alain’s dance blog

Class review for our 4th week of Intro to Swing at Cat’s Corner. The slower song is “I’ve heard that song before” by Harry James on Trumpet Blues and the second/faster song is “Viper’s Moan” by Willie Bryant.

Tonight, Gabriel - a student in our Intro to Lindy Hop class at Cat’s Corner - asked about the song we dance the Shim Sham to, so I decided to post about it.

The Shim Sham is a solo jazz routine appropriated from tap (the creator was Leonard Reed). We teach it because it’s an awesome way to introduce beginner dancers to jazz movement and rhythm.

Here’s a video of legendary Frankie Manning leading the Shim Sham to Bill Elliott’s Shim Sham Song:

The traditional song that we dance to is Tuxedo Junction, but it is danced to other songs as well. Read this thread on songs for the Shim Sham. The one I play most often is Jimmy Lunceford’s T’aint What You Do (It’s the Way that You Do It).

The Swing ConneXion team (with dancers from Cat’s Corner) doing a routine to Bugle Call Rag at the Canadian Swing Championships in May 2007. We won first place.

Dancers: Zack Richard and Maryse Lebeau, Carl Nelson and Geneviève Doyon, Eric Bertrand and Sylwia Bielec, Benoît Laforest and Ann Mony, Alain Wong and Mélanie Huot-Lavoie

You can buy the official CSC 2007 dvd at http://www.swinginmontreal.com/csc/

I’m all excited.

1. Dancers from all around the world
2. Afternoon dances, evening dances, late night to early morning dances
3. Great DJs, both from Montreal and out-of-town

This is what the schedule looks like.

Friday evening: Sara & The Undulators + DJ Danny-O

Friday late night: Tomo (New York), Greg Avakian (Philadelphia) and Nathan Shetterley (Detroit/Quebec)

Saturday afternoon: Swing L’été (I’ll be performing with SCX)

Saturday evening: Gordon Webster and his orchestra + DJ Pocail aka Daniel Champagne.

Saturday late night: Nathan, Mike Thibault (Rochester) and Alain Wong (me!)

Sunday afternoon: Pocail, Nathan, Tomo, Mike

Sunday evening: Colin Perry & Blind + Tomo

Sunday late night: Alain and Greg

Don’t miss out: Le Montreal Lindy Hop exchange 2007

I don’t think so. Sure, dancing can have sensuality attached to it, but it can also be respectful and artistic at the same time. And it can be dirty or classy.

When we refer to “blues dancing” in Montreal, we most likely mean “dancing to slow music”. Sometimes it is to Blues music, and sometimes not.

This year we had our first Blues exchange in Montreal. And since the three swing dance schools in Montreal have given “blues” classes recently, I thought it would be useful to list some references on what blues dancing is.

The best description I’ve found is on Blues-Dance:

Blues dance is strongly tied to Blues music, and many aspects of Blues dancing (for example, call and response, emotional intensity, and tension and release) are directly related to the music to which it is danced. There are many types of Blues music (rural, urban, up-tempo, slow, electric, delta, modern), and also many types of Blues dance, all with very different nuances and emotions.

Early Blues dances often contained very simple one-step or two-step patterns; some examples of such early Blues dances are the “Cake Walk” and the “Black Bottom.” Other Blues dances such as the “Slow Drag” and the “Mooche” have also been passed down to us relatively unchanged from the original forms. In its modern context, Blues dance incorporates many aspects of these original dances as well as incorporating ideas from modern concepts of partner connection, improvisation, and natural body movement.

From the discussion forums: what is blues dancing? Lucy and Jojo’s opinion, the X-rated connotations of blues dancing, Blues and Sexuality.

Here’s a post by Ogden Sawyer, a respected blues dance instructor in Boston, denouncing the association to sex:

Man, I hate that Blues has come to this. I teach blues, I love to dance Blues, but it truly sucks that people really equate Blues Dance with some sort of chocolate covered sex-fest.

I’ll be the first to admit that blues can be sexy and bawdy, and downright suggestive, but the music most often speaks in innuendo and never quite crosses that line. The dance should reflect that. If all you do is sit in closed position and do various body rolls, you just ain’t blues dancing.

Finally, a thread on the intensity of Blues dancing. Let me know what blues dancing means to you.