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AMERICAN ALLEGORY

Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

FINDING THE POCKET

Despite their billings as images of reality, these Negroes of fiction are counterfeits. They are projected aspects of an internal symbolic process through which, like a primitive tribesman dancing himself into the group frenzy necessary for battle, the White American prepares himself emotionally to perform a social role.

Ralph Ellison (1995a)

* * *

It was a warm, humid summer evening in mid-August, and my friend Jayson and I had traveled to a neighborhood in Chicago called Uptown—the city's renowned entertainment district of the 1940s and '50s. As a new resident of Chicago, and having recently seen the movie Swingers, I was interested in discovering if there was a swing dance scene in the city. A friend of mine, who was also interested in swing, told me that four neo-swing bands were performing at the Aragon Ballroom that night. (The Aragon is one of the most celebrated of the old Chicago dance halls and now serves as a mainstream concert venue.)

As Jayson and I walked around the corner to the main entrance of the theater, I noticed how the nearby boarded-up theaters and few remaining small shops that were closed for the night were juxtaposed with the expansive six-corner intersection that indicated a main artery of the city. This section of Uptown was once an exclusive cultural center for the elite, but is now marked primarily by prostitution, drugs, homelessness, and panhandling. The elevated-train stop had appeared threatening, with small groups of menacing-looking men loitering just outside the exit doors of the station eyeing train riders as they rolled through the turnstiles in their direction. The Green Mill Jazz Club, once a speakeasy that boasted such infamous patrons as Al Capone, and the Saxony Inn liquor store and bar were lit up in the distance and seemed to be the only other venues open for business.

After purchasing our tickets, we raced upstairs to a balcony overlooking the entire theater. In awe, I looked out over the cavernous space below and saw hundreds of dancers covering the expansive Aragon dance floor. The band was behind them on the stage, wailing away on horns, while the people danced wildly, dressed to the nines in hats, suits, dresses, and two-tone shoes. It was as if I'd stepped into a time warp and been transported to a dance hall back in the 1940s. I had previously witnessed scenes like this only in old movies or retro pictures like Swing Kids and Malcolm X, and here it was, a former past world recreated right before my eyes. Just hours before, when I'd been on the phone with my grandmother, she'd said to me, "You know, I danced at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago when I was your age." I imagined her out there, dancing and enjoying herself among the crowd. The tremendous energy from the ocean of dancers radiated up into the rafters and captivated me—something electric was occurring down below, something that transfixed me. I did not know how to dance, so I stayed up in the balcony and looked down with a feeling of determination. One day I would learn that dance and be out there on that floor.

* * *

Social dance, as a subcategory of dance, is done by and for dancers rather than for an audience; it is usually informal in nature and emphasizes sociability and socializing, since it can be danced with many different partners. While social dance is practiced around the world, it can also be one of the most misunderstood types of dance, because it is a bodily knowledge that is made tangible or visible only through its enactment. Without costumes or a stage, good social dancers can break into dance without rehearsing, which makes their spontaneous practice appear as if it were innate or natural. As a result, we misrecognize the relationship between culture and the body and assume that dancers are born, that dancing is an innate ability, or that certain groups or races of people are just "natural" dancers. In this way, we mistake "nature" for second nature or the long-term result of practice and repetition of a set of skills.

When venturing into worlds that have been infused with African American culture, from jazz to rock-'n'-roll and beyond, stereotypes of rhythm, fluidity, and expressivity begin to swirl and confuse nature and second nature. Rather than seen as cultural laborers, working on, crafting, stylizing, and perfecting a form of dance, African Americans are perceived as natural dancers. Without exploring the arduous practice that goes into developing any form of expression, we misunderstand accomplished dancers in motion as spontaneous performers. When the misrecognition of bodily labor collides with social categories of race and culture, expressions of any form take on a life of their own—as if detached from any context or conditioning. Without being grounded in their everyday contexts, cultural forms become Ellisonian-like projections by which we believe in the fictitiousness of instinct rather than the reality of learned expressions. In order to dramatize this perpetual misrecognition, we must make explicit the practices and processes of labor that form and shape the body into a vehicle of cultural expression. To do so, it is necessary to step back from the immediacy of dance as a form in motion and understand the constitutive techniques and motions that must be inculcated or incorporated into the body to make it appear as second nature. In order to understand the Lindy Hop as a social dance, it is necessary to demythologize it as a "natural" expression or an innate cultural or racial knowledge and to expose it as a form of expression mastered through the arduous process of bodily labor and inculcation that result in becoming a competent Lindy Hop dancer. In the case of the Lindy Hop, the specific practical knowledge that enables one to be a fluent dancer is something that one acquires over time. In order to parcel out these skills, or "knowledges" of the craft, that define the Lindy Hop as a specific form of social dance, I will discuss four of its most fundamental aspects (choreography, leading and following, improvisation, and styling). By doing so, we can gain insight into the internal dynamics that define this specific cultural form, the tools that any individual must acquire to be a socially fluent dancer, and, most important, draw out those dynamics that lead to the when, where, why, and how misrecognition operates to obscure our understandings of the body and culture.

