History
This is not the history of swing dancing. You can find that from Wikipedia or a number of other sources. This is the history of my swing dancing. When I started, how I started, and so on.
It was March, 2007. It was, coincidentally, my birthday month (three cheers for Pisces!). The Jive Aces were going to be playing at PBDA, and my mother knew them personally and I loved their music. I decided I would go along, and I had done one or two swing lessons at my high school, so it would be fun.
I found out a whole bunch of my friends were going too, which would mean I had people I could dance with. So, I went, and it was an incredible night. Jive Aces packed the giant church as they always do. But, I took away something with me that night, something that would start the dancing aspect of my life.
I realized that I couldn’t really dance to the Jive Aces.
After that, I asked my mother, who could swing dance, if there was a place that she suggested to take lessons. She said that she was taking Lindy Hop lessons (had never even heard of the dance) with PBDA, and that it might be a good starting point. So, I started taking dance lessons.
This helped me get the exact footsteps working, and I so I was able to dance on a strict 8 count, the rhythm that now runs through my very soul, “One, Two, Three and Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight”. That was great, but I was a very mathematical, logical person. Hence, I am also web developer.
Rhythm was my problem. Hearing music. I never danced at any of my high school dances or anywhere else. People said “just feel the music”, “move to the music”, and so on. I could not feel the music. Many people thing that everyone can “feel” the music intrinsically. Not so. Rhythm was on a different wavelength.
My friends said things like “Kerry’s great because he knows so many moves, but he’s offbeat.” I had a friend of mine, for probably 10-20 minutes, stand with me and just have me bounce up and down, and walk on beat. It was SO difficult, something that others do without the least attention. That helped a lot, and I could, then, be partially on beat to many songs, but still had a lot of attention on it.
About 5-6 months later, I was only able to dance with one person completely comfortably, and that was Codi-Rose. She helped me become a strong lead and we could dance great together, but I didn’t like the style of the other dancers that I danced with. I felt we were on completely different rhythms, and they felt it too. My main dance venue had switched from PBDA to Lindy Groove.
It was about this time that I stopped taking paid lessons. I had been doing 2-3 lessons a week, going from Lindy Hop, Jitterbug, and Ballroom Dancing. I noticed Codi-Rose was becoming increasingly busy so we were dancing less and less, and I had a very awkward feeling with other dancers. I wasn’t quite a “social dancer”.
I actually stopped coming, sometimes for weeks at a time. I did keep returning, however, because I had made good friends there, and they wanted me there. That is when I met some people who I started having fun with. This was probably around August to September, 2007. I started coming more and more, and loving it more every time. I was still very offbeat, but was doing much better than before. Then… then the next great change took place.
We had started calling ourselves the Swingin’ Clientele, and so when I say “we”, I refer to the group of friends.
We heard about this “blues” dancing. We had no idea what it is, but thought why not check it out. I had noticed that many of my favorite dancers were t-shirts and sweaters saying “Do Something Blue”. That was the blues venue. I believe it was October, the Halloween dance, when we first arrived.
I took the beginning class, and boy did it make me feel awkward! It was closer than Balboa, and had more feeling than Tango. Some argue more sexy and more passionate. But that came later. I was so “awed” by the dance, that I literally watched the entire night. I believe I watched for four hours. I had one half a dance with one very good dancer. The rest of the time I just watched.
People were moving, synchronously, to the music. It was like watching choreography, but you knew it was improvisation. It was a lead-follow dance, just like Lindy Hop, Salsa, Waltz and many others, but it was different. The “basic” step was simply left, right. There were no “set moves”. Everyone’s dance was unique. A dance was expressed by the combined personality of the lead and follow; no two dances looked the same. It wasn’t like a lead moved his arm and the follow then did a move. They moved together. It was incredible.
It was all to traditional blues, with very few exceptions to perhaps a modern song. They would stop synchronously to a break in the music. I didn’t understand HOW that could happen. Did they really know ALL of these songs, in these four hours, well enough to know where each break is? I didn’t think that was the case. I thought they could feel it. I decided it was this that I wanted to do. This dance, Blues, was the next goal I had.
One of the things I had learned about Blues was that you HAD to be able to listen to the music. It was more important than the steps and anything else in the dance. So, I called my dad, who was delighted that I now was into blues, and asked for any blues CDs he would suggest. He gave me a few, and I listened to them in my car for the next few weeks anytime I was driving. I also listened to Blues for about 10 hours every day for the next seven days.
Well, I had fallen in love with this dance, but it was once a month?! I couldn’t wait that long. I started contacting people trying to find out if there were lessons anywhere (there were none), or if there were other blues clubs. There were none that I could go to.
So, my friends and I decided to do what we’ve now named “blues sessions”. Because we had such a strong urge to dance, we would dance wherever we could. We started in a parking lot with four of us. We then moved to various apartments, and we had six of us. We learned together and improved drastically. We would do this about once or twice a month, so we would blues 3-4 times a month.
A few months later, probably February or March of 2008, I got a friend who said “… but Kerry is always on beat.” It was a huge compliment to me, it means I had changed a lot. They also noted that I was able to always return to the beat if we somehow got off-beat.
Do Something Blue (DSB), the last Friday of the month, is now the day I look forward to every month. I have a countdown timer to DSB, which I am sure I will place somewhere on this site.
The next semi-major change was caused by an injury: I hurt my arm doing a dip. It is still hurt, to this day, because I can’t stop dancing (it’s a problem). But, because of that, I have asked and pleaded for my friends to start leading me, so that I could follow. When I follow, it doesn’t use the muscle in my arm and gives me a chance to heal.
Being able to follow really gives you perspective on what your follows have to go through, and it makes it much easier to lead them. Also, I have noticed that pretty much every professional dancer I have danced with can do both.
And that is the history of my dancing. I have had some other remarkable events that were not listed here, but such remarkable events will be blogged in the future.
