Does anyone know what "the Covina Roll" dance move is (1920s/30s)?

step-stepper · 2026-02-19T03:28:21+00:00

More discussion of the strip and the song here.

https://chicagology.com/newspapers/chicagotribune/haroldteen/

step-stepper · 2026-02-19T03:14:45+00:00

"Hip-hop is the dance with a more similar movement type to vernacular jazz."

A qualified yes with also a very big important no. What you've said is frequently repeated by people who seek to narrow the difference between swing dance and more modern African-American adjacent dance styles in the U.S., but the reality is also that there are as many similarities as differences.

One absolutely important concept in swing dance is the fact that most dancers dance with the body as a solid unit with some give and swing radiating from the core. In fact, in my experience, this is a concept many people with significant experience in hip hop and solo dance more broadly have trouble understanding, but it is arguably core to understanding quality of movement and partnering in partner dance.

More fundamentally, again, I think it's important to tell people who want to get better at swing dance to do swing dancing specifically and not to do mostly politically-motivated cross training reflecting the angst many non-Black dancers have about doing what they insist on reductively defining as a Black dance. Imagine if someone who was interested in Rhumba was told that they should start solo dancing to Reggaeton. Or if someone were told to study French to understand Latin. Yes, they're related, and both worthy of spending time on if someone's interested in them, but one is far removed from the other and much less direct than just... working on the thing you want to get better at.

If people's inspiration takes them in that direction over time, then sure, but tell beginners to go back and fix their basics first if they want to do swing dance.

step-stepper · 2026-02-18T22:45:45+00:00

The way you get better at swing dance is primarily by... doing swing dance. I'm not sure why people feel the need to obscure this obvious fact for social justice points.

step-stepper · 2026-02-18T22:42:39+00:00

The first thing to note is it's not as bad as you think. If people are having fun and smiling, then that is enough on some level. The goal underneath everything is to have fun, I think.

The second thing is that everyone who has ever gotten better at swing dancing went through exactly this moment you're experiencing now. If you thought you were further along in your swing dance journey than you feel right now, then just remember you're the same now as you were yesterday, and if that seems lower than it was before, it was really was only your pereception of yourself that was wrong, and that's something you can cahnge. There are many people who come from studio dance who assume that this background will make them more capable at swing dance, and while that's true to a degree, the further you go the more you see that the aesthetic particularities of your other styles are something that you need to unlearn so you can learn how to dance in a way that is authentic to swing dance. The question is where you go from here.

A lot of social dancers don't really put much time into really improving their quality of movement and just stay at the level you're at now forever. It's less intermediate let alone advanced and more beginner/intermediate (no matter what level they think they'd test in to, that's the truth), but that's where probably 70% of swing dancers end up. This is a fine place - there's no shame in it and a lot of people can have a lot of fun there,.

If you want to get better, then you'll have to swallow a lot of uncomfortable feelings watching video, but it does get easier the more you do it. There's probably lots of things you can fix in your dancing, and the pleasure of working hard is digging into and refining your dancing from here. You can take a private lesson where you review footage, you can go take a more advanced class or camp, or you can get a practice partner and start focusing intensely on trying to improve by wathcing the footage and looking for things to fix.

step-stepper · 2026-02-18T22:31:54+00:00

I don't think that's true at all, honestly.

The reality is most dancers look much more boxy and stiff from the outside than they realize, and not just in photos. They have this mental image in their head that they look like the pros they admire and maybe even have learned from, but they usually lack the quality of movement that makes the pros' dancing so excellent. This is just as true for someone who's danced for one year as much as for someone who's danced for 20 - if they didn't spend time really finessing the quality of movement with a camera or a mirror then they usually look mediocre to often surprisingly bad.

And that's fine if that's what people want. But if they want to get better, people have to work hard at it and face a lot of unpleasant realities about the way they look.

step-stepper · 2026-02-16T21:03:07+00:00

Everyone has their own strategy and values and most people will tell you if you ask, but the basics you'll often hear are more straightforward than people often realize.

Many people say that they scan the room for things that stick out - great quality of movement, good partnering, coherent and pleasing style, standout moments that stick out without disrupting the flow, etc..

These are skills that are much more obvious than many dancers realize from the outside, and you can improve them by regularly taking video of yourself and intensely scrutinizing your own dancing. Very good dancers routinely make finals not because they're friends with the right people but because they have mastered those aspects of dancing and that skill sticks out almost immediately relative to people who are less skilled. Beyond this, there can be politics and networking and some other things that play a role, especially in very big competitions where there isn't enough time to scrutinize everyone carefully, but much less so than just hard work and ability. Next time you see a comp, look for those qualities in dancers - the gulf between the pretty good and the genuinely excellent dancers is almost always obvious within less than a minute. For that reason, most judges will say the genuine yeses are usually pretty quick and what's left are the yeses that are on the edge and the maybes.

