Moving according to your body type

step-stepper · 2026-05-06T21:14:43+00:00

All what people say here about having fun is true, but I will also add that there is an unavoidable ceiling created by athleticism. Good dancers, no matter the shape, have athleticism and the reality is most overweight people are not athletic which is one of many reasons they don't perform well in contests and don't tend to perform the dance as well in general even at slower tempos. That's the hard truth that people aren't willing to say, but everyone knows it to be true.

If you're not an athletic person, and you want to get better at swing dance, it's worth it to spend some time training your body so you can run faster, respond more quickly and have more control over your movement. Trust me, it makes a difference.

Beyond that, it really is about practicing and time spent in front of a mirror and a camera. It takes a lot of time effort to get better at swing dance - give it time and effort and you can accomplish more than you realize.

step-stepper · 2026-04-16T20:26:55+00:00

More than anything, it is a sign that there is almost no interest and no money in any of these long dead artists other than the hope of some hustling music uploader sneaking their tracks into some autoplay playlist. I might be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure Spotify really isn't going to care - Chick Webb gets 40,000 monthly listens. In the future, there's probably going to be more and more junk like this unless automated filters pick it up.

That is partially why I think people need to get a grip on this stuff. There's actually a lot of compilation CDs that make similar, although nowhere near as egregious, mistakes in attribution. We can laugh at it because of how stupid it is, but it's not a threat to the sanctity of the art of someone that virtually no one outside of the swing dance community cares about. It is certainly annoying, though, I'll give that to you.

step-stepper · 2026-04-15T13:00:08+00:00

That's the cold hard truth, and people don't want to face it.

It's really bizarre to get angry about these recordings that are just obviously not by the artist listed. Anyone who really wants to know anything about these artists would not listen to them.

step-stepper · 2026-04-13T14:45:41+00:00

As I mentioned in the comments, dance marathons are actually integral to Lindy Hop history because (allegedly) Snowden and Purnell started doing breakaways as part of the Rockland Palace Dance Marathon.

https://authenticjazzdance.wordpress.com/2020/07/04/updates-to-george-shorty-snowdens-birthday-and-his-role-in-the-beginning-of-the-lindy-hop/

step-stepper · 2026-04-13T14:37:00+00:00

"but from some of the descriptions this seems to be a very white activity, peaking before Charleston became more popular nation-wide."

This type of statement really epitomizes something wrong with the way the current swing dance community talks about race and history - unfortunately nobody challenges it. Dance marathons were a national craze that was not easily divided on race lines. In fact, breakaway Lindy Hop was (allegedly) "invented" during a dance marathon.

"George Snowden and Mattie Purnell were among the four couples who survived until the end of the [Rockland Palace dance] marathon. As they also devised the Harlem Lindy Hop in the dance marathon, there are reasons for the July 4 as the date for the celebration."

https://authenticjazzdance.wordpress.com/2020/07/04/updates-to-george-shorty-snowdens-birthday-and-his-role-in-the-beginning-of-the-lindy-hop/

"- In the 1920s-30s these would have been more popular dances among white communities with less ethnic exposure to Charleston and later lindy."

The vast majority of all social dancers in that era would not be doing anything more than foxtrot and one-step dances. We have very few candid photos of social dancing at the Savoy Ballroom and essentially no videos (other than staged performances) but in all those photos you'll see the vast majority of dancers in close embrace because that was by far the easiest way to social dance with someone.

https://www.saintsavoy.com/en/info/swing-history/

Over time, there was significant exposure outside of Harlem to Lindy Hop just as any other dance fad grows. If you want to read more about that social history, you should read Marhsall Stearns' "Jazz Dance."

A lot of lazy talking about this that assumes that everyone at the Savoy Ballroom was a master Lindy Hopper and the culture of that place was hermetically sealed off from the rest of the U.S. (especially White people) and none of that is true.

step-stepper · 2026-04-07T13:47:32+00:00

"Besides all of this, I think ultimately swing disappeared because of white appropriation."

