Blues dance

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Blues dancing is a modern term used to describe a family of historical dances that are being associated with blues music, or the contemporary dances that draw on their tradition.

Contents

[edit] History of blues dancing

As with blues music, blues dancing finds its origins in West African rhythms and movement combined with Western European structure and partnering concepts[1]. "The Fish Tail,"[2] "Struttin'" and "The Slow Drag" are only a few of the dances that have traveled through time with blues music. Dances currently cited as early blues dances include are the "Cakewalk", and the "Slow drag".

During the post Reconstruction period (1875-1900),[2] as Jim Crow Laws were passed in the South, dance steps once linked to ritualalistic or religious dancing acquired a more secular identity. Also, group dances gave way to individual or partner dances.[3] Where by and large slavery had inhibited the retention of Africn culture,[4] the dances of working class and lower class blacks relinquished some of their Euro-American characteristics in during this time.[5]

W.C. Handy, who wrote some of the first published blues songs, documented his earliest experience with what may have been blues, and dancers reaction to it, at a dance circa 1905 in Cleveland, Mississippi. At one point Handy was asked to "play some of our native music". Although "baffeled" he had his band played "an old-time Southern melody", after which he was asked if a local band could play a few numbers. That group consisted of "just three pieces, a battered guitar, a mandolin and a worn-out bass" (Handy described the group as "a Mississippi string band")and played "one of those over-and-over again strains that seem to have no very clear beginning and certainly no ending at all...It was not really annoying or unpleasant. Perhaps "haunting" is a better word for it...The dancers went wild."[6]

Handy also described the reaction to his band, which included voilin, guitar, string bass, clarinet, tenor saxophone, trombone, and trumpet, playing his song "Mr. Crump" in 1909. "We were all settled into our chairs. I flashed the sign and the boys gave. Feet commenced to pat. A moment later there was dancing on the sideways below. Hands went in the air, bodies swayed like reeds on the banks of the Congo...In the office buildings about, white folks pricked up their ears. Stenographers danced with their bosses. Everybody shouted for more."[7][8]

While playing mostly one-steps, polkas, schottishes and waltzes for colored patrons at Dixie Park in Memphis, Handy noted a reaction to the habanera rhythm included in Will H. Tyler's "Maori". "I observed that there was a sudden, proud and graceful reaction to the rhythm...White dancers, as I had observed them, took the number in stride. I began to suspect that there was something Negoird in that beat." After noting a similar reaction to the same beat in "La Paloma", Handy included this rhythm in his St. Louis Blues, the instrumental copy of Memphis Blues, the chorus of Beale Street Blues, and other compostions."[9]

The great Delta blues player Johnny Shines, who was born in 1915, recalled that "mostly you played for the danceres... They were doing two-steps and quite a few waltzes in those days."[10]

'Blues dancing' - continued in African American communities throughout the United States[11]. In fact, the very nature of a vernacular dance culture ensures the survival of socially and culturally useful or valuable dances. Many of the steps specific to dances associated with popular blues songs of the 1920s were adapted for new musical structures in jazz, and new dance forms like the lindy hop. Early African American blues dances were very simple in their core movement and allowed for a wide variety of musical interpretation, embodying a black aesthetic approach to rhythm, movement and melody which permeated black music. They were often a simple one-step or two-step and though some movements may have been adapted and integrated into some mainstream popular dances, blues dancing as a distinct dance genre and social practice never became a specific focus for white America in the way that dances such as the Lindy Hop and Charleston have.

[edit] Blues dancing today

A common misconception within contemporary swing dance culture is that a blues dance must necessarily be slow, sensual, and emotionally intense. Yet, as with blues music, a blues dance may reflect loneliness, longing, sadness, anger and joy, as well as love, lust, and bawdiness and range across tempos and musical styles. Blues music is about common experiences. It is a sharing of human condition that is accessible to all, and at some level, and can be include one or more feelings from any point on the spectrum of human motion. [12] The same can be said about blues dance.

[edit] Blues dancing in the contemporary swing dance community

The revival of Lindy Hop in the 1980s and 1990s has prompted complementary interests in other dances from Black vernacular dance traditions of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In America Lindy Hop today, after the revival, Lindy exchanges, with their emphasis on late night programs of social dance events, saw the introduction of 'blues rooms' to these events in the late 1990s. While the amount of Blues music played at these events varied widely the name and what Blues music was being played led to dancers patronizing blues music clubs and holding house parties that played a varying amounts of blues and blues-rooted music. In the late 1980s the Herräng Dance Camp began featuring an all-night "Blues Night" dancing party on Wednesday nights, which exposed swing dancers from all over the world to the idea of slow dancing to blues, jazz, and early rhythm & blues.

