A Week without Dance

Over the past week I took a vacation, a chance to relax, recuperate, and focus my attentions on writing. It's been a great time and I've accomplished a lot during my break - but, through coincidence, it also happened that we didn't dance most of the week too.


The whole thing started last weekend when we were booked up with friends and relations for the whole weekend and there wasn't a dance on Friday night. Having a break is good, it give your body a chance to recover and keeps dancing from becoming routine. We took a trip to Cincinnati with a couple of good friends and celebrated my mother's birthday while listening to the Indy 500 on the radio. There was no Monday dance; I think I've said before Memorial Day doesn't much feel like a dance day anyway.

Usually Tuesday is our dance lesson day and we spend time with Melissa or Shayne getting some new steps and brushing up on the old ones. However, again by chance, this week we didn't have a lesson scheduled. Instead we decided to go to a club near our house and, since I was off for the week, we could stay later than usual to enjoy dancing. The place we selected was Smee's, and on their website they advertize Tuesday Night West Coast Swing dances for every Tuesday. Well, the advertisement wasn't exactly accurate. They do have Tuesday night WCS but the program had been halted for the month of May. So, we had dinner and went home without dancing.

The dance drought finally came to an end on Friday night when we travelled down to Nashville, IN to Mike's Dance Barn where we attended a 50's and 60's Dance. All I can say is thank you, Mike! We needed to get back on the floor again! The music was fast, the floor perfect, and we had a blast.

Moving from no dancing to Rockabilly Swing is a big leap. If you take a week off and go to a ballroom dance, you're sure to feel a little rusty. It's natural, it happens to everyone. But in a ballroom setting you can do a few slow rumbas or foxtrots to warm yourself up again. Rockabilly is all or nothing, though. The rust came off in chunks and I found myself baffled by moves we have known for a long time. By the end of the night, though, things were right again and I breathed a (tired) sigh of relief.

I think the point of this all is that there has to be some burnishing to keep the rust away. Even on an 'off week' I need to dance through a song or two. It keeps the movements fresh in my head and muscles. Some repetition is good, I guess!

All I Need is a Hunk of Wood

This weekend will be the first one in about a month when we haven’t had some kind of dancing ‘thing’ going on. It seems odd – with Memorial Day being observed you’d think that someone would have a local Memorial Day Dance-a-Ganza. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising since Memorial Day is a day meant to memorialize those who gave their lives in armed combat. Flags on tombstones just don’t inspire one to Charleston, I guess.

So, without a dance to write about I’ll take the opportunity to say that I’m just looking for a good floor where we can practice our traveling dances without the interference of pets or furniture. Our place is comfortably small and though it has parquet floors which are great for practicing the Lindy or ECS, the close quarters play merry hell with a Fox Trot. If I’m not obsessing over stepping on the cat I’m worrying about backing Kelly into the credenza. Not things I want to be thinking about while trying to master a parallel walk and while I’ve convinced myself that somehow these obstacles help me cope with Johnny Schlep-a-lot out on the dance floor they’re still obstructions I’d rather just avoid.

That brings me back to a hunk of wood – or even tile. It’s amazing how hard it is to find a good sized space with a wood or tile surface where you can practice dance for an hour. We gave our local gym a shot thinking that their aerobics classes surely are held on some kind of smooth surface...but to our amazement they have this weird, knobbly rubber flooring that’s just…ick.

The options so far are:

1. Dancing at the mall – as if the mall walkers weren’t weird enough
2. Finding a new gym – the first time I will have ever quit a gym because I can’t dance to it
3. Sell our furniture – yeah, I can’t see myself watching football while laying on the floor either

So I guess until we find a nearby location we’ll just keep dancing around the obstacles while proclaiming the benefits to our floor-man-ship. Yeah…right…

Practice, Practice, Practice

I wish that dancing wasn’t about practice. In the vision I had of myself dancing it was an easy thing – a natural thing that didn’t require practice. In that vision I’d get out there on the floor and the steps would just come like mana from heaven. It was all natural, just get out there and do it. Unfortunately, reality is a little different.

This Saturday is a practice day – in fact a special day where we set up a double lesson as a sort of Lindy Hop intensive. We’re beginners with the hop and it’s been slow (mainly because I’m slow). I’ll be honest – it took a long time for me to get the basic step for the Lindy Hop. It’s a great dance, all about energy and exuberance and forgetting all the things that bum you out about life.

To quote from The Lindy Circle:

“Looking back on where the Lindy Hop came from is an amazing study of American history and of the global cultural shift facilitated by the American GI's that traveled in World War II.

The influences of the Charleston and Tap dance are evident still in the Lindy we do today and the dance is also sited to have come from an early version of the Foxtrot. Remnants of older dancers such as the Cakewalk, Texas Tommy, Black bottom and popular "animal" dances such as the Turkey Trot and the Buzzard Lope are also expressed. What is interesting is that these came from African social dance culture, and some, like the Cakewalk was created when blacks imitated and mocked the formal dance structure of the whites, which they would then use in their entertainment routines. Ironically, the white spectators would then copy the entertainers, and a social dance that bridged the divide emerged.

Luckily, the two cultures found a common ground, called the Savoy Ballroom in New York. It was here that Lindy was fine tuned and grounded, and where the "Savoy style" that was to influence the world grew up.”

I’m not ready to influence the world with my Lindy – maybe I’m ready to influence a few dancers to leave the floor just for their own safety, but that’s about it. Still the history of the dance and what it means in American history impresses me and I’ve got a ‘thing’ for the 20’s and 30’s so I’m taking a wild swing at learning the steps.

Today we added a few steps to our repertoire (forgive me Melissa; I’m going to butcher the names):

• Side Steps – Finally we’re not going around and around and around and around! This step extends the basic Lindy step to the left or right with a cross-over step and it actually (for a change) seemed to come pretty easy.
• Transitions from Triple Swing to the Lindy – We’ve got the EC Triple Swing down pretty well (it’s the dance we do most often) and now we can transition from a closed EC Triple position to a Lindy Hop basic. Nice to throw in here and there on off-tempo EC Swings.
• Transitions from Lindy to EC Triple Swing – Going the other direction we can change from the Lindy to the EC Triple. Nice since all we can do is a few steps in the Lindy!

I don’t think we’re ready to take the Lindy out on the road yet – but soon, very soon!