What I’m interested in right now is this new “style” that I’m trying to capture into my body. We often talk about in swing dances that it doesn’t really matter what you do with your feet or you can do whatever you want with your feet. I kinda took this as a philosphical thing, like theortically yo ucan do that. But… that’s not the “core” of the dance. Its more of a tangencial expression of it.
I have a few levels of “not following” which i put in quotes because it is still very much following but differerent expressons of it. I have this framework from tango, but number 7 is from swing.
- follower changes something and leader doesn’t know
- follower changes something, leader knows, but it doesn’t affect anything
- leader opens the door for follower to express, follower expresses and then passes it back to leader
- follower suggests change, but leader can chose to accept proposition or not
- follower alerts leader change is coming and makes the change
- follower does not alert leader to change
- follower threads in a lead or a change in a way that isn’t disruptive to the leader and creates an entirely new situation for them to handle.
Number 7 is really… Neus. Of the Balanced Dancing brand. Holy shit when she first did this to me it was amazing, very very cool. I think her way of threading in is becoming more in the general space and it is a fun technique.
I bet there are more expressions of this and I’m looking forward to seeing them.
Back to Lindy Hop…
So, this whole framework is still very much footwork dependent. In Tango, Shag, and Balboa I know where my partners feet are. They set up the next move. It defines the dancing.
And I kinda though thought of lindy hop in the “you can do what you want with your feet” idea as like… one of the 7 points on the “not following” framework. Cool but maybe not something you’d do for the whole dance. Maybe a flavor or a color.
When I started dancing on the East Coast of the US, in Balitmore and Philidephia, it was the first time I expereicned the “hold hands while doing solo jazz” style of lindy hop. Such a radical depature from what I was used to. It took me a couple of months to snag, but it wasn’t that difficult to do in a way that was acceptable to the people I was dancing with.
In my mental model, this is… really a sepearte point. Not everyone danced like this and I couldn’t really see a depth to it beyond really good solo jazz dancing, (but while touching hands). Some great call and response, wonderful playfulness, but not a very richly developed style (yet?).
So my mental model was like
Okay, on the left side is lead/follow every step feeling tone texture speed level. aka “verbatem” following. And then on the right side followers who really should be leaders. Kind of a bell curve for what people actually do in the community and then the dot outlier of solo jazz touching hands.
Okay but in Vilnius, I’ve been struggling because I can feel the pro followers aren’t happy. They’re accepting of my dancing, because it is good, but they don’t like the flavor. They’ll eat the icecream because they like icecream, but they’re not excited about it, it isn’t their favoriate. And I actually felt the same way. But… this is my community now so I’ve been on a bit of a quest to figure out what’s the deal.
The first “breakthrough” that was perhaps a false one, was thinking less like, okay, we’re doing this and leading in follow through, instead, leading with more suggestion. And being just totally open and ready to be like, whatever man, its all good. That helped. And it really landed well with some of the pros. Not all of them.
The second “breakthrough” which hasn’t been tested yet is not thinking of feet can do anything not as a version of lead the feet, but as truely its own point. That the lead and follow is based on momentum and position, but not feet. So my mental model is now this.
Okay, so what does this look like? looks like this: https://www.instagram.com/p/DWUns9pgoTy/
Wtf are those feet doing broooo. But while I was in this class doing the exercisies, yes, I felt a revleation, this is a completly differnt way to dancing. The feet are so mixed up you have to change your relationship to bracing and connection and momentum. Everything is different.
REALLY excited to go social dancing and see how this goes.
My theory right now is this is the base of Pamela and Tadas’ dancing, which I adore. Will report back.