Kategori: ARTICLES & REVIEWS

Good to knows before you visit Smokey Feet next year. Swedish Lindy hopper Johanna Lindblom went to the 7th edition of Smokey Feet in may 2017. Five days later she returned to Stockholm with new guidelines for swing, strong legs and a renewed love for the dance and music. This is her experience. cover photo: Light eX Machina 2017 DANCE IN TO A NEW LEVEL – Going to Amsterdam for Lindy Hop workshop/parties seemed like the perfect kind of vacation. I managed to involve a dancing friend so we signed up as a couple in “BASS” level for dancers “confident in leading/following...

Americans are people of the now, birthing new art and ideas everyday. ”We are fundamentally individualistic. We are not preservationist like our European and Asian lindy hop family.” Jamin Jackson look upon swing dancings practitioners. – European and Asian lindy hop histories are much older than the USA and they have more sensitivity for knowing the origins of artistic moments in their unique cultures. This may be one of the reasons why Americans with brown skin don’t have swing dancing on their radar. We don’t celebrate our historic dances. In the states, we consider swing “some old dance” for everyone else...

You are a good person, you know what is right and what is wrong, right? Most of us do. Despite that upsetting stories of sexual assaults have hit the swing dance scene. ”We don’t have any swing community problems, we have individual problems”, Jamin Jackson says and argues that we all should: …recognize that we are recipients of swing culture not the originators. This means we have to hold ourselves accountable to “their” standard, the people who created it. We don’t have the right to change fundamental social ethics if we don’t like them, no matter how outdated we project...

When starting swing dancing Jamin Jackson saw a flaw in the lindy hop scene. This three things he noticed:  Lack of professional dancers with his background. “Most major influences I noticed at the time were international teachers who started their dance journey in Lindy Hop. They were experts at preserving and replicating classic movements from the founding artists of the past. I felt my experience as a modern vernacular dancer would galvanize a culture shift toward individual creatively – building rugged individualism on the historical foundation.“ Need for a simple duplicatable teaching approach. I compare this concept to riding a...

Beside dancing at Minsk Lindy Exchange Lennart Westerlund stumbled across several questions concerning Lee Harvey Oswald. Did the accused murderer dance the Lindy Hop? Was it him introducing the Lindy Hop to Belarus back in 1961? Karl Lennart Westerlund embroideres his thoughts concerning the subject in this cronicle.  In the early 1960s, the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald, later accused of assassinating American president John F. Kennedy, spent a few years in the Soviet Union city of Minsk. At the time, Oswald was a young American ex-military man with communist ideas. His personality was an enigmatic paradox, a mixture of...