I attended the Lindustrial Revolution Lindy hop exchange in Charlottesville, VA on Memorial Day weekend. I had more fun than should be legal and gathered a lot to think about. In my somewhat obsessive thoughts about the experience, I wrote several emails to friends (mostly Emily). These entries are culled from those.
It's important to remember that I am an Intermediate Lindy hopper. I've really only been dancing and trying to improve consistently for about a year, although I learned about five years ago and have been dancing sporadically since 2007. All of my comments are tempered by that relative inexperience.
To read all the posts in this series, click on the "Dancestravaganza series" tag.
A big part of this weekend were the workshops. I was super excited about these, because I feel like I'm at a level where I don't get as much from the normal classes as I once did. We covered some new material in these workshops: new steps and the like. But as a follow, the stuff that I really got out of it was more philosophical, which was awesome.
As follows, this is generally the advice:
- follow what the lead leads
- don't plan ahead
- have your stylings be convenient for the lead
Most of the time the lessons are focused almost entirely on the lead. He lead learns moves that they can use to lead us. That's fine and necessary. After all, that's how the dance, you know, works. But at a certain point, I don't know how to improve my dancing. When I'm dancing with a great lead, my dancing is on the awesome side of intermediate. When I'm dancing with a mediocre lead, my dancing is on the lower side of intermediate. My engagement in the dance was beginning to be dependent entirely on the lead's ability to engage me. Where to from here?
But the advice this weekend was more like, um, well... it's difficult to explain. But it felt freeing.
Instead of focusing so hard on connection and partnership, we follows were brought into the discussion more. We talked about direction and momentum, and about communication and interpretation. Basically the lead communicates the direction and the momentum in and with which the follow goes, and the follow does whatever she likes once she has that. "You are two dancers. You must dance together. The dancing creates the movement." We talked about things like being an active follow who has some agency, which is super awesome.
It's nice to have it reinforced that there are moments in the dance that are open to interpretation, and so long as I'm going the correct direction, I can take some liberties in what I do with myself and how I play with the rhythm. It's just so nice to hear. It's like I have permission to be creative and to mess up a bit. The lead can handle it if my styling gets in the way, probably. Ideally it wouldn't, but leads get the hell in my way all the freaking time. So there.
But wait, Lexie, you're saying. What about original rules 2 and 3? Isn't that what those are about anyway, just not as explicitly? The answer is yes. But the follow's role tends to get lost in the noise of the lead's movements. Elaboration on how one could take advantage of these rhythmic moments, and encouragement to do so, was something I was sorely missing.
Lindy hop is a dance that's built to be a bit more participatory than traditional ballroom dancing, Part of its evolution had to do with tap and solo jazz, and there are no lead/follow distinctions from there. Also, a passage on dancing in the Gail Collins book really stuck out to me. In the 1960s, women could suddenly go dancing without dependence on a man. Women could be good dancers without men. Women were free to dance however the heck they wanted. They could dance with each other or by themselves. And instead of waiting for someone to ask you to the sock hop, you could just do it your own self.
Although I am a woman fully in charge of my own destiny thanks to the women who have come before me (what what Susan B!!), I don't always feel that way when I'm doing my favorite leisure activity. It was causing me some minor cognitive dissonance, which was no good!
Overall, even though I probably should have been, I hadn't been feeling encouraged to experiment in the same way leads are. Prior to this weekend, I had heard/decided that my next focus in the development of my dancing is to "create shapes with my body." That's fine and all, but there are a couple problems here. First, just "create shapes" doesn't have a root in rhythm. Plus I'm not the most naturally coordinated person in the world, so everything was getting a little disjointed and loose.
Moreover, I don't want the dance to be solely about how I look. Styling is gorgeous and obviously everything in dance is related. For instance, grace is beautiful, but following the rhythm gracefully is a good goal. Attempting to be graceful only for the sake of beauty and interesting shapes is kind of, um, problematic. Dance is obviously a visual medium, but I don't want my dancing to be about being beautiful. I want it to be about being athletic and joyful and rhythmic. Screw beauty, I want to jump around and have fun!
So not to make this all "How Lexie Got Her Groove Back" (sidebar-- "How Stella Got Her Grove Back" about property disputes over an orange farm in Florida would be a really great movie), but I feel like I have been given permission to be a powerful dancer in my own right. I still need to not hurt my lead, but I can surprise him (or her) every once in a while. I can rock out if I'm feeling it.
So thanks, Mike and Laura (and especially Laura) for an awesome workshop where I learned a lot and had a ton of fun. And you gave me back a feeling of agency.
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