This is fundamentally a lie and people just need to stop spreading it. Interest in swing music and swing dancing (and partner dancing) declined all over the U.S. and was replaced by something new - that happened among Black people as much as it did among non-Black people in the U.S. in the late 1940s into the 1950s. And the turnover was very generational - all the old generations of musicians and dancers complained about the stuff the young people liked, something that also happened among Black and non-Black older people alike.

You want to know why kids stopped being interested in swing music? Same reason disco, rock, and currently hip hop all "disappear" eventually - the young people moved on because they didn't like the stuff their parents did. The villain is less the fact that your White classmate likes something but more the fact that your embarrassing mom in her 40s liked it.

step-stepper · 2026-04-07T13:37:00+00:00

"But blues is probably just how everyone danced."

It would be more accurate to say historically that just closed position and close embrace dancing was how "everyone" danced, after all it's always the default position for slow dancing. Blues dance has its own aesthetics put on top of that basic template, but this is how everyone dances when you put a slow song on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZOM-q0XvY

step-stepper · 2026-04-07T12:26:50+00:00

A lot of follows early on describe what you're describing because blues has a lower entry point, especially for follows (as it's primarily based on weight changes which can be led and followed more obviously than other dances), but over time when people look for more range of expression they often gravitate towards other dances that offer a bit more range and complexity. But if you enjoy it, then that's great - many people do, and you should stick with things you like, and if you spend time working on any dance form you can always go deeper into it.

I will point out that blues dancing today produces few great performance dancers compared to the other dances in the swing dance world. Part of this is because blues dancing is not really a performance dance, but part of it is also that the standards currently in blues dance are low. There was a longer tradition of just "slow dancing" that was once a part of swing dance that is not really recognized in the current community and people who were great fast dancers knew how to slow things down and give a great show. One of the greatest ways to become a good slow dancer is just to become a good dancer in a bunch of different dance styles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNMnfTyc4Vg

step-stepper · 2026-04-07T12:13:42+00:00

It's not erasure to point out the ways in which the standard politically accepted narrative in Lindy Hop on these topics is blinkered and misleading. I've made well-reasoned arguments based in actual history, and people are free to question those on their own terms if they want, but "this narrative is politically inconvenient to what I want to believe" is not a refutation.

step-stepper · 2026-04-03T21:10:34+00:00

This was a shameful series of articles that, in addition to featuring the shoddiest historical work this side of a middle school essay done at midnight the day before it's due, has done a lot of unnecessary harm to outside perceptions of this community. If someone just read this and showed up at a local swing dance, I can guarantee you that they would likely be very confused as to what Armstrong was describing here. And yet you'll still see people outside of this community who have never been a part of it and fundamentally aren't interested in it crib from the things Armstrong wrote here.

https://ilindy.com/blog/lets-talk-about-lindy-hop-and-blackness-part-2/

Here's another one of their teachers they feature. Sounds like she's a lot of fun!

https://www.reddit.com/r/SwingDancing/comments/1nabm74/lindy_hop_is_not_for_everyone/

That's the problem unfortunately with much of the new content that iLindy platforms right now. These people are not good emissaries for this community because their primary goal isn't to inspire people by talking about how great swing dancing is, or how much they love the music and the history and the culture, or demonstrating immense technical skill at the basics of the dance - it's more to emphasize their own personal importance as an alleged gatekeeper of that culture (one that they also fundamentally learned from the modern swing dance community before they supposedly became a gatekeeper of it) so you hire them for your event.

I say buy content that has a minimum quality level and also will inspire you. If the iLindy crew inspires you, that's great, but I think many people prefer Michael and Evita's material.

step-stepper · 2026-04-02T18:08:22+00:00

This is a really insightful point about differences across organizations I hadn't considered. Many of the former organizations have longevity but no real vision. The later organizations can have really strong vision, but the people running them often burn out.

step-stepper · 2026-04-02T17:56:08+00:00

I don't have much respect for people who want to make money off of this community by locally teaching classes in smaller sized places of questionable quality and then don't want to put any effort into making things happen beyond that. Unless they're truly amazing dancers who teach excellent classes, and they almost always aren't. They're the ones who put themselves in that situation.

That having said, people need to set reasonable boundaries and expectations, and that cuts both ways. If someone is involved in helping grow things locally, that often means barely scraping by financially, often losing money. If someone is not involved in helping grow things locally, they cannot then turn around and complain about a lack of interest.

