Category Archives: Blues Dancing

Blues dancing is….

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Every time we mention to someone that we teach blues dancing, the immediate response is, “What’s that?”

blues lean 2

Luckily for most of the rest of the dance styles out there, the name of each style has come to mean the style itself. “Waltz” doesn’t need much explanation, for example. People just know what it is.

But blues dancing? Not so much. Here, at least, is the beginning of a list of blues dance characteristics.

Blues dancing is….

…a standing partnered dance, more in the style of the ballroom dances than contact improv.

…a lead-follow dance in which one partner signals moves, direction, timing, etc, and the other follows (even though the roles may be switched).

…danced in close embrace, torso connecting with torso, in a more open closed embrace, (similar to ballroom), or open, with connection only in the hands.

…very much about rhythmic variation, meaning that several “basic” footwork patterns may be used, and combinations or smaller elements of those patterns are also explored.

…connection-based. Every detail of the dance may be communicated through physical connection (the dancers’ “frames”). This is different from a style in which move sequences are memorized and repeated.

…expressive. Dancers attempt to express the emotion of the music and not just the tempo or musical timing.

…grounded, danced on more or less flat feet – the whole foot vs. the ball.

…hip-centered. Lots of hip movement, but in a style different from Latin movement. Twists, dips, figure eights, and more are possible.

…danced to blues music, of course, but also to other slow, rhythmic, groove or lyrical-based music as well, including trip hop, slow jazz, R&B.

…improvisational. The better two dancers’ connection, the more they are able to explore movement variations neither dancer has experienced before.

What characteristics would you add or remove?

(By the way, we teach blues dancing, as mentioned, every Monday night.)

Blues Dance Workshop in Edmonton, BC

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We’re teaching blues in Edmonton!

That’s right, the scene there is quickly growing, and a previous student who now lives there wants to take things further. We’re flying in early on Saturday, January 21st to teach for the day. There’s a dance that night where we’ll dance it up with all our students and anyone else who comes out to join us. The next day we’re offering private lessons for students who’d like to take their dancing even further.

It’s always an interesting challenge to plan for a crash course, 5 hour long series of workshop segments, but here’s how we’ve broken it down:

  • Lesson 1: Blues Foundation – blues hips, pulse, lag, closed position connection
  • Lesson 2: Fusion Flavour – musical flavours that define a genre, lateral hips vs. round, footwork patterns, dance flavours, angles, speed, levels, sharp or smooth, paying attention to eachother.
  • Lesson 3: Footwork – patterns/rhythm, movement across the floor
  • Lesson 4: Musicality – speeding up, slowing down, different combinations of quick and slow, hitting an accent with turns. Lead determined musicality, follow injected musicality.
  • Lesson 5: Dips and lifts – engaging the core, taking care of your own weight, taking care of your partner’s weight

We’re definitely excited to offer our unique approach to an entirely different scene! With luck, we’ll get lots of photos, and we’ll post them here with an update once we’re back.

What’s up in November 2011

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Well, once again our blog vanished into the abyss of forgotten things-to-do, and now it has surfaced, hopefully to be reborn with more frequent content. There’s so much going on in Vancouver that it can be hard to keep up.

As always, with a return to blogging after a long delay, it makes sense to update everyone about what we’re doing. And what we’re doing is a lot!

1) Actually, I should first say that one thing we’re not doing enough of is teaching wedding dance lessons. This is a slower season, of course, but in general the frequency of our first dance lessons has decreased, and we’re not sure why. We’d love to get more students in – it’s one of the more rewarding things that we teach! For more information, visit our wedding first dance lesson page.

2) We’re starting a new blues dance class on Monday, November 14 at my live/work studio! Contact us for more info!

3) I just started a new poi class at Sideshow Studios this past Tues. There were sixteen paying students in the first class! I can’t wait to teach the next class, and I always welcome new students. There’s more info on Facebook. Find us and let us know if you want more info!

