C'mon - Not So Serious!

Dance is not serious.

Blasphemy, you say? I guess I can understand that - every dance instructor from the best to the worse have those of us who take dance lessons convinced that the only measure of your ability to dance is the number of steps you know. By rights you should drill continuously and with the kind of seriousness and commitment that once was reserved for the Marines. There's a good bit of irony in the fact that Edwin Denby, a renowned dance critic, once said "There is a bit of insanity in dance that does everybody a great deal of good." The problem is that most dance instructors have become psychologists steadily trying to couch dance for one hour sessions where its idiosyncrasies can be documented, diagnosed, and suppressed with the right combination of drugs.

It's even funnier when you consider something like swing dancing. In the 30's big dance studios were busily dismissing the Lindy Hop and swing in general as an 'unfortunate collision of economic circumstance and declining morals…' Now, a little over seventy years later, all those studios (that still exist) are teaching several sorts of swing dance. The problem is they had to categorize them, name steps, map out everything, and apply their stuffy metering before they could offer lessons.

So, in honor of the sheer silliness of swing, here's a cartoon with the message - don't be so uptight about your swing!