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The Structures That Bind Us And Unseen Individual Participation So far I’ve been talking a lot about how we got to this point and why it matters. What I haven’t addressed yet is how it keeps going. Why haven’t we moved beyond this yet? Well, in my eyes, it comes down to two important considerations…
On the first part of this article, we discussed how the Charleston dance was born in the city of Charleston, in South Carolina, and the historical/social context of the city during that time. We also covered the main African American dances that influenced the development of this dance style. Now, on Part 2, we will…
You can not divorce these dances and this music from their culture without destroying them, or distorting them until they are no longer recognizable nor functioning the same. Blackness matters and no amount of colorblind treatment will change that. If there is to be a real conversation around race in Lindy Hop, there also must be one around who really owns this dance and who is a guest participating in it. And by that, I mean whose values will shape the dance and those who do it, moving forward.
Soon, swing was seen as not Black at all, but a white hobby. One with an embodiment of white ideals, values, and expectations. Although Black people have been speaking out about some aspects of this shift and their discomfort, they simply went unlistened to. Swing didn’t have a race, just as white people don’t. It was America's dance.
Dancer girls at the Mary Bruce Dancing School circa 1938. Harlem dance legend, Mary Bruce, was an African-American woman who operated her own dance school studio giving dance and music training to thousands of youth, and helped build public awareness of dance and music in the Black community. For fifty years she taught ballet…
The Twist Dance: Chubby Checker, Oct. 10, 1961, Toronto, Canada (Photo by Gerry Barker/Toronto Star/ZUMA Press). Chubby Checker is an American Rock and roll singer and dancer. He is widely known for popularizing many dance styles including The Twist dance style with his 1960 hit cover of Hank Ballard & The Midnighters' R&B song "The…
A couple dancing, photographed in Uganda somewhere between 1890 and 1956, from the Ham Mukasa Archives. Social dance held in a photograph, a century before anybody filmed a Lindy Hop.