My breasts don't assault you by just sitting here, actually

So, over at Lindy Shopper, there is a post that went up a few weeks ago, but that I only just recently saw.  It's titled "Assaulted by Breasts."

I thought it was going to be an article on safety-pinning buttonholes or something, fashion tips on how to keep your boobs from popping out when you don't want them to.

It is actually a rant about what women wear at dances, and how they should cover up more lest they provoke men into being "distracted by so much cleavage or full boobage that it becomes ogling and/or pushes them into creepy territory," or scar children for life.  The rant is prompted by her husband having seen someone's boob that popped out of her dress on NYE; Lindy Shopper ends the post stating that she doesn't want to come home and hear stories about the breasts he saw, so we should all really cover up already.

(sorry for the quote so early in the piece, but it's just... I suspect I would be accused of hyperbole if I simply told you that Lindy Shopper thinks what women wear is responsible for how men act.)

Nathan Bugh's essays

Hey kids, have you read Nathan Bugh's essays from his website? No? I had not seen them till today. and they are all the shit, so I'm just gonna link them.

Where's the beat?

Sync or Swing?

Infinilindy

Ladies First

Know, you don't

re: swing culture by WonderWomanProject

Hellooooo.  Lindy Focus trip report coming soon, but in the mean time, I typed a lot of thoughts in response to a facebook post about a blog post, by my enchanting friend Aries, so I figured I'd go ahead and toss it up here.  

Hierarchy of dance needs/ what makes a good dance?

So this hasn't updated in a while in large part because it's been climbing season, and I haven't been thinking about dance as much because I've been doing less dancing.

But here is something I've been thinking about, and was talking with a friend about this morning: what makes a good dance? And here, as succinctly as possibly, is my hierarchy of dance needs:

1. Nobody gets hurt.
2. We are dancing TOGETHER.
3. We are dancing TO THE MUSIC.

A Different Kind of Audition Format (Shameless Rocktober promotion)

So auditions. They're kind of necessary and kind of tricksey. People have all sorts of opinions on them.

On the plus side, auditions allow for teachers to tailor the information for each group specifically, which is more productive for everyone.  They also help balance classes, and allow organizers to keep class size reasonable and predictable so we can have better experiences in appropriate spaces.  Auditions are also the reason that we can have fast-paced "intensive" classes at all. You have to have everyone near the same page or those don't work.

And yet, I personally find the typical format super stressful. I don't think I'm alone in that. If I had to put my finger on what I don't like about them, I'd say two things:

• I don't like the uncertainty. 

• I don't like the publicity. I just don't like getting up in front of all my friends and all the strangers who I might want to dance with later, with the sole purpose of being judged, in public. 

• I don't like getting up additionally early. (Ok 3 things.) 

So, since this IS my blog, I'm going to take the time to tell you about a little something SwingColumbus is putting together in my home scene of Columbus, OH. (Also, I'm on the planning committee.) It's a workshop weekend called Rocktober. The auditions are different than anything else I've heard of for a weekender.

design by Binaebi Akah

Rocktober will offer 2 tracks, one "Open" track and one "Audition" track.  

The audition track will be more expensive, because it's capped at 40 dancers (20 leads and 20 follows) and those 40 dancers will have 10 hours of instruction with Kevin and Jo.  Kevin and Jo all weekend!  

The open track will be capped at 60 dancers (30 leads and 30 follows). Instructors for this track are not yet set in stone, but we promise they will be good. And if you choose this track, you will have them all weekend.

*UPDATE June 18, 2012: Mike Roberts and Laura Glaess will be the instructors for the open track!*

"How will that work with registration?" you might ask, "Making one track more expensive than the other?" 

The auditions for the audition track will be conducted ahead of time, by video. So you'll know what track you're in before you come.

(more explanation and link to submission form below the jump)

re: Lindy hop as "challenge" (now with more Venn diagrams!)

So this post is a response to the thread of an idea that's been batted back and forth between Rebecca Brightly and Bobby White, as well as a couple other people.

