Swing Dance: Slang or Sonnet?

 

Is it gatekeeping? Is it just caring for the art form and people’s safety?

At the end of last year, one of my closest friends asked me if I wanted to learn Biblical Hebrew. Me, who clearly has a very non-busy life, said yes. During our first lesson, he told me that because ancient Hebrew is so ancient, it has a plethora of strange rules. Thus, learning it meant either committing myself to learning all the rules or just start memorizing vocab and brute force it. One way: tedious and monotonous. The other way: quick, but prone to error if not done correct. In the past few years, I’ve noticed increasing tension in the country western community pertaining to how serious we should take the hobby. Upon some reflection, I believe that swing dancing is quite similar to language learning, and much of the recent disagreements can be nicely explained by comparing it to learning and speaking a new language. 

A bit of background on my own relationship with dance. I started dancing Fall term of 2017, my freshman year of college. During the next 3 years of undergrad, I was quite the social dancer. I took classes, attended the college dance club events, and was even an officer for the club one year. During that time, the style that was taught was ‘rodeo swing’: fast, flashy, uncontrolled, but plenty fun. I often compared it to setting 30 blenders on the floor all going different speeds. It was often chaotic, but people were having a great time. After I graduated, I took a little break from country western, but when I got back into it, I found that rodeo swing was ‘out’ in the non-college dance venues. Modern country swing was in. 

Modern country swing. Controlled. Careful. “Seek connection and fill space”. It was much more cerebral than rodeo swing, and the music was often much closer to the groovy funkyness of West Coast Swing than the fast paced twangs of rodeo swing. In the past two years, I learned about rotational vs body weight tension, body leading, hand placement, and much more. Finding critique of one’s technique was easy to find, sometimes solicited, sometimes not. Like many skill sets, intentional learning and practice meant that my ability to swing dance improved far quicker than the years I spent dancing during college.

Learning a partner dance is like learning a language. There's vocab (actual moves), grammar (how to properly string those moves together so that weight and body position make sense), and pronunciation (form and posture). As one learns the intricacies of the language, one is able to express oneself more creatively and also better converse with your dance partner. What was once choppy mono-syllabic exchanges becomes artistic stanzas effortlessly flowing back and forth between lead and follow. However, like with language, there can be tension on how that language is spoken. 

Post-COVID, there has been an explosion of ‘proper’ country western dancing. For the sake of the analogy, we'll call it proper English, the kind of English that almost anyone can understand and doesn’t immediately place one from a certain geographic location. This has somewhat come into conflict with the older style of dancers, which we'll call a dialect or an accent of English (I don't know the full history of rodeo vs modern country swing so don't @ me please). You have people who just want to learn the basics of swing. They don't care about grammar or their pronunciation too much; they just want to learn the basics of the language, pick up flashy new words, and chat with their friends, however ‘broken’ and ‘incorrect’ it may be. Their pronunciation is ‘bad’ and their grammar is incomprehensible, but they don’t mind. Any misunderstanding is laughed off and the conversation continues on. On the other side, you have the ‘proper’ dancers. These are the ones who diagram their sentences, who do workshops on their pronunciation, and who guard against learning new words before you've mastered the basic language structure. Misunderstanding during conversations will still happen, but those misunderstandings are often treated as a way to figure out what to practice and drill more on. 

It's pretty easy to see then how there can be tension: 

“I don't want to learn how to speak like Shakespeare. I just want to be able to speak to my friends.”

“The way you guys speak to each other is so unrefined, and because you guys don't understand the basics, you could actually create serious misunderstandings and someone might get hurt” (that last bit: dips and other tricks). On that last point, during undergrad during a trips and dips workshop, my follow did end up breaking her big toe due to my poor technique/lack of functional strength. She was in a boot for several months. Oops. 

There are two worlds. You have the college dances and dive bars: wild. Unrestrained. Fun for those there. 

You have the dance conventions and dance halls: measured. Analytical. Fun for those there. 

One finds the other world pretentious. The other finds the other world dangerous and slightly barbaric. 

For me, who started in the dialect/accent and has been learning the proper forms, it's been interesting. Sometimes I'm so focused on my grammar and pronunciation that I lose sight of having any type of conversation. I'm so fearful of speaking poorly that I don't even ask for a conversation, intimated that when I open my mouth, I'll show myself to be a fool. Sometimes, I'm so frustrated by trying to conversate with those that have a strong dialect, that I don't try and only venture to have conversations with the ‘proper’ speakers. Like me learning Hebrew, memorizing the intricacies of the rules is good. So is actually speaking. It’s never just one or the other, but rather a mixture of both, going back and forth. Learn the rules, but then practice. Make mistakes. Sometimes you just have to strike up the conversation in all your broken language, knowing that you'll get some things wrong, but you can practice that later. Or not. My knowledge of the German language is sehr schlecht and I don’t practice it, but when I go to Germany on a business trip, I always try using it in a conversation here or there. 

Ultimately in dance, I'm not going to be an author. I'm not going to publish books or articles. I DO want to learn to be a better speaker, but hopefully not ever become condescending to those who have no desire to learn what the past perfect tense of an inside turn is. Hopefully I'll be someone who is happy to converse with all, no matter their skill level. After all, the point of learning a new language isn't to flex your knowledge or intellect: it's to learn about others and create human connection in new ways.