4) On November 24 I will be performing with two other musicians at Telus World of Science for private guests during a relaunch party. Our focus is on instruments made of natural materials – mostly wood – including didgeridoo, shakuhachi, fujara, native flute, and more.

5) I’m also hard at work planning the three ways I will be involved with the Winter Solstice Lantern Festival this year. Once again, I’m coordinating the fire show at the Roundhouse Community Centre. For the second year in a row I am also coordinating a group of didgeridoo players to play in the labyrinth at Britannia. And for the first time, this year I am also organizing musicians to play ambient music in the Performance Centre at the Roundhouse. It’s going to be a busy Dec 21st evening!

That’s a good start for now. Please let us know if you have questions about any of the things we’re doing. And if you know anyone who is getting married, send them our way! We’ll make sure their first dance is lovely and memorable!

Blues music and blues dancing

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I’ve started compiling lists in my head. This song is good to dance to. This song is great for listening. The listening list is much longer than the dancing list, and this discrepancy is forcing me to question the connection between music and dance.

What compels us to dance to certain songs? What compels us to stop and stand still and simply hear what’s being said? Randomly, I have “Cool Drink of Water Blues” by Tommy Johnson playing right now, and I can’t say it moves me to move. Instead I’m somewhat haunted, intermittently, by the way his voice slides into moments of wavering falsetto and feelng. The guitar in the background offers just enough of a rolling sense of rhythm and melody to send the song forward, but that’s it. This is delta blues from back in the day! It’s the roots of what we all dance to! Why doesn’t it make me want to dance? Perhaps the music wasn’t connected to movement at first? This makes sense to me. It also makes sense to question the idea of dancing to such music in the first place. If dance is a celebration, does it make sense to dance to someone else’s musical outcry of hardship and suffering? Perhaps this is how difficult experience is transformed into something positive.

A quick scan of some wikipedic blues dance history reveals that some of the old musicians from the early 1900s played for dancers! I’ll have to delve into their music and figure out what the difference was between their dancer-driven songs and the songs that just don’t seem to move me (or others) to move.

Apparently the tango was in vogue in the early 1900s, and W. C. Handy used a tango rhythm to entice dancers onto the floor, then broke in an entirely different, bluesy beat. St. Louis Blues uses this tactic. So, did African-roots blues, once melded with European-rhythm music give rise to “danceable” blues music?

As soon as I let go of the idea of what created blues dance music in the first place, it’s easy to start picking out danceable songs. The shuffle beat is incredibly powerful and important in blues dance music. But it’s not the end-all of rhythmic devices either. A simple, single-time stomp can create enough driving rhythm for dancing. There’s a guitarist who plays on Commercial Drive, and as he plays, he stomps out simple a beat on his guitar case. The result is the slide guitar style of old delta blues with enough rhythm to make me want to dance!

A quick glance through a few of my 882 songs that are specifically labeled with “blues” under the genre heading:

3 O’clock blues – B. B. King – medium-slow – shuffle beat with triplets played on cymbals – DEFINITELY danceable

Another version of the same song – a little slower – the shuffle is less noticeable – instead a simple 1 – 2 kickdrum-cymbal beat of boom-click, boom-click – and it totally works

Yet another version – Ike and Tina Turner – from Putumayo’s Mississippi Blues album – shuffle beat with triplets – medium-slow and totally danceable

606 Blues by Slim Tinsley and His Band from Midnite Blues Party, vol 2. – no shuffle beat, but rather a thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk beat in both the rhythm and bass and thus more of a sloooow lindy or slightly faster bluesy step-touch or shake ‘n bake effect – danceable? yes, but not in the really groovy way a lot of us love

Bad Luck Shadow by Johnny Otis – more shuffle, so it’s a groovy slow-medium tempo, perfect for draggin’, struttin’, shakin’, or doin’ whatever blues movement one wants

I could keep listing songs on and on into the night, but here’s the thing – I might find hundreds with the right beat and sound, but the next level is definitely a less definable thing – feeling, soul, heart, whatever it is that moves me to move and express myself. Maybe this is the question worth exploring, how to know whether a song has feeling or not….but then again, isn’t this a decision best left to each individual listener?

