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.

As with Blues music, blues dancing finds its origins in West Africa¹. As with lindy hop, blues dances emerged as a hybrid combination of West African rhythms and music and European partner dancing structures. 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 movement and 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 have done. As a result, an 'authentic' blues dance tradition has continued within African American communities³.

The spectrum of blues music is large, and consequently there are as many different forms, interpretations, and styles of traditional blues dance as their 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 intense. Yet, as with blues music, blues dancing 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 sharing common experiences. It is a sharing of human conditions that is accessible to all, at some level, and a blues dance can include the entire spectrum of human emotions⁴.

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 blues dancing has slowly developed in response to this process of rediscovery and popularization of historic blues dance forms. Based on Lindy Hop principles and aesthetics, and still positioned within the lindy hop or swing dance community, these new blues traditions combine 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 which has facilitates learning, as well blues dancings' natural complement to the emotive and physical excess of lindy hop.

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. American lindy exchanges, with their emphasis on twenty-four hour programs of dance events, saw the introduction of 'blues dancing' and music 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 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, thought 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 establashing 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 Black Dance: From 1619 to Today by Lynne Fauley Emery
² Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance by Marshall Winslow Stearns
³ Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture by Katrina Hazzard-Gordon
⁴ All Music Guide to the Blues: The Definitive Guide to the Blues by Vladimir Bogdanov
⁵ Waltzing In The Dark; Digging The Africanist Presence in American Performance; The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon To Cool by Brenda Dixon Gottschild