The lindy hop: A thoroughly modern dance
Swing is individuality within collective rhythm. What does that mean for self-expression today?
The lindy hop first emerged in African American communities in Harlem, New York, in the late 1920s. In the preceding decades many African Americans had travelled north in search of new economic opportunity, and to escape the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the south. That migration initiated a radical change. At the beginning of the century the African American experience was largely southern and rural: 90% were in the south and 80% on the land. By the middle of the century they had dispersed widely, and mostly to urban environments.1 Of the new communities thus created, the largest and most culturally significant was in Harlem.
Prejudice and poverty remained, and the memory of slavery was present (some elders had lived experience of it). But it was also the beginning of the machine age. Modernity had arrived. Trains were sounding and New York was building. “Take the ‘A’ train”, they sang: “Hurry, get on, now it’s coming; Listen to those rails a-thrumming; All aboard, get on the ‘A’ train; Soon you’ll be on Sugar Hill in Harlem”. For many, especially the young, this was the place to be.
Part of the Harlem Renaissance, swing was a musical response to African American experience at a moment of great transformation. It is individual and collective liberation set to the constant rhythm of the machine. Its sound reflected the accelerated tempo of modern life, and helped a newly urbanised community come to terms with the opportunities and the challenges of an increasingly mechanised landscape.2
Lindy hop emerged as the bodily expression of swing. Unlike more formalised dances (the waltz, the foxtrot), lindy hop is nowhere codified. There are no crystallised rules about what it ‘is’ or how it should be done. There are signature features of course, but the dance remains open. There is more accomplished and less accomplished dancing, but which is which is a matter only of subjective, community judgement. As Louis Armstrong once said about jazz, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know”.
I do not think today’s dancers should aspire to dance just as the originals did. In fact I think it is almost disrespectful to aim at doing so, for the moment is different and so are we. There is an urgency and vitality in early lindy hop that is born of a liberation we have not experienced and we should not imagine we can replicate. How could we ever? The majority of us are affluent, educated and white, and we live in a globalised and heavily networked economy. Clips from nearly a century ago are a priceless source of inspiration, but our dancing should not try to be a facsimile.
What should we do instead? Today’s lindy hoppers still dance to swing music, but what does ‘swing’ mean now? The answer is not to ‘update’ the music. West coast swing has a historical connection with lindy hop but is danced to contemporary pop, and this has morphed the dance accordingly. It is flatter and more glossy. There remains a family resemblance but the differences show how, if you change the music, you change the ethos with it.
Reflecting the concerns of contemporary dancers, today’s lindy hop is actively feminist. There is one more obvious and one less obvious dimension to this. The more obvious dimension is that the dance roles of lead and follow are not formally tied to biology. To be sure, at dances today most of the leads are men and most of the follows are women: heterogeneity is the majority choice, reflecting wider society. But you do see variation and, most crucially, any normative aspect of these choices has been consciously weakened. “Man” is not accepted as a synonym for “Leader”.
The less obvious but, in my view, even more meaningful change has been a better distribution of the creative load. The technique of the dance has changed in ways that enable greater equity of expression. Wikipedia says that leaders in partnered dance are “responsible for guiding the couple and… choosing the dance steps to perform. The leader… directs the follower”.3 (It does not say what followers are responsible for, or what they might do of their own accord!) But following the progressive ideals of its dancers, contemporary lindy hop has evolved away from this model. This has been, in my view, our greatest collective achievement.
When I teach the dance, I describe the relationship between lead and follow with an analogy. Jazz bands also divide into two roles: the rhythm section and the horns. The rhythm section is bass, drums, rhythm guitar and piano, and their primary task is to provide a frame. They might play the chords of, say, “Take the ‘A’ Train”, at 170 beats per minute and in the key of A-flat major. If that is what they do then that just is what the band is playing: nothing the horn section does will change it. But this decision is not a constraint on the horns. Quite the contrary. Rhythm is precisely what enables the horns’ own creative expression.
In contemporary lindy hop, leads are to follows what the rhythm section is to horns. They initiate but they do not direct. They create a creative frame for others’ further expression. The best leads, and the best rhythm sections, pay attention to what their partners do and maintain the space accordingly. On the other side, horns and followers should not do the passive minimum and simply play or dance along. They must be active contributors to the creative act. They must be distinct from their partners and true to themselves, but also, of course, not dissonant. You cannot just play different chords altogether, willy nilly.
Lindy hop is sometimes presented as a ‘vintage’ dance, as if liberation from poverty and oppression is something to be nostalgic about. But that is not right at all. Swing is individuality within collective rhythm, and sincere lindy hoppers pursue that goal: but now with an updated agenda. They use their bodies to explore not only how swing can be achieved in the relationship between a partnership and the music, but also within a partnership itself. That focus draws inspiration from the past but also reflects the concerns of today’s dancers. Lindy hop first emerged as an open and thoroughly modern dance—and it remains so today.
I was persuaded of this idea, that swing is a response to the dawn of the machine age, by reading Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars, by Joel Dinerstein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_and_follow (accessed 31/1/24)
Yes, there’s no greater collective achievement than turning an unbridled expression of creativity and joy into a soulless political cause.