Teaching Follows to Swing Dance

May 30, 2013

Chris and I have had a couple opportunities to teach Balboa and Lindy Hop recently, and we’ve gotten very gratifying feedback on how well we teach together as a team – especially how much we work with the follows in class. Chris gets as much credit for this as me, because he’s very conscientious about making sure the follows have material to work on. I’m just a loudmouth and make sure I get heard in class. 🙂

Photo courtesy of Dave Welch at Photos With Class

Because of the nice response from our students, I’ve been thinking lately about our teaching partnership. Of course, we aren’t perfect and are always trying to improve on this ourselves, but these are the major points I see as critical in giving the follows an equal education.

1) Stop seeing the follow as the less important member of the team. To teach follows effectively, both the leads and the follows must respect how important their role is in partner dancing. If both teachers model this behavior and outlook, the students will hopefully feel the same way.
Something as simple as the leader-instructor introducing the follows’ styling, and showing genuine enthusiasm for spending time on the topic in class, will help balance the roles.

2) Spend enough time preparing – together. The follow-instructor must be clear on the class material in order to participate in actually teaching, not just dancing. I suspect that when the follow-instructor isn’t contributing to teaching, it’s usually because she doesn’t know what the leader-instructor is going to demonstrate next. She’s trying to figure it out along with the class.

3) While planning, pay attention to whether the moves are lead-centric or follow-centric. Try to balance the material with different moves or additional styling.

4) Teach the Skills needed when following. This might include where to hold your arms, position your weight, or different footwork that makes a move easier. This is especially important to remember when teaching Advanced classes – teaching the nuances of Following Skills changes an Advanced class from “a bunch of choreography I can never use after I leave class” to “now I’m a better follow!”.

5) Sometimes a class will be at a completely different level than the material planned. So go with it! Even though you’re teaching off the top of your head, still try to address the reasons why you make certain choices as a follow, not just the mechanics of how to execute the move.

What other techniques do you find helpful for effective teaching of both roles in partner dances? As a student, what do you find helpful, or dislike?

Jean Veloz, still dancing at age 88

July 19, 2012

If you’ve reading my blog for a while, you might remember me mentioning an original LA lindy hopper named Jean Veloz. She’s revered as one of the most stylish and most inspirational swing dancers in LA during the early 40’s, and she’s still out dancing. A couple weeks ago Jean headed out to Herrang, Sweden, to teach and dance at their yearly event.

Here she is, with all her style and class, dancing with Marcus Koch at Herrang:

We all want to be her when we grow up.

For more on Jean Veloz, click the tag at the bottom.

Dancing at Carnation Plaza – Disneyland

May 3, 2012

Last Saturday we went to Disneyland – this was a bittersweet event because it was the last night of swing dancing at Carnation Plaza. They’ve had live music and swing dancing there since the late 50’s, with top name acts performing like Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, Count Basie and Harry James. Oh, yes, and yours truly – I played at Carnation with my high school band. 🙂

I never really danced at Disneyland – until we moved recently it was just a little too far away to make buying a pass worthwhile – but Chris started dancing there in the late 90’s. It was the first place he saw swing dancing in person, and he started taking lessons because dancing at Disneyland looked like fun. How cool is that?! My first swing dance was in a church basement, and his was at DISNEYLAND!

The regular Disney dancers held an “Aloha” party for Carnation

on the final night, hence the lei.

With good friends Jacob and Emily (and her Minnie Mouse bow!)

Photo by Richard Takenaga

Chris’s “Tie my shoe” move. He didn’t trip, i swear! 😉

Photo by Teresa Wyman

And, while we were there I took advantage of having my hair done and

had my silhouette cut on Main Street.

Passersby got a kick out of watching the silhouette artist work.

Luckily, it only took about a minute. 🙂

The final product. She made my nose WAY cuter than real life, and I’m okay with that!

“I’m Just A Jitterbug”

February 24, 2012

I’ve fallen off posting about dancing much in the last couple months, but a recent Facebook conversation reminded me that I’ve been meaning to post this article originally published in a 1939 Look Magazine. It shows some “behind the scenes” shots of LA swing dancers who were filmed as inspiration for the Walter Lantz cartoon short “I’m Just a Jitterbug”.

