First Alternate: A Lindy Hopper's Newsletter

Hey, sorry I haven’t been writing a lot lately. At first it was because I was busy as hell with real life dance projects (how lucky!), and now it’s just because I’m frustrated and annoyed.

I want to give voice to this annoyance, because I think it’s more common than many of us let on. I’ve come to terms with my cycles of frustration, and one of the few things that still gets to me even when I’m handling my frustration well is just how alienating it feels.

I have, over the years, come to see my frustration as a guidepost. When I’m annoyed with something in the dance scene or with my own dancing, it usually means I feel like something is missing from my scene or my practice, or the thing that’s annoying me is in conflict with my values. Usually the peak of frustration means I take a break, and with that break, I figure out what (else) I want to do to alleviate my annoyance.

I wasn’t able to use this annoyance, to turn it into something productive, for a long time. Some of this is just experience: I needed to be around longer and know how things work to figure out what I could and couldn’t change. And some of this is because I have faced so much pushback to being annoyed. 

Part of this is on me. I am often honest when asked a question that is meant to be a pleasantry. With tact, of course! If someone asks me why I’m not going to something that I don’t want to go to, I’ll say “I don’t really want to go to that” instead of making an excuse. If I don’t like the band or song I’ll say “this isn’t my favorite kind of music to dance to;” if there’s a lot of things bothering me, I’ll just say “I’m not really feeling it tonight.” 

But no matter how diplomatic I am, the dynamic that’s created is that I am dissatisfied and they are not, and my dissatisfaction is a threat. Often, the impulse is to try to talk me out of my frustration in the moment, and there’s pushback when I gently decline.

And honestly, it’s this reaction—that my frustration is something to be fixed, that it has to be fixed for everyone else to have fun—that annoys me more than anything. This, without fail, always is the last straw that benches me for a few weeks (if I don’t recognize I need a break sooner, which I’m pretty good at these days).

Because it frustrates me (further!) when people mistake my frustration for something like ungratefulness. I am too observant for my own good, and I have a deep care for the things I love. I love the dance, myself, the scene, enough to get frustrated with it. Any committed relationship—to a person, a community, an art practice—requires being willing to recognize, express, listen to and grapple with difficult feelings and circumstances like anger, frustration and annoyance. To ignore or minimize those emotions is a sign of disrespect.

There’s nothing wrong with being satisfied with the way things are. If the scene works for you, great, it works for you. If you’re interested only in certain aspects of the scene, or your desires are satisfied by a dance floor, some people, and a song, I genuinely think those are perfectly valid ways to move through this hobby. But my dissatisfaction is a strength and I don’t like it being dismissed.

I get frustrated most often by potential: I believe things can be different in a way that’s compatible with the scene, and I believe that difference is desirable, and I am disappointed when other people don’t see the value in that. 

There are things that, over my 13 years in the lindy hop scene (local and larger), I know I can’t change. They’re things that aren’t actually dysfunctional, they’re just not to my taste and they never will be. There’s nothing wrong with that. And there are things I think are worth changing that just require a very long timeline, and sometimes it feels like progress is slow. When I get really frustrated by those things, I take a break and let the acute frustration wear off. Sometimes it suffices just to be much more selective about the ways I engage for a little while. (This makes for some awkward encounters when I come back to something, and someone chides me about how they haven’t seen me in a bit. Trust me, if I was gone for a while, you wouldn’t have wanted me there.)

But a lot of the time, if I’m annoyed, it usually means I’m about to figure out what I want to do next. If you’re a dancer who enjoys any class I’ve taken, any practice I’ve facilitated, any set I’ve played, it exists because I got annoyed and decided to do something about it. 

I started DJing because while the DJs in my home scene are pretty dang good, I was annoyed that I wasn’t hearing my favorite kinds of music very often. Helen and I started our biweekly open lindy hop practice because we were bummed that there wasn’t a good space for people to get nerdy about their lindy hop in San Francisco in the way there is for balboa and shag. We hired Andy and Andrea for the summer because we thought they demonstrated a perspective on dancing we were frustrated that we weren’t seeing. Many of the classes I teach are motivated by “why don’t I ever see people do [X]?” or “I wish dancers wanted to work on [X] because I love doing it.” And after I take action, I do feel better! Even if it doesn’t “fix” the thing that was frustrating me, I’m buoyed by the process and the creation of opportunities.

I’m not the only person I know like this, and that speaks to one of my broader frustrations (one of those ones it’s taking a while to move the needle on). In a healthy community, there needs to be space for people to be dissatisfied. Not all dissatisfaction is created equal—for example, if someone doesn’t like that the dance is Black, or that it’s done to jazz, or that people want those things at the forefront of the practice, obviously those are fundamental dissatisfactions that can be fixed by finding another hobby. But many people have a notion that a community is a bunch of like-minded people doing things happily, and that isn’t sustainable. 

A community is a bunch of little relationships in one big network. As in a relationship, to discourage committed community members from voicing when they’re frustrated is to create resentment and hurt, and those feelings only grow. It creates an environment where the usual decision makers can speak without pushback (because their opinions are not “troublesome”) and culturally dominant demographics are catered to (because their desires are “normal”) and those who are marginalized (sorry to feel like I have to say this, but I am talking about nonwhite dancers, queer dancers, trans dancers, etc here, not weird bigots!) are encouraged to keep it down. It doesn’t mean there is no conflict, it means that when conflict finally occurs, it’s larger and much more difficult to resolve. Often it’s just temporarily soothed and then ignored, starting the cycle all over again.

I can’t fix the way the community handles this on my own, but I can control my own response to it. So yeah, I’m annoyed right now. I welcome it. I’m blessed with individual friends who listen to me and people to brainstorm with. I’m already, with a little space from what’s annoying me, full of ideas. Deal with it!