Gosh, then how does DJing really make sense? Every song will be interpreted in as many ways as there are dancers in the room, right?

More thinking, more lists, more levels of categorization, more listening is needed!

Blues Dance, Blues Music

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After a bit of an internal hiatus from blues and partner dance (I just wasn’t feeling compelled to do much), I feel like I’m back….and better than ever!

This time I’m delving more deeply into blues music. I remember going through a phase like this at the beginning of my swing dance craze, back when I started dancing in the first place, back when the newness of it all compelled me to learn all I could about this new thing I so dearly loved. I listened to a lot of swing music then, I learned about its origin, along with the dance, and I felt I really could embrace my experience on the dance floor from the inside out. I didn’t just dance to the music, or on the music – I danced inside it. I breathed it!

Now the same is happening, but with blues. It’s no longer enough to simply show up at a dance and dance to the songs I like. I want to know what they are, where they come from, who sings them, and what they’re about. I had no idea that blues music reaches back quite so far. I had no idea that watching a recording of old blues singers could be so compelling, but it’s true – the look in Howlin’ Wolf’s eyes from some of those old films is…well….frightening….awe-inspiring…moving. Moving. Moving!

How many blues dancers realize that they’re dancing to the deep outcry of people who struggled, who fought, who had it tough but came through the fire anyway? No wonder I needed a break – the dance was becoming all mechanics and no feeling. I’m back to that original place I entered all those years ago – feeling, feeling, feeling!

At one point during my search for new music, I tried to find playlists for blues dancers. Not much luck there! I realized that there is a huge hole out there in the internet – not enough information about the songs that are great for dancing. Perhaps DJs would rather hide their secrets. I’ve decided I’d like to expose them, or I guess I mean I’d like to share them – share my own adventures in music so that others can have the experience of dancing to the songs that are really moving. So, time permitting, that’s my plan – start listing the artists that sing and play their hearts out, first of all, and then list the songs that are best for really going somewhere on the dance floor. I’ll list slow, medium and faster blues along with fusion, world, and other not-quite-blues genres as well as non-blues music that has enough bluesy elements or simply enough feeling to make me want to blues dance to it. Perhaps blues dance is no longer blues dance once you change the music, but it’s close enough. The feeling is there. The same elements apply.

Speaking of the elements of blues dancing, Diane and I are also teaching blues again, and it feels great. We’re delving deeper into the dance now, and we’re finding new ways to break down the things we do and offer concepts that will help other dancers expand what they do as well. Our latest mini blues dance class went really well, so we’re organizing more, spreading our unique insights, hoping to positively influence the Vancouver dance scene one dancer, or one small group of dancers, at a time!

We want more blues!

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One of the things we’re determined to have more of in 2009 is blues dancing.

It’s really hard to imagine too much blues dancing – I’ve certainly never experienced it. I wonder if it’s anything like chocolate, a sensory fireworks show that diminishes imperceptibly with each nibble until the intestines, liver, kidney, etc, catch up, and everything collapses! With blues, the worst thing I’ve ever experienced is feeling physically tired from dancing all night! That’s it. Otherwise, it really is endless chocolate without the side effects!

So we live in an almost perpetual state of wanting more. That’s not a bad way to start, is it?

We keep thinking we should just open our door and have a blues jam. Our space is small large enough, right? I actually did type “small” at first, and it’s probably closer to the truth. Our “studio” is 12×17 ft, roughly, and there’s a computer desk at one end, mirrors along one section of wall, just crying out for a hard kick, and an awful creak right in the middle of the floor. Even if each couple could dance inside a 5×5 space, that’s only four couples dancing at once, shoulder to shoulder, nothing wild allowed. And everyone else? Pressed against the walls or somehow butting in.

No, we need a bigger space! That’s the next step – get a large enough space, suck it up and pay the rent, ask for a modest admission fee at the door, and then get down for the rest of the night! What are we waiting for?