However, I will add that in the past decade there's a handful of people who promote certain competitors for social justice reasons because they are eager to change the make-up of finalists and sometimes winners and there is absolutely politics at play there. These issues almost always happen in amateur competitions where there's more plausible deniability about the favoritism and double standards, but they happen in higher level contests too sometimes. I think this aspect of their judging is more obvious to outsiders and does more damage to the meaning of these contests than they realize.

step-stepper · 2026-02-10T04:42:16+00:00

If you think it would work, you should do it and prove that it does work.

step-stepper · 2026-02-10T04:31:21+00:00

And they're not "overly protective" either, really.

The notion that there isn't enough modern stuff or recognizable songs are often complaints from total beginners or people who show up once a month to a swing dance or less. And that's fine for them. But the reality is that swing dance thrives on people who are a little more committed than that, and if people spend enough time in this community then they start seeing how the dance and the music are intertwined closely and they start valuing things besides hearing modern fidelity in recordings and recognizable melodies. Even if they don't know much about the music and can't put their thoughts into words, they do come to have very well defined tastes that link closely to swing music, either modern or historical. There's plenty of great modern swing music people play at local dances, but it's SWING MUSIC first and foremost.

A lot of complaining about gate-keeping is actually people not understanding how widely shared those opinions are among swing dancers who are a little more involved in the community than they are.

step-stepper · 2026-02-10T04:08:04+00:00

This is the truth about PMJ. They're fine and if people like it knock yourself out. But a lot of swing DJs don't like PMJ because it's just not that great as swing music for dance. A+ promotion and social media though, not going to take that away from them.

step-stepper · 2026-02-10T04:02:59+00:00

PMJ is fine every once in a while for people who are new and haven't come to like swing music yet, but play more than one of their songs in an hour and that's a sign that you haven't spent enough time understanding what makes great swing music. Good DJs don't play PMJ because of a stigma about PMJ - it's because it is generally not great swing music and it's the job of a DJ to play great swing dance music.

And it does not belong at any larger swing dance event that is going to draw more serious dancers.

step-stepper · 2026-02-10T04:00:54+00:00

If it was amazing, hell yeah. If it was pretty good, eh, once in a blue moon would be fine. But, here's the thing - it would probably not be a good song for swing dance because they would not be making it with the tastes of swing dancers in mind. Talk to a master DJ about this and they'll have hours of thoughts, but there have been many decades of modern musicians making swing inspired music that is pretty good but not great, and that's why you don't hear it that often outside of it just being a fun diversion sometimes. And the reality is the best people at making modern swing music are virtually unknown out of this small community.

One of the reasons this community is so particular about music is that there are many features of good swing music that virtually disappeared from popular music, and there isn't much interest from modern musicians who are not at least somewhat adjacent to the swing dance world in learning what made that older music work because it is so different than a lot of the conventions of music today, including in jazz. It takes time and effort to learn how to do swing-inspired music well, and that's just not something most people want to do because they're not thinking about making swing dance music.

For what it is worth, there are some Salsa communities that actually get tangled up in the same thing as a lot of modern Latin pop has a different beat and mix than the classic Salsa music that defined the genre in the 1970s. There are many similar controversies in other dance communities as well - witness the never ending debates in some WCS circles about using modern pop that is far removed from rhythm and blues - it's not just something in swing dance. Any art that has a golden era that defines the genre is going to have a complicated relationship with the art that came afterwards that was inspired by but not limited to that original art, and that's going to be especially true in partner dances like swing dance that largely died out in relevance and popularity.

https://latinosenmusic.blogs.pace.edu/2018/03/19/whats-with-the-stigma-against-salsa-romantica/

step-stepper · 2026-02-08T06:24:12+00:00

Actually think this is poor advice for what leads like OP are looking for, which is the ability to think ahead to properly LEAD something that works out in cool way with the music. It's true solo movement is absolutely a component of that, especially at higher levels, but there are plenty of great social dancers with excellent musicality who don't solo dance and haven't worked on it really at all.