The first posts is "31 Signs you're not an advanced dancer yet" (Brightly). It is an interesting article by itself, but my response is only to a very small part of it, a nearly-parenthetical aside toward the end of the piece.

"We don’t start lindy hopping because we want easy popularity. We take the journey to becoming lindy hoppers because we crave challenge."

This is a very inclusive "we" statement, as BW points out, positing motivation for basically all lindy hoppers.  Is it true?

[long post after the jump]

Random rant on being told to do it "naturally"

Possibly my biggest pet peeve in taking dance classes is when I am told to do some movement "naturally" without any additional explanation.

I am intensely awkward*. You tell me to do some shit "naturally," and I will do my best, but it will still be wrong.  

re: Plight of Lindy Hop Followers

So, over at Rhythmic Rambling back in December, Rachel wrote of followers slogging through learning/skill plateaus:

Suddenly, after dancing for 6 months or a year, followers realize that they’re pretty much relearning how to do everything in order to dance with well with others.

She talks about how it can be more frustrating/ego-crushing for followers than leaders at this point (a year or so in) partially because the leaders get a lot of the ego-crushing "you know nothing" out of the way early. Whereas it is reasonably straightforward to be able to effect a basic level of following, which people can often pick up very quickly, so at the beginning, followers' egos have an easier time.

I totally agree with her, especially since I went through this you-know-nothing-relearning HARD in about that time frame in my dancing, and feel like I repeat it cyclically. I would like to add another thought to this discussion, also, that I talked about with one of the instructors at a recent weekend. I had booked a private lesson, and when they asked if I had specific questions or goals for the session, the answer was no, because...

DAYTON SWING SMACKDOWN!

omg, y'all. smackdown.

This past weekend was *amazing,* the culmination of months of really hard work for all the teams in the form of a team performances in front of so many of our friends and family, down in Dayton, OH. Fact: it is scarier to perform in front of friends than strangers.

Big shoutout to Josh Forbes for organizing the weekend- Smackdown is Josh's baby. ::sniff:: and it's getting so big now! Gonna start kindergarden next year.

For those that don't know, Dayton Swing Smackdown is two competitions rolled into one; both city/regional and college teams compete. And two rankings are tabulated, overall and collegiate. Collegiate teams can win overall, but non-college-student teams cannot, obviously, win the collegiate division.

All of the teams brought it hardcore, but I am just bursting at the seams with pride for the Columbus teams. Cbus brought home both trophies- the OSU Jitterbucks took the Collegiate Cup despite fierce competition from Miami University, Ohio University, and University of Dayton teams. And Team SwingColumbus took first overall out of 6 entries, the college teams plus two teams from Lexington, KY.

So, videos! (Thanks to Dave Martin of Columbus for the videography, videos below the jump.)

Blues comps at lindy events and cross-competition

So there was a very active thread recently on Bug's Question of the day, about

Why don't more blues dancers go to events like ILHC and Lone Star to compete in the blues divisions? Why don't the lindy hoppers who compete in the blues divisions at ILHC and Lone Star come to Blues events and compete?

I pretty thoroughly regret* having jumped into the fray the way I did, but tangents about specific events aside, if I may take the liberty of synthesizing some of the answers, there seemed to be some consensus that, beyond the overlapping-but-not-identical pool of competitors, competitions at blues-specific events ("blues comps") and "blues" OR "slow" comps at lindy events (often used interchangeably even if labeled one way or the other) have different judging outcomes because the two communities value different things. One of the specific things that the blue community values is a particular blues aesthetic. Little to no value is placed on a blues aesthetic at an unspecific "slow" competitions.

In counter to that, some people were all like "what does that even mean?"

A happy coincidence (in which I westie to country music.)

So our local weekly swing dance is at a country bar. Because they have a lot of line dancing and country dancing, they have a real dance floor, which is pretty sweet.  Also they have half priced burgers and beers before 9 on Wednesdays, which just happens to be our local swing night.  This is also pretty sweet.  The happy hour special was in place before Wednesday became swing dance night, but they've kept it in place despite the now-much-larger crowd that's in there mid-week.  By whatever alchemy, our group and this venue have hit a sweet spot, where the dancers buy a lot of food and drinks, and we get to have a weekly venue at a bar and not a studio, and it has a real dance floor.  And the venue management likes having us there.  Win all around.