We talked to the folks who run Rhizome cafe, since we’ve noticed that they occasionally hold dance/music-based events, but no luck there – apparently their license doesn’t allow for more than a limited number of such events, and they don’t seem willing to try their luck with us. I really liked the idea of a blues dance at a place where one can also grab a snack or a drink (hot chocolate?) in between dances! Too bad. I also like the visibility of that location, and the potential for people from outside the blues scene to find themselves gratefully discovered and invited in.

There are other spaces as well, each with limitations, but we know one of them will work out, eventually. We’re open to suggestions! The venue doesn’t have to be perfect – just allow for movement! And music, late into the night!

Some people say to me, “You and your wife must dance a lot!” but it isn’t really true. We don’t dance at home just for the fun of it. There’s something special about a venue filled with just the right number of people to be cozy, with just the right atmosphere to inspire playful dancing. Perhaps there is also the selfish pleasure of being seen, but really I think that’s just a part of community. Everyone watches, and everyone is seen, and everyone participates. Strangers become dance partners. Dance partners become acquaintances and friends. Community ensues. It’s a beautiful process.

So we want more blues! And we have a community! So it’s time to stop writing about it and time to start choosing a space!

Dance is joy / Dance is work

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I started dancing ten years ago when the person I was dating dragged me into swing. I wanted something more sensual, like salsa, but swing it was (she was persistent), and after a month of struggle, I finally got the basic step. Then I was hooked, and dance started to fill my life. I changed from a science to a performing arts track while in university, started a swing club, danced whenever and wherever there was dancing to be done. I never dove into serious formal training, but I’ve danced off and on ever since. Anytime I had periods of diminished happiness, I always realized later that I had suddenly stopped dancing as often as usual. The more I danced, the happier I was!

Then I met Diane at a swing dance. Our connection grew, on and off the dance floor, and three years later we were married. We decided to make dancing into a part time career, so now dance is also work. We teach almost daily, we choreograph and perform together, and my old breathless sense of dancing for joy has been…tempered…by the sense that I must dance, or at least teach dance…in order to make a living.

Most of the time this is perfectly fine. It’s great, actually! I get to teach other people how to dance, and hopefully to discover the same kind of joy I first found when I learned swing. Performing is also wonderful when it goes well, and I love the process of creating new work. I also really like being completely focused while in a dance class, pushing my body to do new and wonderful things as fast as I can learn them, and the time always passes way too quickly. Dance can be hard work, but it’s work I really like.

And then I stop and realize how far I’ve come from my initial pure pleasure of moving. I don’t dance swing or blues now without thinking about what I’m doing. I don’t often just let go. I’m constantly reminded of my need for more technique, more training, more vocabulary. How long has it been since I’ve gone to a house blues party and danced the night away without thinking about anything at all? Too long.

If I worked at an office job, I would need to find ways to revive my motivation for and interest in my work, whether by creating meaningful connections with my coworkers, developing new projects, pursuing new training, or even trying a different schedule once and a while. Fortunately, I can actually choose to do these things since I’m my own boss. Yet I wonder if these things would even be quite enough. I imagine I would probably need to go a little further, and try to get closer to the heart of what drew me to such work in the first place. I would need to nourish a sense of play, exploration, and discovery. I would need a way to let go a little, and allow some unordered, unpredictable variables into an otherwise mundane routine.

With dance, that means going out and just dancing, full on, all out, with complete abandon. Easy to imagine, hard to do unless I find a time, a venue, an occasion.

So I’m looking for one. Waiting. Ready to make dance joyful again.

Vancouver Lindy Bout II Blues: We won!

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David and Diane competing in the blues competition at Lindy Bout II

After much agonizing, I finally decided I could handle competing. I think Diane was ready before I was (she wanted to compete at Swing Summit) and I might not even have joined this competition if it weren’t for her.