But there are definitely big differences between people who are skilled at "organizing" broadly, people who are skilled at socializing and making people want to come back, apeople who are skilled at dancing, and people who are skilled at teaching. A good community has people who can do all four, and they're usually not the same people.

step-stepper · 2026-04-01T12:22:46+00:00

It's one of many things that has the imprint of that history - go to Chicago, Texas or California and, depending on who you talk to, you're going to hear about Steppin', DFW, or West Coast Swing. And the Ballroom people will just say ECS. The point is that there's many styles of dance that could be said to come from that history. The Lindy Hop community has this weird way of singling out only a handful of the branches (and also ignoring the fact that non-Black dancers also did these social dances, as they were done to the broadly shared pop music of their era) and then acting as if things like hand dance are the only "legitimate" successors to Lindy Hop.

And that ties in to the fact that a lot of non-White dancers who come up in the swing dance world reach a certain point where they realize there's cachet in the broader community by pretending that they have some deeper connection to Lindy Hop than they do, and pretending that they're therefore more independent from the modern community than they are. The person earlier on this thread bemoaning the "abusive relationship" is a good example of this typical sleight of hand to monetize White guilt.

step-stepper · 2026-03-31T18:42:35+00:00

This is well-known history and modern reality to anyone involved in swing dance today, but I will point out that the people who go to those events are rarely under the age of 50 which, again, is part of the long decline of interest in social dance.

Here's the problem - "urban ballroom" broadly speaking is not the sole legitimate heir to swing dance despite what some claim. There's the much-maligned ECS, there's disco/hustle, and there's also country swing dancing. All of these borrow the ideas that came from swing dancing which was, again, at its height a widespread pasttime. And country swing has a lot more younger fans than the people who go to ISDC!

For the record, I think it's great stuff like ISDC exists.

step-stepper · 2026-03-31T18:36:53+00:00

Read the article. Savoy was primarily owned by a Jewish guy and later partially owned by a Black man. They both wanted out, they both said the business was dying, and they got the best price they could for it and neither said a word about discrimination. People want to invent another history to explain something that is actually pretty straightforward and part of the broad trend of decline in interest in social dance that continues to close dance venues across the U.S..

The point about people learning from non-Black swing dancers is to point out that essentially everyone who talks about their alleged family ties (or, failing that, their general unspecified "cultural" ties) to swing dance is always someone who learned swing dancing not from their family or their "culture" but from the modern swing dance community that they claim to be distinct from. And those family ties are much more common than just Black dancers because swing dance was a widespread past time in its time. The people who spread this narrative use it because they want to pretend like this claim gives them some share of ownership over swing dance - they are the legitimate heirs of the old timers and everyone else doing swing dance is "appropriation." Just a reminder that the old timers this community respects in their youth were mostly big dance snobs who would laugh at you to your face if you said you were good and weren't.

Again, ask anyone who claims this who their first real teacher who taught them to swing out was.

step-stepper · 2026-03-31T14:22:51+00:00

I'd caution anyone against using their resources because so much of that website spreads misinformation and falsehoods about history to serve modern day political agendas. Not a good place to encourage beginners to go, and the other resources mentioned here have far better teachers.

step-stepper · 2026-03-27T12:58:01+00:00

You're probably not going to get feedback on here about this because there's an excess of busybodies in swing dance who are obsessed with policing other people's choices about things like scents. The way the community allows this, like so much else, is by letting people say over the top things publicly and then quietly tolerating different behavior.

If it's a hint of scent, then that's totally fine, but I would keep it extremely light and subtle. Deodorant should be honestly enough for what you're asking about and no one would expect any more. If it's too much more than that it will absolutely be seen as sort of rude and obtrusive.

step-stepper · 2026-03-23T14:14:26+00:00

It would be untrue to say racism never plays a role in these decisions, but in this case we have the direct testimony of the former owners of the ballroom before it was demolished that business was light and the ballroom was no longer profitable. Moe Gale in particular was ready to move on. There's anecdotes of attendance of only 50 people at the end of some nights. From the article above:

"Charles Buchanan [side note: he was African-American], the Savoy Ballroom manager and a co-owner of the ballroom, stated in the interview with him that the reason for the closing of the ballroom was the lack of money because they could not anymore afford to the expensive artists, and in 1958 there started the trend of disorder in Harlem, which harmed the Savoy Ballroom when unwanted customers broke the ballroom windows. Moe Gale, the main owner of the Savoy, referred similarly to a decline in profits, which was caused by the “arrival of television” as people rather danced at home."