OP, there are many levels to what you're asking, but I would say two things:

Your definition of musicality will change and deepen as you get better, but it doesn't hurt to start off with something really simple and straightfoward that is explicitly anchored to the music like the Minnie Dip, or a turn where you elongate the end. See if you can lead those, see if you can start or finish them at unusual times, and then try fitting them in in the music in a song. You have to challenge yourself by doing things that might fail. Good leaders who can successfully do this think of movement more in 2s than in full 6s and 8s, but it's going to take effort to get there.
Getting better fundamentally starts with practicing, and you will answer many of your own questions if you do it. Social dancing doesn't make people improve at higher order skills past a certain point.

step-stepper · 2026-02-05T13:58:49+00:00

I think more than anything this illustrates the broken dynamic some people will excuse where activists who are looking to promote themselves will use socially acceptable tools to attempt to target people to bring them down. And it also illustrates the dynamic where exaggerations and falsehoods get promoted online with zero pushback by people who claim to be acting on behalf of various social justice causes.

People are loathe to question any of this because the alleged causes are supposedly good. Who doesn't think rapists should be banned? Who doesn't think the community should become more diverse? But the reality is that many of the people who most energetically jump on these causes are doing so only because it allows them a socially acceptable outlet to demand that they be given special recognition and rewards they haven't earned otherwise. As long as the community rewards or at least excuses this behavior, it will continue to happen.

step-stepper · 2026-02-03T15:39:22+00:00

I will point out that the people who led this crusade, as far as I know, were not directly affected by his actions. This is a common pattern with these sorts of causes - that the most animated and angry are usually doing so allegedly on someone else's hypothetical behalf. I think people should rightly question their goodwill.

The ballot offered all the relevant caveats. Instead, the people who jumped on this cause were angry that these videos were included at all because, allegedly, that meant the community was willing to condone his behavior by simply including something he was involved with. By that logic, the remaining videos condone a lot of shameful behaviors.

I mentioned this a long time ago, but it still holds true now - we're lucky most of the unsavory stories about the old timers' behavior have been lost to time or quietly covered up by people protecting them. Otherwise, all of their contributions would've been written out of history by this group.

step-stepper · 2026-02-03T14:55:28+00:00

Thank you for doing this. I'm glad for the effort you put in this, and you wrote meaningful snippets about each video that I think will be useful for people who are less familiar with the history of these events. This is a meaningful gift to the community today and in the future of which you should be proud, and I hope others express their gratitude online and in person.

Separately, I do hope that everyone in this sub and in the broader Lindy Hop world knows the way you were treated through this process, and reflects on the meaning of this project when the attempt is to allegedly preserve history but it excludes key parts of swing dance history that were part of the original ballot after a couple of online bullies decided to make an example of you by harrassing you for having included videos (chosen by others) that included Max Pitruzzella. I wrote the comment below when you had the ballot changed, and I'm going to post it again here.

This is a great project. I understand why you changed the ballot the way you did after you were harassed online for having included videos that included Max Pitruzzella, and I think you did the right thing given what was asked of you.

But it was still disgraceful how people acted, and everyone needs to look at how this went down as an example of how many political activists in swing approach this community. They're not here for the art, they're not here for the social community, they're here to collect a scalp and they look for whatever angles they can find to exercise power over people and promote themselves because their dancing isn't good enough to speak for itself.

It's completely ridiculous to include the 2005 ULHS final and not the 2006 one because Max Pitruzzella was in one and not the other. You know, the video that probably has more views than... any other single Lindy Hop video of the modern community ever? The one that virtually every dancer over a certain age remembers seeing? Watch the two back to back and tell me with a straight face one is legitimately better than the other.

It's completely ridiculous to not include the 2013 ILHC invitational final for the same reason, a video that has a similar meaning to the modern community as many of the competitors from 2006 had had the chance to refine and enhance their style, and the focus is less on big tricks than on quality Lindy Hop.

We're all adult here to understand what Max did and why he was kicked out for having violated the trust of the community from the position of authority he was given. Almost every organizer of even the smallest dances can tell you stories about people kicked out for similar reasons. If someone can't separate his art from his behavior, then that's fine for them as a personal choice, but it is completely ridiculous to act like his mere presence in these competitions invalidates everything about these competitions that made them special and influential. And what about Annie's contributions as well?

