Blues dance

'Blues dancing' is a modern term used to describe the family of historical dances that developed in response to blues music, or the contemporary dances that draw on their tradition.

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 concepts¹. In illustration, the Strut - a 19th century dance step - became the basis of the Cake walk².

Early Blues dances were very simple and allowed for a wide variety musical interpretation while still staying true to Black aesthetics of dance. They were often a simple one-step or two-step and never became a focus for white America in the way that dances such as Lindy Hop and Charleston had done. As a result, an authentic Blues dance tradition has continued within African American communities³.

Blues dancing today

The spectrum of Blues music is large, and consequently there are as many different forms, interpretations, and styles of traditional Blues dance as there are music. "The Gut-Bucket," "The Fish Tail," "Struttin'" and "The Slow Drag" are only a few of the dances that have travelled through with Blues music.

A common perception within contemporary swing dance culture is that a Blues dance must 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, ranging across tempos and musical styles. Blues music is about common experiences. It is a sharing of human condition that is accessible to all, at some level, any given Blues dance can include one or more feelings from the entire spectrum of human emotion⁴.

Traditional Blues dances have been gradually introduced to contemporary swing dance culture, some expanded or adapted to suit the needs and interests of contemporary dancers, and new dances created in the same tradition. A freestyle form of partnered dancing has slowly developed alongside to this process of rediscovery and popularization of Blues dance traditions. Based on Lindy Hop principles, this burdgeoning 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. In this way it shares a lot of similarity to dances like Modern Jive. This style of slow dancing does not bear most of the Africanist elements that define Blues dances and therefor does not qualify from an academic, historical, or cultural stand point as Blues dancing, though it is an interesting and intriguing interpretation of emotionally intense music, where the melody and harmonies are given precedence over rhythms.

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 African American Vernacular dance traditions of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In American Lindy Hop today, after the revival, Lindy exchanges, with their emphasis on late night programs of social dance events, saw the introduction of 'blues dancing' and music to these events in the late 1990s. Blues music started being played during after-hours dances, which eventually led to dancers patronising blues music clubs and holding house parties that played a varying amounts of blues and Blues rooted music. In the late 1980s the Herrang dance camp began featuring an all-night Blues dancing party on Wednesday nights, in some quarters anecdotally regarded as an opportunity to secure sexual partners, but increasingly becoming a creative and social dance practice in its own right. In the context of Herrang, and throughout the historically-minded culture of contemporary swing dancing, it was almost a natural consequence that Blues dancing attracted the interest of dance historians and researchers.

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 travelling 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 fascilitating the spread of knowledge and music and encouraging dancers to found local blues dancing communities.

Citations

¹ Emery, Lynne Fauley. Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970. California: National Press Books, 1972.
² Stearns, Marshall, and Jean Stearns. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. 3rd ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.
³ Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
⁴ All Music Guide to the Blues: The Definitive Guide to the Blues by Vladimir Bogdanov
⁵ Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance. Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1996.

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 African American 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.