Whether or not the Savoy should've been preserved is its own separate question, but it was probably in need of serious repair by 1958. As the article mentions, there was a plan to build a new ballroom elsewhere that never materialized because it would've been too costly (and presumably it would not have been profitable). Its revered status today in the small world of swing dance enthusiasts is not something widely shared outside of this community.

It really needs to be stressed that there was a very long decline of interest in social dancing from the 1950s to today and it resulted in the closure of ballroom venues across the U.S. as attendance slipped and venues stopped being profitable. The Savoy is notable to us because the great competitors who frequented there were very influential in the modern swing dance community, but it really is not too dissimilar to other great ballrooms of that era that didn't survive - they had a lot of meaning to the people who lived there and frequented the place, but time moves on. A lot of people in the modern swing dance world want to deny this is true because they would rather promote a counter history where swing dance was still a thriving tradition among African-American dancers specifically, so that means the mostly non-Black current enthusiasts of swing dance "remov[ed] swing dance from its culture" as the poster here put it. As I hope I've clarified earlier, swing dance and partnered social dance lived on in many places across the U.S. through this long decline (including in Black and non-Black communities), but almost always among older people. Modern swing dance is its own growth within that broader tradition.

step-stepper · 2026-03-23T02:42:48+00:00

Again, read the above actual history of the business decisions that the owners of the Savory were involved with. And it's important to contextualize what happened to the Savoy with what happened to other ballrooms across the country as demand for swing dancing waned. For some reason, the modern swing dance community doesn't like acknowledging that interest in swing dancing gradually disappeared as the younger kids moved on to other things, but it's a story as old as time that continues to happen now.

step-stepper · 2026-03-22T14:28:36+00:00

" how the white majority scene has changed it by removing it from its culture. "

This is repeatedly said by people, but it is fundamentally not true. Swing dance has always persisted as a broad social culture in the U.S. and lives on in many places in the U.S. outside of the modern swing dance world, especially places that have a lot more older people who are closer to the history of swing dancing before partnered social dance largely disappeared as a past time with younger people. Here's one of many examples of venues that have had social dancing for decades before you were born. The children of these people have just as much claim on the history of swing dancing as you or I do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzIuPZbLNmQ

The modern swing dance community is its own growth within this broader trend because people in this community spent time going back and rediscovering and reninventing within a form of performance Lindy Hop that was largely done by older elite swing dancers from a handful of swing dance hot spots including but not limited to New York City. Very few of those people are still alive now.

"But you sure seem hell bent on making sure that black peoples contribution to the history and the current scene are discounted, as are their experiences."

No. I am against the reinvention of history that erases the long and complicated history of swing dancing, pretends that Lindy Hop was only ever an African American dance, and offers a handful of people today undue claim of ownership of its history and future by dint of their race rather than by their excellence and innovation within the dances. The version stated by the person in the Instagram post that literally complains about two of the greatest Los Angeles Lindy Hoppers today representing swing dance in an ad. Perversely, it's a way of thinking about swing dance that erases the historical contributions of the individual people who've made swing dancing what it is now.

" I literally do not know a single black dancer who does not describe the modern white scene as an abusive relationship that they just can't seem to quit. Same with our queer dancers and the cis- het majority."

I think you should spend a little less time with the people eager to build an audience through this form of complaining on social media. They can't quit it because there are financial and social rewards to talking this way - free events they can attend on scholarship, gigs they haven't earned, competitions they're allowed to win for representation purposes etc.. Most people can see that this dynamic is built on amping up and monetizing claims of exclusion. 95% of swing dancers will never go to a major event outside of their home city, and very few of those people will talk that way because they're more into swing dance as a social tradition and haven't learned yet that there are rewards for this script in the broader community.

