Alive & Kicking
2022-06-01 17:59:45.96026+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Last night, rather than trying to do something useful through the Covid crud, Charlene and I watched the 2016 swing dance documentary "Alive and Kicking", and I found a couple of things that might be useful to help us think about how to evolve square dancing. And, yes, I definitely need to do the 4 week beginner swing class near me.
First: They described the great dormant period of swing dancing as the 4+ decades post WWII, which just happened to be the boom of square dancing. Some of the portrayal of the social aspects of the dance culture of Swing were a little more rosy than I've heard from friends who are into Swing, but I still think it's worth some looks at that (and part of why we dance with IAGSDC clubs).
Second: the instructors in the film are making their reputations on creating new moves, showing new sequences, demonstrating novelty. So.... kinda like square dancing of the early '70s? The height of the boom?
Third: The outfits. I don't think crinolines are coming back any time soon, embroidered cowboy shirts are gonna have to wait 'til the bad taste of Marion Robert Morrison's hypocrisy and all of the ick associated with the cowboy mythology has faded from our culture. I could see outfits like the Depression era B&W photographs of square dances depict, though...
Fourth: The roots in Black culture. Unfortunately, you've gotta go pre-Henry Ford to find that in square dancing, and we mostly just have white historians to help frame that context.
Fifth: The music. I went music shopping last night, and I realized that as much as I don't connect with the older square dance music, modern pop leaves it *all* up to the vocalists, and that's a big role for the caller to fill.
Sixth: The physicality. An established caller friend recently sent me a video to talk about. The music was 126-128BPM. Most of the dancers were moving about 110BPM. Several squares were having trouble executing the calls on time, or hearing the calls apparently, so the caller was riding the music volume hard to pull it down during the calls, which meant that after a while even if you wanted to try to dance to the beat, you couldn't, and there was lots of stop-and-go.
If I showed that video to non-square-dancers, nobody'd refer to it as "dancing". Everybody was apparently having fun, so I can't say it's bad, but I can't use it as a recruiting tool to drag people into square *dancing*.
No conclusions, just getting down a few thoughts for here and Facebook.