But the bar does have a crowd of regulars, and it's in a not-unpopular area of town, pretty near campus, so there's always a steady subpopulation on Wednesday nights that's not there for the swing dancing.

Last night, a couple of instructors from a local dance studio randomly walked into the bar to have a beer, near when our music was ending, though they danced to the tail end of it. After the swing music ended, the bartender put the country music back on, and played a song at my request:

Lindy Focus Trip report (aka/LFPT.)

Holy shit, y'all. Lindy Focus. Now that I've had a couple whole nights of sleep, I almost feel ready to try and write again.

Lindy Focus was awesome, in the "inspiring awe" sense of the word. (This was my first Lindy Focus.) The scope of the event is just incredible, with something like 700 people coming for the week (more on NYE), 3 areas to major in ["main tracks"] (Lindy, 8 levels; Balboa, 2 levels; Advanced Jazz; Comp and Show), and 12 more things to minor in ["side tracks"], from fundamental movement training to burlesque to tap to 2 levels of Charleston emphasis to aerials and even blues. Oh, and also dancing every night from 9 till LATE (multiple late night options: lindy, bal, or blues), with 4 of the 5 nights boasting live music from incredible bands. It is almost too much to take in.

No, it really was actually too much to take in. One can only be in one place at a time. There are only so many hours in the day, and one has to devote a few of those hours to sleeping. Presumably.

And while it sounds very structured, the camp was not, in fact, over-scheduled. There was enough time pretty much every single day to just wander off and dick around and see what people were up to. There was actually a whole day in the middle of the camp with no main track classes, full of side tracks and electives and talks and open practice. I took a nap, even. It was glorious.


Look, I made sections:


FAVORITE MOMENTS (including but not limited to):

- Seeing so many dance friends from *everywhere* and making new ones
- MIDWEST REPRESENT nye pizza party and group photo
- realizing I do have girl skills, doing one roomate's makeup and another friend's hair. It was a wicked faux-hawk, but still... it was hair, and I did it.
- balboa in flip flops 'cause I stumbled into a practice session and wanted to dance.
- swingout battle in the bal room at 630am and 230bpm. The DJ turns around and is like... "wait what? I LOVE YOU GUYS!"
- having someone tell me just past midnight, midweek, that they WERE going to go to bed, but after dancing with me they felt like dancing all night.
- mind-reading dances with a buddy from baltiMORE  late at night, when we're both too tired to care if failure happens.
- baltiqurque. and, hey, I *can* still lindy hop after that much liquor. or at least everyone was kind enough not to disabuse me of the notion.
- learning the phrase "c'est que what the fuck," which needs no translation.
- being the follow who happened to be dancing with a badass dancer when a couple of other badass dancers came up to him to be like, "show us that thing!" and being along for the ride.
- Chance juggling my shoes to end the dance after I lost one and kicked off the other.
- sunrise on new year's day.
- (that's what the dead hooker said.)
- a bunch of specific dances, but I told those people in person that they were awesome (or at least smiled dopily and gave a big hug), so they don't need named here. jus' smiling to myself.
- a couple of girls told me that I was fun to watch. compliments from other follows are the bestest.
- none of this is in chronological order.
- I'm still wearing my bracelet.
- FINDING LOVE IN A HOPELESS PLACE.
- live music!


Talkin' about least favorite moment, spending money and classes, all below the jump, long as usual...

Declining a dance (a thing that you, Yes, You! are allowed to do.)

So a friend of mine was recently co-teaching a drop-in beginner lesson before a night of dancing; I was watching the door and listening. To conclude the lesson, he said that there were only two rules for swing dancing. Following the obligatory Fight Club joke, he stated that the first rule, was the leads had to ask some follows to dance at some point tonight (and that it would be sad to leave all the lovely ladies waiting). Second, he stated that if someone asked you to dance, you had to say yes.

And then I threw up in my mouth a little.