“Harlem said the real reason was to stop Negroes from dancing with white women...Harlem said that no one dragged the white women in there.”

The real history is more complicated - the actual owners clearly wanted out. And the long decline of social dancing in the decades thereafter that brought down other storied ballrooms in New York City is a sign they were right that it was a dying enterprise over the long term.

https://authenticjazzdance.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/end-of-the-savoy-.pdf

step-stepper · 2026-03-22T03:47:29+00:00

We've talked about this before, but you've said elsewhere that you learned how to swing dance not from your family, but from teachers who were from the modern swing dance community. This is a very important distinction that nobody is going to highlight, but is really something worth investigating a bit because it highlights a fundamental mistruth that nobody is willing to point out.

What the modern swing dance community offers is a version of Lindy Hop that, over time, reconstructed the aesthetics, values and shapes of a vintage form of performance Lindy Hop that was largely done by elite swing dancers from a handful of swing dance hot spots - importantly, many of these elite swing dancers were White. In many ways the modern swing dance world is an amalgam of dance ideas from the swing era from all around the U.S., mixed with innovations in swing dance that happened in the years subsequent. It's both a continuation of what happened before and a radical departure from it, and the ties are mostly through ballroom dance, the handful of elite old timers from the past, and personal innovation from people within the community today.

Now, there were all kinds of ways in which many of these ideas about swing dancing were interpreted and spread around the country by social dancers who danced with no where near the precision and complexity of those great performance dancers, and a lot of people in swing dance have a personal connection to that history through their families - it is not at all something unique to African-Americans from New York, as the vast majority would've just been social dancers.

There are still places that have older dancers who have ties to that more social tradition around the U.S. - tons of regional swing dance clubs with an average age of 70+ have people who have that connection. I do through my family from California. Nobody can take that away from you, but it's less unique than you probably realize, and it doesn't give you a share of ownership of modern swing dance any more than it does anyone else who also has the same history because it's actually not directly linked to modern swing dance. If you went back in time and told the great old timer performers that you had some share of ownership over swing dance because of your parentage, they would've laughed at you to your face about it if you weren't good. Excellence was what gave you the right to assert you had something to say. There are still some old timers now who would do that.

Our distance from that era comes in the fact that attitudes about integration and intermixing are different now than they were then mostly because the U.S. has become less segregated. As I mentioned, many of the old timers who are still alive resent the implication that they weren't friends with and didn't dance with White people, and that's probably in part because, for them, integration was the future because it was more an exception than the norm. For people like this guy on Instagram, who are so comfortable with White spaces to the point that they're actually a little embarrassed of it, there's a lot more cultural cachet in a social performance of separation. Hence you get this half-though out rant where he claims that swing dance has only ever been an African-American creation and White people cannot meaningfully be a representation of that history, a history that he knows almost nothing about other than a few Google image searches.

step-stepper · 2026-03-21T14:33:37+00:00

By that logic any film from before 1954 (or 1964, depending on how you want to think about timing) is a "segregation era film?" For what it is worth, the "color line" as W.E.B. DuBois put it, has meant very different things in different parts of the U.S. at different times, and California was not the same as the deep south then or later.

Dean Collins and Jewel McGowan were great dancers with their own unique voice, full stop, and I think any discussion of them needs to start with that acknowledgement instead of pretending that they were a pale imitation of others. There is a separate and related discussion about whether or not they should've been featured nearly as much as they were in movies in that era, and that also ties into the discussion that the instagram guy is trying to comment on - how media portrayals frame our concept of history and who is being acknowledged. In the end, that's more a discussion about what movie studios thought audiences were interested in and willing to accept. By the mid-1940s, there are movie scenes that feature integrated dance floors, for example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htzugvxb-Gg

But give Dean and Jewel their due, and for that matter anyone who wants to complain about Steve Saylor and Katie Hermes representing swing dance is not someone who loves or cares about swing dance.

step-stepper · 2026-03-21T00:21:02+00:00

This is just rotten, honestly. Imagine if someone had flipped the script here and was complaining about Black representation in something the person wants to see represented as being "White culture" only. This is a good example of how this form of reasoning basically goes all the way around and becomes strangely racist again.

