Meet Me At the Hop
A group of men dressed in evening jackets sits behind covered music stands on a stage banging out jazz rhythms. A girl with a short, flared skirt is whipped around the dance floor by her male partner. There is a dramatic break-away, and they separate. Each dancer launches into a series of frenzied steps, as if the world connecting the two has severed, and now each dancers’ partner is the music itself. The beat changes, and the couple come together again, as if no time has passed. More jazz sounds, more swing, more steps -- all to the rolling applause of the crowd.
It's a description that calls to mind an era when a global war was on the horizon, a time when Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom was significant not only for its nightlife, but also because it was integrated. But the scene is notable because while it could easily have taken place in 1930s America, the scene is taking place today in cities across the United States, in nightclubs, classrooms and international competitions.
Thanks in part to the release of a group of films in the late 1990s including “Swing Kids” and “Swingers,” couples swing dancing has seen a resurgence in the last decade. The most popular form of swing dancing is the Lindy Hop. The Lindy Hop was born in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Harlem and includes jazz, African dance, the Charleston and ballroom dance among its many ancestors and influences. Legend has it that the Lindy Hop earned its name on the floor of the Manhattan Casino in Harlem. One night, one of the dance's early practitioners, “Shorty” George Snowden, was participating in a dance marathon. Snowden was approached by a reporter and asked what dance he was doing. The story goes that Snowden had recently read a newspaper headline announcing Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic and replied, “I'm doing the Lindy Hop.” Snowden had unofficially named what Life magazine would later refer to as “America's National Dance”.
By the mid 1930s the Lindy Hop would crown its new long-term king in Frankie Manning. Manning would become the choreographer for Herbert "Whitey" White's dance team “Whitey's Lindy Hoppers” who were based at the Savoy Ballroom in New York. In 1935, Manning introduced the “aerial,” a move that involved Manning and his female partner locking arms before he threw her over his back in a quick airborne somersault. Manning is also credited with altering the way couples stand together, leading to the more horizontal posturing you see today. By the end of the 1950s, the swing craze was dying out, and Manning retired his crown and took up a career with the U.S. Postal Service. Swing dancing wasn't heard from on the popular front again for more than 25 years.
In the mid 1980s, clubs playing swing and big band music began to reemerge slowly in several cities in the United States which created a renewed interest in the dance form. With little in the way of instruction or classes to take, dancers looked to classic films like “A Day at the Races” or “Hellzapoppin” to learn the Lindy Hop moves. Public interest in “Neo-Swing” began to grow at an accelerated rate in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which lead to a dramatic crescendo of exposure on MTV, in film and a now-famous GAP clothing commercial. Due largely to the attractiveness of Manning's aerial, the Lindy Hop quickly became the chosen form of swing dancing for the masses.
Twenty-something singles and couples alike flocked to dance clubs, bars and swing classes. Young people arriving in new cities looked to swing groups in order to meet people. Bright red lipstick, Betty Page hair and spats made a comeback, and so did the careers of some of the genre's original dynamos, including Frankie Manning.
Since the millennium, pop-interest has moved on to the next big craze, and the Neo-Swing boom has calmed. But the late 1990s effectively ushered in a new generation of Lindy Hoppers whose interest in swing dancing was more than a fad.
“With swing dancing, I could...keep a very masculine energy with it and really do something that I thought was, I don't know, badass as opposed to frivolous and silly,” says Daniel Newsome, 31, a dancer, choreographer and the founder of Denver swing team 23 Skidoo. “It was kind of like the hip-hop of the 1930s.”
Solid swing dance communities were established in many cities in the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, eastern Europe and northeast Asia. Due in part to the extensive circuit of national and international Lindy Hop competitions, workshops and camps, dancers young and old from around the globe continue to interact, compete and teach each other.
Photography by James Glader
www.jamesglader.com
Swing dancers annually flock to Sweden for the Herräng Dance Camp where greats like Manning continue to dance and teach. This interaction between the old and new guard has also assigned the Lindy Hop the role of historical record keeper. Its anthropological significance is one that is uniquely American in its blend of influences from Africa and the west, mixed together and re-spun into an entirely unique form. To some degree, it is the duty of the new generation of dancers to maintain that connection while they find new ways to innovate.
“Lindy Hop changes from the ground up and is constantly looking back to move forward,” says Skye Humphries, 24, a swing dancer and teacher. “Lindy Hop is the perfection of the notion of a usable past; it provides a pragmatic link to history. Lindy Hop doesn’t just record history, it puts it to work in the service of the present...It is an important petal in the greater cultural flowering that was occurring at that time. It was the art and recreation of everyday people -- working class African-Americans at an incredibly important juncture in their history and the history of America as a whole.”
And as today’s fiercest competitors are taught by the masters of the 1930s, it's now the modern master's responsibility to teach future generations of swing dancers. Unlike other forms of dance, new swing dancers often do not have previous dance training.
“There's certainly some people who come from a dance background,” Newsome says. “But that's the exception, rather than the rule. We find that most people come to us in their teens, twenties or even thirties, never having danced a step before, and that they will primarily dance the dances of swing. And it's kind of the same thing that's true for say, salsa or tango.”
For aspiring dancers, the idea of entering into the high octane community can be daunting. Many current hoppers recommend taking classes to get the basics down. But for the teachers of the Lindy Hop, a dance consisting of 20 to 30 core moves but that greatly emphasizes improvisation and modernization of older moves, the task of teaching can be tricky.
“From my experiences as a student and a dancer I have always appreciated the individuality of Lindy Hop,” Humphries says. “So a good teacher for me is someone who helps people find their own ways of moving—helps people find ways of expressing themselves rather than giving them static patterns to adapt to.”
The modern Lindy Hop scene includes a competitive circuit, including the Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown in Minnesota and Camp Hollywood in California, as well as the less-intimidating social dance gatherings. Consistent with the early history of swing dancing, the competitive and social aspects are invariably intertwined. Arguably, calling many of these swing assemblies “competitions” is a misnomer, as the contest portions pepper the program, but the bulk of the event consists of social dancing.
The future of swing dance partially rests on the shoulders of its social nature. New members are introduced to dancing through friends. Online forums like Yehoodi, a website dedicated to discussion swing dancing, and You Tube have created unprecedented access for anyone across the globe to watch and learn.
But perhaps to a greater degree, the future of the Lindy Hop is in the hands today's dancers who have the ability to pass on the energy and history of the eighty year old dance.
“I think the scene exists now because of the people like me, all over the world, who were dancing back when it was popular and who have been dancing since then,” Newsome says. “And [now] we're a lot better at dancing, we're a lot better at teaching, we're a lot better at organizing events and we're a lot better at playing music that makes people want to dance. So the communities are very strong in that sense…. [Lindy Hop] is our folk dance. It is our culture.”