Wednesday, May 30, 2007: Our Bodies, Our Instruments

(Migrated from Myspace.)

I came away from Camp Jitterbug last weekend with a truckload of tree-hugging hippy crap. And it’s awesome. Allow me to share:

From more than one person, but particularly from Ramona and Andy & Nina, I got the message loud and clear that when you get to the top of the heap, the next place you go is back to the beginning. Forget every fancy footwork variation you ever learned. Forget what you’re supposed to do with your left arm. Forget looking pretty all the time and concentrating so hard on how you’re moving your body. Instead: Relax, relax, relax. Only use what you really need. The dance is supposed to be about joy, and you can’t let the joy in if you’re too busy thinking about exactly how your swivel looks or if you’ve got your arm in a nice line or how you’re going to get back on the proper foot after this crazy footwork pattern you’re about to whip out.

Our bodies are instruments, and there is a deep difference between playing a chord progression you learned from a teacher or copied from someone else and finding your own voice, your own melody. The hardest thing is to take down the barriers we’ve learned and built up over the years and instead to have truly engaged, honest dancing. Ask yourself: how often do I really look into my partner’s eyes? Chances are most of us are busy looking down at our own feet or (if you’re me) staring at the clavicle of your partner’s chest to pay attention to their face, their expression, their emotion. There can be so many emotions to dancing, and this is something I never truly appreicated before. Dancing can be like acting. You can be the jilted lover in a Bessie Smith song, or you can be the wild woman who don’t get the blues. Apparently you can even dance angry, although that tends to draw me in rather than open me out.

The biggest struggle, at least for me, is to turn away from the drama of the caste-system that so much of our scene has become, and instead to look inward to what I really feel, how I really want to move. To access the glowing bundle of Lindy energy and joy inside me and to send it on its happy way through my every limb and muscle. To look up, into my partner’s face, to look up at the world and not to be afraid to find somone looking back. To allow people to be drawn in, rather than asking them so desperately to please look, look at me. Find my own joy, and allow that joy to draw others in. Find the extra levels, the extra personalities, the infinite possibilities that I had unconsciously and unknowingly foreclosed. This is a new path, a new me. It’s all very Zen.

I don’t know what it means to dance like Gina right now, but the more that I can strip away the layers and patterns and imitations I’ve built up over the past 5 years, the more I’ll find out how. Because I have a feeling that dancing like myself feels amazing.

Tuesday, March 6, 2007: More thoughts on DJ’ing

(Migrated from Myspace.)

Well, the manifesto had its day and its theoretical uses. I get so analytical sometimes, but I can’t help it. I’m an academic.

Today I’m reflecting on my DJ set last night at Hot Jam and my experience DJ’ing Saturday night for Enter the Blues. Here’s my Hot Jam set list, if you’re curious:

On The Sunny Side Of The Street – Roy Milton
Trouble Blues – Joe Turner
Come On Over To My House – Julia Lee And Her Boyfriends
Baby Don’t You Tear My Clothes – Harlem Hamfats
Ain’t Misbehavin’ – Kay Starr featuring Novelty Orchestra
The Stolen Alphabet – String Swing
Minor Swing – Django Reinhardt & Stephan Grappelli
For Dancers Only – Junior Mance (out of towners jam)
Old Man River – Ernie Andrews
If You’re A Viper – Harlem Hamfats
Mardi Gras Boogie – Joe Turner
Julia’s Blues – Julia Lee And Her Boyfriends
St. Louis Blues – Louis Armstrong
Rock Me Baby – Etta James
Poison Ivy – Willie Mabon
Gal from Joe’s – Erskine Hawkins
Ridin’ And Jivin’ – Earl Hines
Hesitation Blues – Wingy Manone
Teardrops From My Eyes – Ruth Brown
Barrelhouse Bessie From Basin Street – Bob Crosby
Honeysuckle Rose – Kay Starr featuring Novelty Orchestra
‘Taint Me – Roy Milton
Coleslaw – Jesse Stone & His Orchestra
Shoe Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy – Ella Fitzgerald
(and after yells of “one more song,” I whipped this out on the fly)
Hound Dog – Big Mama Thornton

Thursday, February 15, 2007: Solo Blues Firsts

(Migrated from Myspace.)

Last weekend at the Valentine’s Uproar in Nashville (which was a wicked good time), it was sort of impromptu-announced that there would be a solo blues competition, with the prize being a pass to the Buenos Aires Blues event Dan Parshall is putting on.

It was free to enter, so I decided to give it the old “what the heck” shot and enter. Thing is: I had never danced “solo blues” before in my entire life ever. I’d seen some video of solo blues competitions. I’d seen the clip from “The Spirit Moves”. But I’d never actually really tried dancing it myself. Lucky me, however, I’d been taking a belly dance class series during the previous weeks. I figured I could borrow some serious hip-motion stuff and hand movements from my belly dance class.

What ended up happening for me was, I think, inspired by the message I got from Ramona during her masters class earlier that day. It was partly about making ourselves vulnerable when we dance, by opening ourselves up to our partner (or in this case the audience) and partly about feeling the music and letting it tell me how to move.

Saturday, January 7, 2007: DJ’ing Manifesto

(Migrated from Myspace.)

So I wrote up this gigantic essay on what I think makes a good DJ for one of the discussions on the ASEDA forum. I figured I should post it here because it’s like 3 pages long in Word and it seems like a waste just to have it up in one obscure corner of the interweb. It also includes a section on how I think DJ’s can develop each skill I mention.

Tuesday, October 3, 2006: What really matters.

(Migrated from Myspace.)

I went out dancing last night for the first time in 2 weeks, since I’d been way too overwhelmed with exams to actually get out and dance. Usually when I’ve been away from dancing for a little while like that, I feel a bit weird or out of my comfort zone when I try to start dancing again, and yesterday was no exception. I felt off, my solo jazz was really whacked out, improv and variations weren’t coming as easily to me, it was a characteristic I-haven’t-been-dancing night.

But it was making me think strangely, too. Maybe the combination of feeling off like that plus having just come from ULHS before my hiatus left me overly pensive. Some things I was doing felt artificial to me, or contrived, rather than flowing organically from the dance I was having. And I realized that a lot of those things were movements I’d picked up from other dancers.

Now, I always think it’s good to have a big vocabulary of things to pick & choose from and mess with, and adopting moves from other dancers is a great way of doing this. But I’m wondering right now if there’s someplace else I could go in my own dance if I stopped thinking so much about what varation I can do where and started concentrating more on feeling the music and paying attention to my partner. Who says I can’t just do walk-walk-triple-step on the end of all my swingouts? As one of the teachers and advanced dancers in my scene, I feel pressured to always be doing something cool and creative, but who says vanilla swingouts aren’t cool? Same goes for balboa (although I hardly dance it at home). Why do I feel the need to work on some fancy new styling for lollies? It feels good just to do kick-touch-kick-touch, so what’s wrong with that?