Hey everyone!

My posts are few and far between these days, but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking, having a lot of conversations with friends, and working hard on dancing. I’m just less Online these days, which is good mostly. But here’s some dance stuff that’s been on my mind recently, in no particular order.

• I love to visit old lindy hop websites using the Wayback Machine. Have you tried it? Whatever your town’s oldest lindy hop org is, whatever long-running event you can think of, look up its website and plug it into ol’ Wayback. This is our history, too, a lot of this stuff could be gone any second, and one day we’ll wish we had it. It’s fun to get a taste of just how big the scene was in the nineties and early aughts, see what people were talking about on fora, see who was teaching when. My most recent stint is because my non-dancer friend Bryce found an old Northern California Lindy Society shirt at an estate sale and gifted it to me (my non-dancer friends are very good at unearthing cool 10-20 year old lindy hop memorabilia). The Bay Area scene’s websites are particularly well-preserved, and it’s just fun to see how and what events people were organizing in places where I still dance over 25 years later. Yearly Frankie workshops at Lake Merritt Dance (where my local weekly, The Breakaway, is held)! Multiple nights a week at Monte Cristo Social Club! A live band night with JUNIOR MANCE! Lindy in the Park, now and forever!

• I think short-form dance videos on Instagram are fine, actually. If I want to watch a fully-developed idea, and I can’t see it in person, frankly I’d rather watch it on YouTube, preferably on my television. Three minutes of vertical dance video makes me feel like maybe you, the performer, are trapped in my phone, bound in an eternal 9:16 aspect ratio hell (no, I won’t “rotate my phone.” I don’t know how! Do NOT teach me). A swingout in that aspect ratio already feels cramped. Yeah, yeah, I know, we live in a society, Instagram is where the people are. This is just my personal preference! 30-45 seconds of dancing in that limited space feels just about right, like how you’d probably linger in one formation during a performance for a little while before moving around the stage. That being said,

• Bring back YouTube! Jerry’s Almonte’s Best Lindy Hop Video series really has made me realize how much I miss the very slight friction and intention that searching for and selecting a YouTube video provides (rather than being served just whatever), and how much more attention I give to a performance with a wider screen. It feels just a little more like I’m in an audience, or at least like I’m watching a performance. Or maybe I’m just a millennial. Whatever! 

• I want messier stuff. I’m joining a conversation already happening by saying this, as my friend Maurice Fields posted about this recently on their Facebook, posing unpolished work as the fuel to get through a plateau. I’ve been challenging myself to dance a little riskier and messier this year. As a local instructor I see a lot of dancers coming up who are learning so much so fast, and that’s GREAT, and I can see them already putting pressure on themselves to rein themselves in. But being willing to experiment and take risks is how most people eventually develop their style, and I want that for my local dancers! All this stuff comes from the top down though, of course, thus: I want messier stuff from everyone.

• I love to read a book. Reading a book is not the only way to learn something, but it sure is underutilized. I simply love to read a damn book. It’s been mostly a novels year for me, but Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been knocking around my brain in every class I’ve taught, watched or taken since I read it earlier this year, and Hating Jazz, a book I picked up expecting very little, was extremely fun. 

• I’m just another lindy hop asshole dancing house now. God, I missed struggling in class! If you know me a little, you know I grew up in dance studio styles like tap, ballet, contemporary, “jazz,” etc, so while I occasionally go to a hip hop or tap class, choreography makes me a bit too comfortable. This year I wanted to force myself to be IN my body and OUT of my comfort zone, and Terrence Paschal, who teaches the classes I go to, is really good at emphasizing the exploratory and improvisational aspects of the dance (the aspects that are like vernacular/authentic jazz dance, and some of the aspects I am weakest at in it!). And I love disco and house music, so it was bound to happen eventually. After all I just said about messier stuff, you will NOT be seeing videos of me in the cypher, because I’m too busy being present 😇

• If you build it, he/they might come. Having found myself in some conversations with friends and organizers recently about what makes an event Good For Queer People, lately I have no answer but, to quote a famous tumblr post, “man, I think it depends.” The best event for me, but one queer person, is an event my queer friends are at. And the events my queer friends are at are the ones with good music and supportive staff and an accessible gender neutral bathroom and well-ventilated venues with plentiful water. Turns out sometimes what a gay person wants is a well-organized event! But I am but one gay, so if you truly want to know The Answer, you’ll have to ask all of us I guess.

  

Speaking of a well-organized event that I, a queer person, love being at: I am so ready for Lindy Focus!

P.S. A month or so ago I finally got that whole Jubilee Sessions album, the one where the artwork is compressed poorly by every platform it’s on. 10/10. Roll ‘Em!