(Migrated from Myspace.)
So this past weekend I taught at the Gulf Regional Lindy Hop Championships in Florida, where I was a judge for all of the contests on Saturday night. First of all, I need to complain that because I was judging all 6 rounds or whatever there were, I hardly got in any dances all night, even though there were people there I really wanted to dance with! (Jeramie, Adam, Don…) And then the late night was a blues late night, which was lame, because I really just wanted to dance some plain old Lindy Hop. Instead I just got tired and sat down. So much for the complaining. At least the jam was freakin AWESOME and I got to go out there a couple times. Didn’t have the nerve to bust out my solo charleston, but someday I will…
On the up-side, it was really interesting and fun to get to watch and evaluate everyone in the contests. Being forced to rank people in order (1-10, or however many couples there are) makes you think about what’s really important to you in dancing. Is it tricks? Aerials in the fast competition? Good lead/follow? Musicality? Spirit? How do you compensate and get objectivity when you want your friends who are out there to do well? A lot of thoughts like that go through your head, and unless you’ve planned ahead of time (and even then it can’t help you all THAT much), you’ve got about 3 minutes to answer all those questions for yourself and put something down on paper that reflects the answers. And feel accountable to those answers and be able to articulate why you placed someone where you did if they ask you about it. A lot of the judges looked at things differently than I did (I think we were all kind of looking for slightly different things), but I think actually it’s good to have people out there who have different values & emphases. That way contestants aren’t being held to just one person’s standards.