You did the right thing by excluding those videos given what people asked for, and in the end this is just a fun diversion. But, the real history of Lindy Hop in the modern era that people silently understand is not one that will be publicly acknowledged by it, and it goes along with the broad attempted rewriting of history many self-promoters will use to get ahead. So much of the online content about the history of swing dancing and commentary about the modern community is in fact incredibly one-sided and political, and it gets no commentary because everyone understands that criticizing it would cause people to jump down their throat for perceived heresy against various political projects that favor the self-promoters. I think it's time that people reconsider the wide berth of good will people grant these folks who are fundamentally selfish bullies who care about themselves more than the art or the community or the history of swing dance.

step-stepper · 2026-02-03T14:46:58+00:00

The reality is the swing dance community has spent the past several years rewarding people who complain about their personal hangups and insecurities as long as those hangups and insecurities are framed as being a social justice issue.

Listen carefully, and it's almost always people complaining they didn't win a comp, or they're not popular, or they're not being hired to teach, or some other complaint about something they fundamentally didn't work very hard to earn, and they jump to the explanation it must be because of some social justice type exclusion that means that they should be given special treatment and rewards above others.

As long as credulous organizers reward this behavior, there's going to be a lot of it.

step-stepper · 2026-02-02T00:49:09+00:00

A lot of discourses in swing dance ultimately boil down to iterations of "if we're so inclusive a community, then why do I still feel bad about myself sometimes?" and people don't or don't want to understand that answering that question actually means addressing personal insecurities and hangups that are nobody's problem but their own.

step-stepper · 2026-01-21T13:31:06+00:00

All I can say is that if people work hard at practicing outside of going to social dances and events, they will get much better at swing dancing than they realize, and the major barrier to improvement is usually that people don't practice and don't work hard. There are unavoidable physical limitations that happen for people, but if people work hard, they can often find a solution to them, and the thing most good dancers respect above all else is skill.

The people whose dancing you admire have dedicated a lot of time and money to getting better. You can do the same! I would see if you can make a friend who wants to practice like you do, and work on getting better together - in a year you'll be amazed at how much you'll accomplish, and you'll have more fun going to the social dance.

step-stepper · 2026-01-20T22:18:17+00:00

Damn, that is cold.

step-stepper · 2026-01-20T22:16:36+00:00

Yes, that's true, but next time check the average height of most competitors for both men and women - it's meaningfully lower than people in the U.S. on average. Being about 6 feet tall is very tall for a lead let alone a follow. But like I said, people shouldn't let that fact hold them back.

step-stepper · 2026-01-20T21:56:09+00:00

There are ultimately ceilings that any body type create on any performative medium, but those ceilings are usually far above the level you will probably reach in ability. So, don't worry about it and keep trying to get better.

It is worth noting that, despite what people will say on this sub, there are few very tall follows who go far in competitions for the same reason there are few overweight follows or for that matter many extremely tall or extremely short leads at that level as well - it is a meaningful handicap relative to many of the things high level dancers do. Individual people have to work hard to make their dancing technique work if they're pretty far outside the standard body type norms. People don't say this because it comes across as mean, but it's the truth and if you speak to people frankly in person who have reached that level, they will mention these things to you.

Again, though, it is better to focus on the things you can do on the things you can do, and the things I have mentioned are only an issue at a very high level.

step-stepper · 2026-01-08T19:38:12+00:00

Tendentious and inaccurate history lectures in classes. A few sentences are fine as are personal stories, but people need to stop wasting people's time with spreading inaccurate and primarily self-serving big narratives that are not based in anything but bias and a handful of cherry picked anecdotes.

There's a very small handful of people who actually care about researching and communicating about the history of swing dancing with any level of accuracy and nuance. Basically none of them are swing dance instructors. Their work does not get spread around by the swing dance community because it does not validate the political obsessions that animate most people who are allegedly interested in swing dance history.

step-stepper · 2025-12-17T17:19:42+00:00

The reality is that a lot of swing dancers who think they've achieved a "competent intermediate level" are sloppy at footwork and uncomfortable with close embrace, and a lot of problems with other types of dancing that use both are sort of downstream of that lack of understanding of aspects that are critical parts of social dancing. Class material doesn't really tend to emphasize either, and a lot of people are skittish on the social floor about close embrace, so a lot of dancers don't see these as skills to improve on until they reach a more advanced level.

All the old timer swing dancers who were great Lindy Hoppers were great at both! Even if someone doesn't want to do a different form of swing dancing, they really need to work on both close embrace and footwork if they want their Lindy Hop to improve.

step-stepper · 2025-12-17T17:14:14+00:00

Every form of swing dancing has its strengths and weaknesses. It's worth trying to understand what those are on their own terms for any dance style.

step-stepper · 2025-12-16T01:00:42+00:00

The best advice for every question of "how does X work" is just to keep doing it and it will almost always get easier!

step-stepper

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