WHAT IS THE LINDY HOP?

* * *

I descended from the Aragon's balcony, where I had been watching the dancers, down to the main floor and stood a comfortable distance away from several dancing couples. My eyes gravitated toward one couple whose enthusiasm and dynamism had captured my attention. The man and woman circled around each other, connected only through one outstretched arm. They smiled and focused on each other as she glided into his arms. Her arm rested around his shoulders and his around her hips. He carried her around him in a quick circle as if they were walking hip to hip. Using his momentum and his right hand, he sent her back out away from him so that they were again adjoined only by one outstretched arm. The move looked like a rubber band expanding and contracting in space. The couple glided past each other, then reconnected and turned around together, then separated back to their starting position. They twisted, turned, and traded places over and over, yet each time they did it in a different way. Suddenly the couple broke apart as if a wheel had come off a car, and the symmetrical balance that held them together was broken. Instead of losing their way or falling out of control, they had planned this; each froze for a moment before breaking into his and her own individualized musical interpretations. The man bent his knees and walked past the woman in a kind of weaving motion, as if his knees were buckling under him, while she rotated her hips and twisted around him in a semicircle. Her dress splayed out around her and swished back and forth across her knees as she twisted, while his baggy trousers dusted the floor as he sank into the movement. When she almost passed him, he grabbed her hand and turned her back toward him, and the whole process began again.

* * *

The circling step that I saw both of them dancing was the Swing Out, which is the "box step" or the basic step that serves as the foundation on which all other variations are built. In the Swing Out, dancers begin apart, and the man acts as an anchor around which the woman moves. As the woman comes in toward her partner, they meet and momentarily connect in the middle of the dance move as they turn around together, and then the man leads her back to where she started by "swinging her out." It is as if she were tethered to a pole, being pulled in and then sent back out to where she started. Like the undulating music of swing, the dance captures a "swinging" feeling with this rubber band–type movement, as the female follower pulls in and out.

The man, who usually leads, begin by bowing down at the opening of the Swing Out. He keeps his torso upright and expands his chest, but lowers himself through bent knees and a tilted pelvis to a lower plane like a bowler would when following through on a toss. This emphasizes and dramatizes the position of the female follower, who remains on a higher plane as she executes her signature "twist-twist" movement. The bowing movement serves a double purpose. Steven Mitchell, the contemporary Lindy Hop master instructor, once commented at a Lindy Hop workshop, "I've had the pleasure of working with Al Minns [one of the great original Lindy Hop dancers from the famous dance troupe Whitey's Lindy Hoppers]. Al said that this movement of the man bowing to the woman was an adaptation of how in the plantation days slaves used to make fun of their masters by exaggerating a bow to them."

Women, usually the followers, are defined by the twist-twist, a sensual step driven by the woman's hips swiveling back and forth as she moves around her partner. The grounded and heavy characteristic of the dance takes its origins from African dance, which gives it a loose and fluid look through constant compression of the legs. The athletic bouncy steps make the dance look more bent and relaxed and distinguish it from other dances that are more upright in posture, such as ballroom dancing styles. Contrary to what the name "Lindy Hop" may suggest, there is no jumping or hopping in the dance; rather, the movement is smooth, solid, and grounded. There is a constant rhythmic eight-count "pulse" and flowing style to the dance and, when well executed, a deep bounce but no hopping.

