec City. I always feel a little bad about being at these girl jam events because I feel like I’m committing theft learning so much for such a low price (usually these types of events are free to leads as long as you can get to the city). The price really being braving the tundra weathers of Quebec City and the chills of Rochester (I’m a tropical wimp I know). There are always great solo jass classes that always inspire me and usually some sort of solo charleston competition during the weekend.

Competition you say? Dun dun dun… queue fight music.

Every time I compete in solo competitions, the first ten seconds of the song is usually drowned by the frantic self thoughts of disbelief that I actually convinced myself to do this again. “Don’t you remember the last time you did this type of competition and you almost threw up?”. Twenty seconds into the competition my disbelief turns into panic as I realize that I just done everything I know in terms of charleston variations. Twenty five seconds… still panicking. After thirty or so seconds, everything just kind of becomes a blur until the music stops.

The first time I learned a “charleston variation”, it was just about one week before my first Lindy Bout event. I remember getting my JoJo Jackson charleston dvd in the mail and going over the moves on my laptop while pretending to be doing work at my co-op job. During that Lindy Bout and during the solo jass competition, Mandi Gould (Toronto) asked us to do the Shim Sham in a line so the judges could verify their finalists. I had no idea what the Shim Sham was. It was truly an epic moment in my dance career.

This time around in NEGJ, I actually felt somewhat okay by the end of the competition. I don’t remember doing more than three or four charleston variations so there is definitely lots of studio time still to be broken in for my next charleston challenge. At least I can take pride that I didn’t puke at the end of the comp.

North East Girl Jam 2010 – Charleston Finals

Laura’s Charleston Routine

Laura’s solo charleston class at North East Girl Jam. She’s a fantastic dancer and her smile is infectious. I secretly steal her moves on the social dance floor when she’s not looking.

Forgot to post this – won a competition with Alcina Chiu at Toronto’s Inter-Regional Jack and Jills. :) More clips on the site’s Vimeo page (http://vimeo.com/channels/hamfats).

Northstar Blues – Team Cutting Final – Part 1 from Harbord Hamfats on Vimeo.

Northstar Blues – Team Cutting Final – Part 2 from Harbord Hamfats on Vimeo.

Northstar Blues – Team Cutting Final – Part 3 from Harbord Hamfats on Vimeo.