I’m of two minds when it comes to dance competitions. First, I prefer to approach dance as a means of expressing myself, connecting with a partner and with the music, and really being in the moment. It’s a form of moving art for me. Competing brings dance into the realm of sport, and I don’t necessarily dance to be better than anyone else. It certainly isn’t a sport for me.

In fact, one reason for my long delay in signing up to compete was the fact that I didn’t feel like I was polished enough, ready enough, good enough, perfect enough. I suppose the biggest competitor I’ll ever face is…myself.

My other feeling about dance competitions – or even competitions in general – is that I’m actually too competitive to handle competing. I take it way too seriously, way too personally, and can’t seem to separate my heart from the act of winning and losing. Throughout the eleven years that I played soccer, I always told others I didn’t like competition, just the feel of the game. While this was true in some ways (I loved moving across the field, feeling the touch of the ball, making elegant plays), the underlying meaning of my statement was that I didn’t want to get too caught up in the competition aspect because I simply cared too much. This made for some nerve-wracking games back in the day, and it all returned to me last night. I had trouble social dancing at first because I was so keyed up about competing.

Our approach to dance may be a little different than others’. We really really really believe in connection, which for us is a fourfold layering of signals and responses: I respond to the music, and I respond to my partner. My partner also responds to the music as well as to me. This means that at any possible moment in the dance, there might be four possible impulses balanced against four possible responses, and somehow we must do it at the same time, flowing from the previous moment to the next. Add to this our preferred level of emotional intensity – intense, joyful or passionate, tuned in – our attempt to be active in every part of our bodies, and you have something very different from a repertoire of moves that get mixed up based on the lead’s whim, with the follow more or less following, reacting, responding all along the way.

We started dancing the way we always do, but it wasn’t long before the audience began to hoot, holler, and cheer for other couples. I panicked. What was going on? I tensed up, and I could tell that Diane was trying to be calm about my tension. Should I be doing something more crowd-pleasing, more humourous or risque or….? Diane poured her calm, grounded energy into the dance, kept reminding me with her eyes and body to keep listening to the music. Still the audience cheered the others on. From the corner of my eye I saw shoes and jackets being removed. I imagined some saucy routine taking place right there behind my back, and I felt my presense slipping. Even worse, some of the couples kept dancing right in front of us, right into our space, and at one point I panicked again because I realized the judges probably couldn’t even see us.

I don’t know how it happened, but by the fourth song we had it. A gorgeous song came on, we breathed it in, and we were transformed. Did the crowd see it? I heard someone murmur, “Right on, David,” and I actually felt a shift in everyone’s attention. The laughter had trickled away, our focus and connection had suddenly deepened in response to the music and each other, and the room’s collective breath seemed to be suddenly held.

That moment was beautiful. I felt our dancing reach yet another level beyond steps and moves and patterns – we were pure impulse guided by the music. Later on we traded phrases with the other two couples, and again we struggled with the balance between sincere connection in our dance and ways to please the audience, but in the end our connection and presence came through. In the end, it was really only the act of dancing that mattered.

The audience was given the final vote. I expected a quiet response to our quiet way of dancing with each other. Instead, the cheering was thunderously definite. We had won!

More blues dance discussion

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Apparently I’m repeating myself. I found an older fragment of an article I wrote a while back about fusing blues with other forms of dance. Later, I updated the article with a response to the trend toward “vintage” or “historical” blues. Here are those thoughts, spoken in the royal “we” of couple/companyhood, in their original form:

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There has been some recent discussion throughout the swing and blues communities about the authenticity of the modern approach to blue dance. Some dancers have even researched “vintage” blues forms in order to practice and teach a more “correct” form of the dance, and others simply dance to blues music and call it blues. Where do we stand?

We agree that there are factors one may use to determine whether a dance can be considered “authentic” or not, and this is perfectly valid in a historical context. We recognize that some of the movement in our own dances may match a historical definition of blues dance, and some may not. We’re a bit more interested in the current expression of the form, however, so rather than adhere to a label and definition of the dance and build our understanding from there, we prefer to explore the specific mechanics of partner dance itself: connection, weight shifting, footwork, movement, musicality, and more. These partner dance concepts aren’t limited to any one form, but are used across all forms of partner dance no matter its historical origins.