Can I deconstruct that response for y'all a bit? Why that made me sick even though my personal philosophy still leads to basically same result-- I will virtually never say "no" to getting asked to dance.* I swear to god that I am aware that there will be people who think I'm more than a little "Stop the penis party" with this, but hey, this is my blog and my opinion and you don't have to read any of it that you don't want to.

I am the craft-masta! (in which I glue leather to shoes.)

Fun with craftyness time!

Wednesday morning, much to my frustration, I was shot down at the shoe repair store when I asked if they'd glue leather soles onto my sneakers.  Also I was given funny looks.

So yesterday evening, I took myself over to the craft store to buy:

 1) pretty ribbons to lace my sneakers up with in pretty colors.  :)

 2). Suede and glue to fixie my shoeses.


The process...

Trust is a complicated thing. (Bambloozled class and current dance ruminations. Also... words are hard.)

So yeah. Trust.  It's a thing you need to have with someone you're dancing with... only sometimes you don't have it.

It's a thing you have to have with yourself to dance with, only sometimes you don't have it.


There are a few emotional/meta themes that I have been chewing on in my brain for a while now (my brain chews, apparently? yes, it does.), as they relate to my dancing.  One of them (obviously from the opening of this post) is trust.  Another could be called "confidence."  This post is going to be some of my thoughts, as best as I can articulate them, about trust in partnership and connection, and manifestations of that, physically, with respect to attitude and posture and counterbalance.

I'm going to start by attempting to describe some things about the classes last weekend at Bambloozled, especially picking out the things that I really want to dig into, and circle back around with some things that I have been working on in my lindy, both long-term and more recently.

Mechanism of beauty accumulation at high skill levels in partner dancing communities by marginal selective advantage among new dancers*.

Bugs Question of the Day post again!  I feel like it's sort of inappropriate for me to post many-multi-paragraph responses to the QOTD (or my new favorite abbreviation that I just saw on the page, "?/day", when I have my own personal blog for that sort of thing. So since this is my own space, here is my really long answer to today's ?/day.  


First, the question:

@gregory Dyke asks: "A tongue in-cheek question to balance out the overly serious nature of the past few discussions. Is the theory set forward in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqmd75VsVFU @1.30 correct? Beauty and good dancing in women are linked because men do the asking, are shallow and therefore invite the beautiful women, thus affording them more opportunity to dance and become good?"

And here is my initial response:

Holy long response that I just typed out and have decided would be a better blog post. Short answer: as an evolutionary biologist, this theory (as in, prettier girls have more OPPORTUNITY to become better dancers because they'll get asked more often at the beginning) is totally plausible and would not require a large bias at all. A very small (or unconscious bias) would be plenty sufficient. As a follow whose default look is butch and scruffy but who can clean up to what might be described as glamour tomboy, I can say that when I make more effort to look more attractive, I get more dances, hands down.

But here is my slightly more complete response....

Being a leader is hard...

at Laflx 2010, my very first exchange. Photo by Bret Langham

I'm going back to DC this weekend for Bambloozled.  I have been to DC 4 times in the last year, if you count last year's Bambloozled,  (bblzld, dclx, red hot blues ad bbq, ILHC) and it has been a fantastic experience every time.  DC really knows how to organize an event and throw a party.  DC also knows how to draw in some good dancers.  I always go home from DC on a cloud from both the absolute number as well as the percentage of dances that I've had that are just phenomenal.

Which sort of brings me to a funny story.  "A funny thing happened on the way to ILHC," as it were.  

NEVERMORE! Jazz ball 2011 (ever, ever more.)

This photo is going to get used on every blog of this event, because it's awesome. Photo courtesy of Elisa Peterson

November 4-6th, me and a merry band of Columbus, OH, dancers made our way to St. Louis for the weekend-long spree of awesomeness that was the Nevermore Jazz Ball.  Our merry band was actually two whole cars full of dancers, 8 people willing to travel 7 hours for some St. Louis goodness.