There are now blues dancing communities throughout the international swing dancing community, though local communities vary, reflecting local social and cultural values and contexts. The spread of blues dancing has been largely a result of individual dancers traveling between local communities and establishing blues scenes, individual teachers holding blues dance workshops in different cities and countries, and through the online community of blues dancers facilitating the spread of knowledge and music and encouraging dancers to found local blues dancing communities.

Blues dancing in swing dance communities today may range from traditional blues dances to much less historically grounded forms. Traditional styles and steps have gradually been reintroduced by teachers and dancers with an interest in the history of the form, some of which have been expanded or adapted to suit the needs and interests of contemporary dancers, and new dances have also been created, echoing these historical styles and traditions. Additionally, a freestyle form of partnered dancing - usually at slower tempos - has slowly developed alongside this process of rediscovery and popularizing of blues dance traditions. Partially based on the principles of partner connection, aesthetics and approaches to rhythm and timing of Lindy Hop, this burgeoning form often combines elements of West Coast Swing, Foxtrot, Argentine Tango, and general club dancing. Its growth has, arguably, been largely a result of the lack of established moves or basic steps. This style of free-form slow dancing has much in common with other dances such as Modern Jive, it does not bear most of the Africanist stylistic elements that define the historical family of blues dances, though its acquisitive 'step stealing' approach to borrowing from other dance traditions to suit the needs and interests of dancers is very much a feature of historical Blues dance and vernacular dance in general. These newer dances often offer interesting and intriguing interpretation of emotionally intense music, where the melody and harmonies are given precedence over rhythms.

There are ongoing debates within blues dancing and swing dancing culture today about what constitutes 'authentic' or 'true' blues dancing. Some hold the position that a blues dance that does not possess the stylistic, aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of Africanist dance cannot qualify as blues dance. Others argue that a blues dance which has had very little creative contribution from black dancers or draw from the base of movement they created, does not qualify either. Yet a third position might hold that a blues dance is simply dancing to blues music, regardless of the steps performed or whether they involved partnered or solo steps, or whether the steps and movement are aesthetically tied. It is certainly the case that even non-black dancers, moving to music which is not blues, performing steps which have no Africanist features or historical tradition consider what they do 'blues dancing' though it fails to meet the definitions of blues dance held by ethnomusicologist, historians, social anthropologists and other academics who had coined the term "Blues Dance".

[edit] Inspirational Artists

[edit] See Also

[edit] External Links

[edit] Citations

  1. ^ Emery, Lynne Fauley. Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970. California: National Press Books, 1972
  2. ^ [1]
  3. ^ Jookin'. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Temple University Press. 1990. page 81 ISBN 0-97722-613-X
  4. ^ Jookin'. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Temple University Press. 1990. page 6 ISBN 0-97722-613-X
  5. ^ Jookin'. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Temple University Press. 1990. page 6 ISBN 0-97722-613-X
  6. ^ Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. by W.C. Handy, edited by Arna Bontemps: foreword by Abbe Niles. Macmillan Company, New York; (1941) pages 76,77. no ISBN in this first printing
  7. ^ Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. by W.C. Handy, edited by Arna Bontemps: foreword by Abbe Niles. Macmillan Company, New York; (1941) page 100. no ISBN in this first printing
  8. ^ [http://www.amazon.com/Cakewalks-Rags-Blues-Military-Style/dp/B0000666Z5 sample of Mister Crump / Memphis Blues
  9. ^ Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. by W.C. Handy, edited by Arna Bontemps: foreword by Abbe Niles. Macmillan Company, New York; (1941) pages 99,100. no ISBN in this first printing
  10. ^ Escaping the Delta: Standing at the Crossroads of the Blues By Elijah Wald. 2004. HarperCollins. page 45. ISBN:0060524235
  11. ^ Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in Black Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
  12. ^ All Music Guide to the Blues: The Definitive Guide to the Blues by Vladimir Bogdanov

Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance. Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1996.

[edit] Further reading

  • DeFrantz, Thomas. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.
  • Friedland, LeeEllen. "Social Commentary in African American Movement Performance." Human Action Signs in Cultural Context: The Visible and the Invisible in Movement and Dance. Ed. Brenda Farnell. London: Scarecrow Press, 1995. 136 - 57.
  • Jackson, Jonathan David. "Improvisation in African American Vernacular Dancing." Dance Research Journal 33.2 (2001/2002): 40 - 53.
  • Malone, Jacqui. Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of Black Dance. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
  • Szwed, John F., and Morton Marks. "The Afro-American Transformation of European Set Dances and Dance Suites." Dance Research Journal 20.1 (1988): 29 - 36.