Don't Mean A Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing

Sometimes, I think I was born in the wrong era. Because I absolutely love swing dancing. I just can't get enough. Maybe I should have lived during a time where everyone was as obsessed with swing as I am.

I went Lindy-Hoppin' last night at a great monthly dance in Tucson put on by the University of Arizona Swing Cats. I tried to take some photos, but let's just say that for now, I'm a better dancer than photographer. (Hopefully I'll get some good dancing action shots for this blog in the future after I master my manual settings).

When two people swing dance together, one is the leader, and the other follows (usually a man and a woman, respectively). It took me a long time to get used to this format. At first I felt that as a follower, this left me little room for my own expression and creativity. But as I've matured as a swing dancer, I've realized that the dance is a conversation, and the leader-follower structure merely allows that conversation to happen. When you're talking to your friend, you could both just talk at once. But this modus operandi pretty much guarantees that your conversation won't be very interesting. You need to be able to hear one another so that you can play off of each others' ideas and achieve a unity in the topic and mood of the discussion. It's the interplay between friends' ideas that can make a conversation fascinating and engrossing and fun, and the same goes for a swing dance. The leader-follower scheme is the channel for this interplay.

Learning to follow well, so that you can feel and react to your partner's signals, is a technical skill that takes a lot of practice. The leader must be able to read, react, and adjust to the follower too. Getting to this point in partnered dancing can take on the order of a year of consistent practice after you've got the basic steps down. But after reaching this point, swing goes from "pretty fun" to something you're addicted to and want to do all the time. You dream about it at night, and get pumped up every time you hear about a swing band playing in your city. Because finally, you've got the tools to create and explore your own chemistry on the dance floor.

There's just nothing more satisfying than catching your lead's unexpected funky break, or feeling the synchrony lock in when you figure out his unique rhythmic gait and reproduce it in or your own steps. Or maybe it's most satisfying to surprise your partner by throwing in a double turn where he'd only planned for a single, or making him laugh as you add in some outlandish embellishment inspired by the saxaphone. Actually, with so many great moments in every swing dance, I don't really feel the need to choose.