THE LINDY HOP

The Lindy Hop, as Ralph Ellison the American writer pointed out a long time ago, is 'mysterious'. He seemed to have different kinds of 'mystery' in mind, but perhaps one that we can single out is its identity, is it 'old' or is it 'new'? If we put the history aside it really does feel like both. Some people get extremely confused about just this point. A couple of years back some British Lindy Hoppers made an educational film saying they were going to bring the Lindy "up to date" by dancing it in what they said were "modern" clothes, and wore 'jeans' instead of 'Zoot Suits'. Jeans in fact were created and being worn for many years before Zoot Suits were ever thought of, but because of recent fashion trends we don't think of them like that. The Lindy Hop is similar.

 

When Warren Heyes and I started talking about bringing the Lindy Hop back to life in the UK at the beginning of the 1980's a number of people laughed and said 'who wants to see more 'jiving'?' and similar remarks. In other words it was seen at the time as something really 'old', but if we fast forward to more recent times when the Lindy Hop has become established here, it is now seen as the 'new' interloper amongst the already established forms of 'jive' dancing here in the UK. Now that plans are underway to create a new style swing 'boy' big band, we could easily have a similar phenomenon to the impact of the Gap commercials in the US which triggered off a mass enthusiasm for the dance as something "new". Time will tell as to whether that pans out or not. But in the meantime we can get back to fathoming the 'mystery' by explaining that there is nothing wrong in regarding the Lindy Hop as the newest "old" dance around today!

 

Although it might seem "new" to the UK it first saw the light of day in 1928. A new crew of young dancers, from Harlem as well as the Bronx and New Jersey, led by George "Shorty" Snowden, his partner Pauline Morse and George "Twist Mouth" Gannaway and his partner Elselene met up at the Savoy Ballroom. They merged several existing popular dances into one so that a boy and a girl could dance as partners whilst leaving room for each of them to engage in almost as much individual expression as if they were dancing on their own. In this way the complex rhythmic creations of the Charleston craze were incorporated into this new dance, which had a huge potential, because it opened up the way for two people in a partnership to work off each other's rhythms in a new way.

 

Although the Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought to an end the raging rhythms of the Jazz Era, which initially held this new dance together, the Swing Era that followed on close behind concentrated on the emerging 4/4 driving beat, which took the dancing onto a new level. The Lindy Hop thus became a complex mixture of Charleston steps, swing outs, and all kinds of solo steps in which the partners let go of each other at times to dance side by side or in front of each other and eventually came to include what became the characteristic acrobatic "air steps".

 

 

Right from the outset, the Lindy Hop was a composite dance form that not only summed up most of the popular dancing that had been achieved to date, but in merging and remoulding them created the basis for the new styles that were eventually to follow as the Swing Era fell away after World War Two. Watch any good Mambo dancers out on the floor and virtually all of the best partner work you will see was taken directly from the Lindy Hop. Exactly how and in what way this was done is a long story that will be told in other places, but for the time being these details provide enough evidence to demonstrate that when taking up the Lindy Hop you delve into a wealth of dance tradition and experience that you, in co-operation with your partner, can shape in any way you want to. Above all this is not the dance of "individuals" but in the first instance of two people who agree to work together to make a collaborative achievement (in itself a useful lesson in how to live) and beyond that a social activity that unites whole dance floors of people together by getting down into the same groove.

 

 

Created by African Americans, the Lindy was rapidly picked up by the rest of the USA as its favourite dance and before long it swept round the world. During World War II it became known as the 'Jitterbug' but remained essentially the same dance. The ready welcomes accorded to the dance in different parts of the world is hardly surprising as it incorporates elements of the three broad world cultural families - African, European and Asian.

 

Although it is unlikely that there would have been the Lindy Hop without the preceding brutalities and horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the practice of slavery in the USA, that lasted until full emancipation was achieved in 1865, the dance itself was created way after those grim events. In reality the Lindy Hop, as part of Swing culture as a whole, was a template for how all Americans should live together and respect each other. For a short while a majority of the US population were dancing or listening to different varieties of Swing, and even now we can still experience the same inclusive quality in that once the dancing gets going everybody tends to appreciate it, if not like it! There are many levels of meaning, or perhaps 'mystery, in the Lindy Hop that can be accessed either separately or together by dancing it and/or studying it. It is for you and your partner to work out how and in what way you want to relate to it. Learning more about it's background and development can make it more satisfying as well as more enjoyable, but as we've stressed elsewhere the choice is yours.