First Alternate: A Lindy Hopper's Newsletter

Thanks to everyone who read my piece about #ImprovRespect. I would be remiss not to include this revelation from friend and Lindy Hop legendkeeper Jerry Almonte:

I thought this was really fascinating! Knowing that this was a little bet by two of the more influential American Lindy Hoppers at the time certainly brings a different lens to this than I had when I went into writing about it. 

Where I split off from Jerry is that I don’t think the origin of #ImprovRespect really changes the effect it had on me and a surprising number of people I know. Since my piece went live, many people who started dancing within a couple years of me messaged about the effect this had on the way they watched contests, and even the way they think about preparing themselves for contests. I stand by my assessments of the similarities and differences in the scene’s contest priorities now.

He’s right that this last big technical conversation was forced to make way for the quenelle controversy in the immediate aftermath of ILHC 2014, to this date one of the first truly outright bigoted things I remember witnessing firsthand live in the scene (and that’s only because I can’t remember which re-instance of Ksenia Pharkatskaya uploading her blackface performance I first experienced). He’s also right that these comparatively frivolous conversations would, less than a year later, be forced to make way for what would become, by far, Lindy Hop’s biggest reckoning with its own idolatry and power structure failure in the form of repeated grooming and sexual abuse of minors and young adults perpetrated by Steven Mitchell.

As for Europe’s contest domination at the time: who wins contests, and what influence that has on the dance as it barrels forward, is a conversation that has been going on for at least the thirty years I’ve been alive and is evolving every day. Having looked back at the scoresheets, I think the story about the All-Star contests following 2014 is a little more complicated, but not in a way that contradicts the meat of Jerry’s assessment that European dancers were winning at an alarming rate.

And yet, looking back at these contests, it’s interesting to see whose influence on the dance outlasted their placements, especially in the US where ILHC “World Finals” is still held: the following year, in 2015, Nils and Bianca would start creeping up the levels and becoming perhaps the final word on Swedish Lindy Hop, outpacing their All-Star peers who would largely return to Boogie Woogie. Ann Mony and Ryan Calloway didn’t place in 2014, but their dancing set a reputation for my home scene, San Francisco, for years, in a way that maybe only Kevin St. Laurent and Carla Heiney and Paul Overton and Sharon Ashe had before. Christian Frommelt and Jenny Shirar didn’t place either, but their dancing influenced countless up and coming Midwestern dancers for the entirety of the 2010s, and now their specialty, St. Louis Shag, has jumped the Atlantic Ocean and lives mostly in Europe. 

If it was pretty indisputable that Sweden had the largest volume of successful competitors in the 2010s, I think the same metric falls apart if you try to measure it in 2024. In some ways it’s not possible to dominate Lindy Hop in contests in the same way one could ten years ago, because the international contest scene is a lot less connected than it used to be. The Lindy Hop champions at the Savoy Cup this past year are largely people I’ve never heard of, despite feeling like I’m pretty plugged in online. I could list off to you the who’s who of the United States Lindy Hop competition scene, but someone in Greece or Korea would say “who?” about almost every single one of them. 

There’s just more people doing this in 2024, and more people means it’s harder to keep tabs on everyone who’s good at competing. There’s also just more video now: seemingly every contest event has high quality video, not just ILHC, and dancers are on TikTok and Instagram Reels putting their shit out there outside of a contest setting. There’s no need to look to the results of the ILHC All-Star Strictly to tell you what’s hot, the algorithm will. 

However, despite these new avenues for visibility and validation, people still seem to care so much about their results at every single contest of any size, as much or more than they ever have. Largely, I think this is fine, even fun. As I mentioned in my #ImprovRespect post, the more chaotic Lindy Hop contests are, the harder it is to quantify “success” in them, the more interesting I find them. To me, that’s the system working. I want to be confused!

But a part of me misses when there wasn’t so much content, as much as I love seeing my friends’ and my favorite pros’ stuff show up in my feed (and as much as I love making stuff to post!). 

More than that, I miss the opportunities for showing shit live that’s not eight 8s in a jam format or 90 mix and match seconds at all levels. There’s not nothing, of course (I’m thinking of Beantown or Camp Jitterbug or Camp Hollywood, kind of), but you know what I miss? The live ILHC Classic levels below All-Star, teams, and solo teams, which have since moved online. I’m glad that the virtual aspect has allowed new talent to enter the field that otherwise couldn’t, but I miss the specific experience of seeing dancers who were at the top of their game in their home scenes perform for a live audience of people who are nerds for competing in Lindy Hop. Even on video, there’s an energy to these performances that’s missing when you perform to an empty room with a camera.

I want to plug my friend Shelby’s video where he revisits some dancing he watched in the 2010s that inspired him. I’m working on building a playlist like that of my own, please send your faves my way!

Jerry has also been posting about ULHS 2006 Liberation finals, as a first “viral moment” that’s a great example of something I think could not happen in the same way now. He suggests that it’s the beginning of an era, and I think it’s as good a marking point as any. What I’m thinking about a lot is what the last one of those was, because like he does, I think that era is over, but I don’t know when it ended.

I also want to take this opportunity to say that Jerry’s blog, with a little assistance from the Internet Archive, has been invaluable to me for as long as I’ve been a dancer when it comes to anchoring myself in my own time and place and gaining context on where the scene was before me.

I was planning to send this out a couple weeks ago but came down with a gnarly illness, so forgive me for sending this out long after the moment has passed. As always, reach out to me! I love talking about this stuff with more than just my own brain.

I’ve been working on a project for a while now that’s about another flash point in Lindy Hop contest history, one that I wasn’t there for, due to being five years old. Keep a lookout for that in October or November! Thanks for reading!