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What Is This Dance? What Are These Songs?


JSngry

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from 2:08 thru 4:20, the again from 6:01 thru 7:28. First sequence holds more substance than the second.

freeze @ 6:44 for a shot of the band

What is the dance going on there, especially in the first sequence? Hopping and foot work/steps. Is this an early version of the Lindy Hop, or is it something else altogether?

And that song (songs?) there's something almosy Ornette-ish about the phrases (crazy, I know), are the existing tunes or some weird jam that was created on the spot for this movie by that band?

The movie itself sucks, not bad in a fun way, just bad, period. But the dancing bits and the music therein has pushed some kind of a button in e. Just wtf IS that?

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TL;DR: it's mostly (Collegiate) Shag, and, no, it is not an early form of Lindy Hop. (Shag developed parallel to Lindy Hop.)

It's actually a bit of a mess, because different couples are dancing different dances. Keep in mind that at the time, many people weren't as uptight about "this is dance X and you're doing dance Y." A lot of that came in with formalized instruction of the Arthur Murray form (the cynical view is that you can't teach what you don't know, so you'd better call it "wrong" or "a different dance" to save face and keep your students...).

In any case: it's a mix of Charleston, Shag, and Foxtrot steps. I saw a bit of Texas Tommy (the dance, after which the Lindy Hop figure was named), and I think even some Swing, i.e. "LA Swing," the swing dance that was danced in the Los Angeles area and that was not Balboa. (Getting confused yet? Yes, the names are terrible, but that's what they called it at the time: swing.)

To further the confusion: the Texas Tommy had likely been mostly abandoned by young dancers by 1936, and what was left of it was probably called Two Step (not to be confused with Texas Two Step or any of the other myriad Two Steps) or even Lindy Hop at the time.

The couples that are doing a bit of traveling seem to mostly be doing standard Foxtrot steps. They may have called it Foxtrot, or they may have called it One-Step (unlikely), or they may have called it Walk (that was the name used at the Savoy Ballroom), or they may have called it Peabody... Yes, the terminology is a mess. :)

Aren't you glad you asked?

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1 hour ago, lipi said:

Aren't you glad you asked?

I am, in fact. Thank you! Collegiate Shag, that sees to be the main one.

I actually know a little bit about "L.A. Swing" dancing from playing for Push dancing here for about a decade or so. Dancing/dancers have their own histories, stories, etcc, so I picked up what I could as I could.

Also was aware that there were different dances occurring simultaneously, but the one that really struck me eye eas that style of hopping in time to the music while still moving around the floor AND getting the feet kicks going, that's some baaaaad action Right there, and I've never seen anything quite like it until now.

lipi - if I may call you that, by how do you come to your knowledge of these things? Were you born in it either immediately or through family, or did you hang around the old-timers before they got too old, or just what exactly.?

 

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5 hours ago, JSngry said:

lipi - if I may call you that, by how do you come to your knowledge of these things? Were you born in it either immediately or through family, or did you hang around the old-timers before they got too old, or just what exactly.?

Not born into it, so I wasted twenty years not dancing! In college I was lucky to have a very good dance history teacher, who got me into lindy hop, and a graduate student friend who was (and still is) a professional tap dancer, who got me into tap.

I watched as much of the existing video as possible, and talked to and studied with the old timers (Norma Miller, Frankie Manning, etc.) or those one step removed (Sylvia Sykes, Rusty Frank, Chester Whitmore, etc.).

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