How does it all fit together for us? We use historical definitions of blues dance as a sort of starting point: this is what the dance used to be, and sometimes still is. Then we build on that point by placing our attention on what actually happens when two people dance together, no matter what the form is called. This means that the form will inevitably grow beyond its definition. This is, we believe, the true reason we dance in the first place: to discover, to express, to create a shared moment of deeply human experience. In the end we may simply dance to blues music and call it blues, but what we’re actually doing is far beyond the scope of any single, limited defintion of a dance.

Oh, the blues dance blues

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Since 2001 I’ve come to love this thing called blues dance.

It’s possible, though, that this thing isn’t really even called blues dance. Can you give something a name and yet not know exactly what that thing is?

Here’s what I thought it was back in 2001: adapting what I knew from lindy hop to be slow enough and fitting enough to dance to blues music, to fit the music, to have a more moment by moment connection, and, oh yeah – feeling the thrill of really close contact with someone while dancing in a semi-darkened room, and being so tired that I actually felt wonderful and could finally let go. That was blues. It was awesome.

Seven years later, I’ve danced to countless blues songs. I’ve attended blues house parties and blues dances that lasted until dawn. I’ve taught blues classes and blues workshops. I’ve watched blues, read about blues, learned to play a bit of blues. And at some point in all this time I developed the blues dance blues. It’s quite possibly a more urgently mournful blues than any actual blues song itself. If my blues could express itself in a conversation, it would go like this:

“I’m digging this slow, sensual dancin’, man, and this song just eats my soul!”

“Yeah, but you ain’t doin’ actual blues, man!”

“I’m feeling the shuffle beat and the bass and the low growlin’ horns, and I’m moving! What else is there?”

“The shake ‘n bake! That’s what else!”

“That what?!?”

“It’s a vintage step, man, straight outta the ole juke joints, man. You dig?”

“No.”

“To dance blues, you gotta dance the dance they danced back in the day! You gotta do the mooch! You gotta do the fishtail. You gotta do the slow drag. They’re all historic!”

“I’ve never even heard of those names! And I thought I was dancing in the only day that really matters anyway – right now!”

“Maybe so, but then you ain’t dancing blues.”

And on it goes. Is blues the pure and simple act of dancing to blues music? Is it using the different layers of the music to inspire different kinds of movement? Or is it the mooch? You have your historians on one side, your presentorians on the other. You have your purists teaming up with the historians, the inventors enjoying the present moment. You have your…. blues dance blues. One big unnecessary argument.

When asked if he could teach some certain move, I think it was the “leap frog,” one of the biggest names in swing dancing history, Frankie Manning, said they didn’t have names back when they danced in the 30′s. They just danced! I find the non-name thing a little hard to believe simply because it’s our nature to name things. And yet the point here is that the idea of not naming is one that allows for discovery, expression, and invention. Naming brings in the added argument of correct-ness or not-correct-ness, and that’s where my blues is coming from. If I’m worrying about the historical validity of my footwork while trying to dance blues, then that’s all I’m ever going to feel: blues. If someone watching me is only looking for vintage steps, they’ll miss the excitement of what’s happening – what’s being created – in the moment.

So let’s try this. Let the historians compile their lists. While I dance what I feel is blues, they can check off any of the old moves that I do properly. I’ll be happy if I get even one step correct. The slow drag? Check! Then I’ll pocket the list. A keepsake.

Then I’ll forget about that list, turn the lights down low, and spend the rest of the night dancing my heart out in the best possible way I know how – by feeling it, by connecting with my partner, by being open to possibility. I’ll get the blues, then, I’m sure of it, but it will be the kind of blues we all want to feel: deep, raucous, sensual, passionate, wild, playful, uninhibited, wonderful.