The defining characteristic of the Swing Out is the "breakaway," in which the dancers find their maximum extension from each other in the Swing-Out figure. Although they remain connected through one arm, this distance offers the space to improvise and display individual interpretations and steps before returning back to dancing with one's partner. The combination of coming together and breaking apart within the partnered framework of the dance is the basic step through which everything else develops. All the elements of the dance are incorporated in this figure—rhythm, timing, individualism, and reliance on and connection to one's partner. Although the move is semi-choreographed, partners cannot merely plow through the choreography; nor can they pull each other back and forth like a rag doll. The dance must be led and followed for it to work correctly.

The Lindy Hop is elusive and difficult to articulate because the dance is based on two intrinsic contradictions of freedom and structure. First, the Lindy Hop is a social-partner dance founded on cooperation and communication through leading and following, yet both partners can do individualized steps throughout if they choose to do so. Since the Lindy Hop has both a closed position (where partners are connected body to body) and an open position (where they are only connected by outstretched arms), the dance is both highly social and highly individual at the same time. Second, the dance is based on a series of choreographed movements and figures; yet at the core the Lindy Hop thrives when dancers improvise steps to the music. Like the jazz music to which it is danced, dancers may "play" with the music so as to dance "on" the beat and "off" the beat, creating syncopated steps and movements that emphasize the framework of the dance as well as its internal plasticity.

As a result, the Lindy Hop has an open-ended structure of creativity that hinges on few formal rules or restrictions other than the structure of the basic Swing steps and the syncopated swing beat that marks the rhythm and feeling of the music. The Lindy Hop is highly individualized, yet both partners are mutually dependent on each other in order for the dance to succeed. The tension between individualism and cooperation, between the improvised solo and the arrangement, is at the heart of the dance. This contradictory logic makes the dance a dynamic interaction as partners communicate and interpret the music together in time and space. It is a personal biographical extension of each individual's aesthetic and identity.

Starting with the basic step, dancers then add an infinite number of variations, twists, turns, and improvised steps. In addition to the swinging motion of the Swing Out, the Lindy Hop also includes variations of the Charleston—the signature dance of the Roaring Twenties. The Charleston is modified within the framework of the Lindy Hop so that dancers remain connected, dancing together side by side rather than apart as they did in the '20s. In addition, the Lindy Hop offers moments where partners actually separate and perform jazz steps such as the Turkey Trot, Peckin', Shim Sham, Apple Jacks, and the Shorty George (Batchelor 1997, Emery 1988, Stearns and Stearns 1994). On this foundation, dancers add turns, figures, kicks, pauses, dips, aerials, jazz steps, and their own creative interpretations and expressions, limited only by their imagination and the dictates of the music. This aspect of balance between choreography and improvisation is always one under flux and negotiation.

* * *

Standing along the sidelines at a downtown club, I watched couples switching partners and spinning through a myriad of figures and positions. I could not discern whether this was all haphazard and random or actually choreographed. What I did know was that the dance was fast and almost acrobatic when practiced to up-tempo songs. Watching these Lindy Hoppers dance, weave, and pound the floor was like seeing a mixture of ice skating and gymnastics, a seamless combination of athleticism and grace. Their restrained chaos, somewhere between caution and abandon, characterized the Lindy Hop as both anarchical and poetic.

As the band eased off the up-tempo pace and the music grew more moderate, the dancers adjusted their movements to a smoother, silkier styling. The lights in the room dimmed, and the people on the sidelines turned their attention to the floor. As a social dance, the Lindy Hop reflects a conversation between partners exchanging ideas and expressions about the music through physical connection. As if words are unnecessary, he directs her and she follows under his arm; he indicates a direction and she accentuates his suggestion with a stylized interpretation. Through this process, the dance becomes an extended game of sign language in which the entire body is fair game for expression and interpretation. The dance is both social and personal; its formation and logic are grounded in sensuality, passion, and expression.

* * *

LINDY HOP REVIVED

While the Lindy Hop was "revived" in the late 1990s, it was not a straight reproduction of the Lindy Hop danced in the past. A variety of viewpoints emerged on how best to cultivate the dance. This diverse set of opinions ran the gamut from those who advocated strict adherence to the classic dance steps or "traditional canon" of the Lindy Hop found in old movies and documentary footage to those who desired to incorporate other dances into the Lindy Hop framework and still others who looked to fuse it with contemporary cultural forms like Hip hop. Examining this multiplicity of viewpoints deepens our understanding of the dance by further defining its logic of practice.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from AMERICAN ALLEGORY by BLACK HAWK HANCOCK. Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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