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

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)

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...

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.

My (It's not) Bambloozled 2011 (anymore) Blues..

So I walk into our weekly swing dance Wednesday night this week, and catch a dance with one of my favorite leads.  The dance is playful and stretchy and full of confidence, call and response, jazz, and smiles.

Kara and Paul, open Jack and Jill Finals.
Josh Wisely Photos

At the end of the dance, he stops and looks at me with some surprise/admiration and says, "You should go to blues events more often."

Because I’m listening, and relaxed, and, yes, more confident. 

The event in question that I just got back from is BamBLOOZled in Washington, DC.  This was my second year in a row for this event, and it’s one I will make every effort to get back to next year.  It’s workshop weekend, in that there are classes all day Saturday and Sunday, but it also boasts a full schedule of social dancing all night Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, so you can make whatever you want out of the weekend.

What I made out of the weekend was something of a hybrid; I danced all night Friday, went to morning classes on Saturday and napped through the afternoon ones, danced all night, skipped morning classes on Sunday and went to the afternoon ones, and then danced/partied all night.  I actually got to meet and hang out with some really cool women this weekend as well, which is something I don't always get to do.  Overall, it was simply awesome.

For the slightly longer version...

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

ULHS class

There were classes Saturday morning at Showdown, but they started at 10am, and I was not awake at that time, so I did not go. There were also classes Sunday afternoon.  

Due to my indulgence very late Saturday night, and the corresponding amount of sleep that I got, I felt awesome by the time I got up on Sunday afternoon, and, consequently, the only class I made it to all weekend was the final one, Chance Bushman and Bobby Bonsey’s Collaboration and Competition in Solo Jazz Contests.  It started at 6pm, and I actually just listened and watched rather than participated. 

(I was kinda really bummed, because I heard that Evita’s Solo Blues class was really good, but after me and my roomies got up and got lunch… we fell back asleep.)

So the first thing that Chance and Bobby talked about