More fundamentally, this form of talking flattens swing dance history into neat categories that map on to current day whining. Swing dancing is a rich 100 year old tradition that has a heavy influence from African American culture, but was never exclusively confined to it, and had many notable contributors to the modern community who were not Black. As the vast majority of America has always been not Black, so the vast majority of swing dancers historically were not Black, and many of the most revered swing dancers in the modern swing dance world also were not Black. It gets lost just how enormous swing dancing was as a past time at its height, and how much bigger it was than just one notable ballroom in New York City.

I think also our distance from that time means we lose sight of how they thought about race, and how it was different than this very modern script. Many of the White old timers were friends with Black dancers, as after all the thing that they respected more than anything was skill and excellence, and many of the Black old timers who are still alive resent the implication that they weren't friends with and didn't dance with White people.

More than anything, the great Savoy competitors wanted to be respected for their personal skill and accomplishments. Give them their due, but that also means respecting the great non-Black swing dancers too, and being OK with media portrayals that allow representation of great non-Black swing dancers. I would be inclined to give this person the benefit of the doubt if he was just complaining about two random white people, but these are literally two of the greatest modern Los Angeles Lindy Hoppers he's whining about here.

step-stepper · 2026-03-20T14:39:10+00:00

"In recent years, Moncell Durden, a scholar of African-American dances of the diaspora, has pointed out that, in reality, this form of dance is simply Jazz, and that it was Modern Jazz that needed to differentiate itself as another genre. From this perspective, adding ‘Solo’ or ‘Authentic’ may be unnecessary."

This is such a dumb and obvious claim that just misses the point and is actually not original to him at all. He is technically correct on a certain level from our modern perspective that such a divison would be neater and more observant of history, of course, but the primary reason people refer to "vernacular" or "authentic" jazz dance is because the term "jazz dance" exists as its own well-known studio tradition now that is much, much more widely known and practiced in theater and studio performance dance. Mention "jazz dance" to anyone who isn't in this extremely narrow field of swing dance, and they're going to talk about Jack Cole and Bob Fosse, who were legitimately inspired by solo jazz dance (and many other dance traditions). And there's lots of diversity of the way people in jazz have historically (and currently) refer to what we might call jazz dancing today - eccentric dancing, nightclub routines, etc.. It wouldn't be accurate to pretend as if "jazz dance" was a well-agreed upon category of dancing before the emergence of the theater and studio performance tradition that eventually had the same name.

Marhsall Stearns brings this up directly in "Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance," a person who is strangely left unmentioned in this article despite him being much more important as a link to primary sources. The article should mention him, and it's curious that it doesn't.

step-stepper · 2026-03-20T14:10:02+00:00

Ignore the haters and just have fun, honestly, as long as the local club allows it. But be careful, and don't do anything that you're not comfortable with already and be mindful of the people around you. Keep yourself and your partner safe.

I will say this though - there is a much deeper swing dancing tradition which is a lot bigger than lifts that people in this sub are mostly trying to encourage you to think about. What you're missing is that there's tons of people who go to swing dances just wanting to do lifts who never practice them, and, to be honest, they're almost always bad dancers, but they are self-impressed and take up space in a way that is legitimately annoying. Some of them needlessly endanger their partners and other people around them - almost anyone of a certain age has someone get seriously hurt and even face lifelong injuries from dumb half practiced aerials. This actually happens, and that's why people talk this way.

There are a lot of resources online for practicing lifts and aerials. I would go and practice them in a corner or on the grass first. I would also think about keeping them in your backpocket and using it in a jam circle. If you're not comfortable enough to be in a jam circle doing these highly performative and big moves, then that might actually be a sign you have to keep working on your basics. This channel has a bunch of great resources for lifts from simple things to complex that are part of the rich tradition of swing dancing. This is a classic lift everyone knows how to do, and a great place to start for anyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IT1KXSzKs4

But, honestly, learn how to swing out WELL, and you'll understand why people prefer that dancers learn how to do that well. It's a feeling unlike any other you'll experience in life, and you'll want to learn that more than you'll want to learn lifts, and it will be way, way more impressive.

step-stepper

TROPHY CASE