The footage of dancing was rotoscoped for the cartoon (basically traced), which seems to be looked down on by animators, but it’s fun for us dancers, because it’s so true to life. Only 2 couples are shown in the Look article, but from watching the footage we know that Ray Hirsch and Patti Lacey were part of this project too, because we see their signature moves in it!

As was unfortunately common in this era, there are racist and derogatory images included in the article and cartoon. I have included them in this entry because I feel strongly that it is inappropriate to cut them and not recognize the bigotry present.

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Human Jitterbugs Are Models…

For Dancing Insects In an Animated Cartoon

Nobody ever knows what a jitterbug will do next. Even those masters of miracles, the Hollywood animated cartoonists, who cam make pigs dance and ducks talk, couldn’t figure out the jitterbugs.

“When the jitterbug craze hit the country,” says Cartoon Producer Walter Lantz, “we started out to make a jitterbug cartoon. But after making many hundreds of drawings, we realized it was impossible to follow the intricate steps conceived by these dizzy dancers unless we could work from actual jitterbugs in action.”

So Lantz rounded up jitterbug teams, turned them loose in front of a camera, then had animators study them on the movie screen. Even then, the timing problem was too difficult. Finally, each frame of action was projected and a tracing was made of it. Animators then drew the cartoon bugs over the tracings of the dancing teams.

Some of the human models and the cartoon scenes they inspired for “I’m Just a Jitterbug” are shown here. The cartoon required 12,000 individual drawings, but it takes only seven minutes to show it on the screen.

Grandpa and Grandma Bug act as silly as human beings.

(Dancers are Roy Damron and Snookie Bishop)

The Bugs Get a Lesson in swing from Mary Herron and Jack Conlogue.

“Snookie” Bishop and Roy Damron demonstrate for the bug cartoonists.

This is the Way the bugs do it after Roy and “Snookie” have shown them how.

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And here’s the final version of the cartoon!

Funny thing is, I don’t see any of the images from the magazine in the cartoon.

“I’m Just a Jitterbug” (1939)

Because I like to see the unedited version myself, I’ve included the complete magazine pages below.

Film to Reveal Origin of Jitterbug

October 5, 2011

I was playing with Google News Reader again, and came across this writeup from The Pittsburgh Press, Dec 23, 1943.

Film to Reveal Origin of Jitterbug

HOLLYWOOD — Filming of “Jitterbugs,” Pete Smith Speciality designed to show how the art of “jitterbugging” developed, will get under way soon, with Will Jason directing.

The short subject boasts a cast of five women and three men, including Arthur Walsh and Jean Phelps, Lennie [sic] and Kay Smith; Charles Saggau and Irene Thomas; and Dorothy Ford and Betty Lou Walker.

Groovie Movie (1944)

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I’ve never heard of Dorothy Ford & Betty Lou Walker before (I’m guessing Dorothy Ford is this gal?). I wonder what their roles were supposed to be?

Arthur Murray: How to Become a Good Dancer

September 28, 2011

Here are some scans from Arthur Murray’s book “How to Become a Good Dancer”. Originally published in 1938, Arthur Murray’s book illustrates the popular ballroom dance steps using the footprint diagrams he developed for his mail order dance instruction booklets in the 20’s.

My edition is from 1942, and the 200+ page book covers general dance technique, Fox Trot, Waltz, Tango, Rumba, La Conga, Samba, and finally, on four piddly little pages at the end, has the Jitterbug and Lindy Hop.

Interestingly, the steps as illustrated are not what you’d learn today in a jitterbug/swing dance class. There are some similarities, but the names of the dances/moves and even where to place beat 1 are different! This is a good reminder that we often view the past through our own experiences, or oversimplify it by thinking that one person’s experiences represents everyone. But this way of thinking about “how things used to be” isn’t usually accurate. If you danced at the Savoy Ballroom you would have one idea of Lindy Hop, but if you took a class from Arthur Murray you’d have a completely different understanding of the dance – both things you could have done in New York in 1938. Is one right and the other one wrong?