First Alternate: A Lindy Hopper's Newsletter

Hi! It has seriously been a minute!

Things have felt a bit too dark out there for me to share my silly little lindy hop thoughts, but of course I’ve been having them. I’ve got about three posts I’ve just been sitting on, waiting for it to feel not too small to bother with them. What I have been doing, in the meantime, is throwing myself into a LOT of IRL projects. So I think I’ve earned a little victory lap!

I think this will be a little miniseries working backward, starting with Helen’s and my most recent project (which is the one we’ve been working on the longest!).

Summer Workshop with Andy Reid and Andrea Gordon

We’ve been planning this workshop since last autumn, and it finally happened this past weekend.

First, a clarification: Helen and I have a habit of creating bits that take on a life of their own, and this workshop is not one of them.

For a minute last year Helen and I were jokingly nudged when Andy started appearing on teaching rosters at events again because we (very earnestly!) put him on our silly little in/out list for 2024, after reflecting with some friends about how much we missed having his dancing influence the scene. And listen, you should always be careful mentioning a lindy hopper’s name in public, because we’re all at most two degrees away from each other.

What I mean is: we were sometimes given completely unfounded partial credit for what was obviously Andy’s prerogative, as well as the incredible partners he works with and the events that hire him. Which made us uncomfortable! I didn’t want people going to a dancer I admire and asserting that two SF weirdos were responsible for any part of his career!

That being said, when we found out he was working? Obviously we wanted to hire him! When we heard he was working with Andrea Gordon these days, a follower whose dancing we really admire, we were even more excited. 

We decided to fly them out to San Francisco for a summer weekend. We had a number of different motives:

1. The local balboa scene puts on a lot of workshops of this scale, put on by the organizers of BalHaus out here in SF (Pin Wang, Chiara Wilson, Carissa Koo, and Juanita Dickhaus are at least a few of the masterminds behind them). They fly out interesting folks for a weekend, Saturday for people with less experience and Sunday for more experienced dancers. I love going to those. Why, I started thinking, don’t we do that for lindy hop?

2. Back in 2017, San Francisco dancers (myself and Helen included) were treated to a whole summer of one-instructor-pair weekends—the work of the extraordinary Ann Mony and Adam Hitchcock. We wanted to capture a little of that energy that had been so valuable to us.

3. We have spent a lot of time thinking about and asking others what is missing from Bay Area dancing right now. Having formulated some theories, we figured that one of the best ways to address them is to bring in some dancers who demonstrated those missing values. 

4. To me, especially as one gets “better” at dancing, classes from visiting instructors are as much or more about hearing and trying someone else’s perspectives and seeing if you like them as much they are about “moves” or even “technique.” As someone who has the privilege of knowing and hearing from a lot of hungry local dancers at a lot of different points in their journeys, that’s the kind of challenge I wanted for them.

5. Honestly? I wanted to take class!

We’d never put together something like this, and if you talked to me in the two weeks leading up to the workshop, I was a bit of a wreck. But (as everyone told me I would be!) I’m thrilled with how things turned out. We had a lot of advisory help from Kerry Kapaku, Ann Mony, Adam Hitchcock, Peter Strom, and Naomi Uyama, a lot of community advertising help from basically every local venue organizer, and a simply enormous amount of practical and emotional support from Katie O’Neill and Allen Kerr. With all of that help, we had to learn basically nothing the hard way.

I loved working with Andy and Andrea—they were both communicative and straightforward and were interested in understanding thoroughly what our goals were. Once they were here in the flesh, they were lovely company and wonderful, engaged, patient instructors to our students. Their classes combined the importance of connection to the ground and to your own body, in service of getting and giving a lot of feeling, in service of sharing a musical, playful space with your partner and the music. I learned a ton from them not just as a student, but as someone always trying to improve my own instruction. If any organizers are reading this, you should hire them!

Now that it’s over, I feel like I can admit to some of the values Helen and I were trying to highlight by hiring Andrea and Andy specifically.

• Dancing with the whole body . . .: rather than just leading and following with the arms or legs, to better create feeling with your partner. Letting yourself be present with the floor and your partner rather than trying to minimize your own effect

• Generosity: being able to dance with and not at your partner and the music, to notice and use their ideas, to invite them into yours, and to play with them together

• Getting out of your head and into the music: letting go of a scientific or data-focused protective dancing headspace and making way for a more nebulous, more difficult artistic one that requires vulnerability

Some of these things we specifically asked from them, but most of them I knew they’d bring just by virtue of the art they make. Even with my stated goals, what was most important to me was that Andrea and Andy bring themselves. They really delivered, and I’m proud to have hired them.

Check out the combo we ended the day with on Sunday!