 You may not know this, but the S in Hunter S stands for Stanley.
photo courtesy of Travis Hartman

The weekend began for me on Friday around noon, when my travel buddies showed up at my house to stash their cars in the lot and their bags in my CRV.  My OCD kicked in just a little at the start, and I took over packing the car, haha.  But! As a result! We got 4 people's worth of stuff for the weekend in the back, and I could still see out the back window.  Win.  

The trip down was relatively uneventful: get on I-70 W, drive until you hit STL.  We found a great Vietnamese restaurant right near the venue, and found the venue with no problem.  When we got there, there was a dedicated parking lot for the dancers, with a guard.  Brilliant! I love it when events go out of their way to solve parking problems.  Just takes a stressor out of the weekend.

We quickly got changed and dove into the dancing. The floor at the Casa Loma is really fantastic- both quick and beautiful.  That night we danced to two local bands, the Sidemen and Miss Jubilee's Hot 5.    Both bands were swinging deliciously.  We settled into the groove of hugging on and dancing with old friends, and quickly started making new ones.

Shannon, ever smiling.
Photo courtesy of Travis Hartman

Someday, maybe, you'll get to see Danny be
really excited.  photo courtesy Travis Hartman.

It wasn't all just hugs and relaxations, though.  Friday night was also the Jack and Jill competition, which everybody in my car/party had entered.  We even got B to enter.   :)

Binaebi and Jeremy in the Jack and Jill.
Photo courtesy Travis Hartman . 

Plus,  all the contests for the weekend were MC'd by the ever-ineffable Jon Tigert.


The Jack and Jill has great compliment of competitors, and Columbus's own Shannon Varner took first, with John Holmstrom.  Aaron Raiff and Hannah Burgess took second, and Michael Bradford with Emily Schuhmann placed third.

In which I wonder what side-track I should be in for Lindy Focus...

So when I signed up for Lindy Focus in June, I selected the "Advanced Aerials" side track.  Mid-July, I had a conversation with a friend of mine about taking it with me, and he said he was down.  But I never bothered to correct the TBD on my Focus registration.

So I get an email a few days ago from one of the organizers, just giving me a heads up that I still don't have a partner listed, and I should get that straightened out or I should switch to another track before they all close.  I dropped my friend an email to say Hey whats up, are we still doing the aerials class? and he informs me that he's not going to Focus at all.  He's shifted primarily into blues gear, which is why I haven't seen him recently.  whoops.

Epic, photo-laden Rocktober 2011 "Trip" Report

Hey y'all, this one isn't a "trip" report, because I didn't have to travel out of my own cozy homedown to go to it. But it was a "trip", in that I felt like I sort of went on a journey, mentally.  So here goes:

Columbus, OH, hosts two major events a year- CBUS, which is an exchange and is social dancing only, and for the last few years, Rocktober, which has classes.

Rocktober happens (You guessed it!) in October, it happened this past weekend, Oct 7-9th.  Last year, it was a big, multi-track extravaganza, with three tracks in the convention center and a big Showcase competition for couples' choreography and the whole 9 yards.  This year was a little different.

This year, while there were still dances to live music on Friday and Saturday nights (And DJ'd late nights) to which everyone, the whole community, was invited, as well as a J&J competition, there was no big, multi-track workshop.  What we decided to do instead (disclosure: I was one of the organizers for this) was to host the kind of intensive workshop with small classes and top level instructors that dancers in our region rarely get to participate in. That dancers, period, rarely get to participate in: a very small class with world class instructors that lasts the whole weekend. What a great opportunity, we thought, (disguised as being unable to find a venue for a huge workshop), to give dancers in our region the opportunity to give their dancing a kick in the pants.  And in the process, bring up the level of dancing in our region as a whole.

We filled the class with a combination of video auditions, which were open to anyone, and personal invitations to regional dancers.  The latter we hadn't really planned on initially, but we realized that very many people were intimidated or confused by the video audition requirement. Consequently, they hadn't sent in a tape because they didn't think they'd make it, when in fact they were our target audience.  So what we got in the end was a class populated entirely by people who were highly motivated to learn. 

Our instructors were Kevin St. Laurent and Jo Hoffberg.  This was the class:

all photos courtesy of Jenna Menchhofer