Words by Lily Kind.
Angela Andrew keeps the class in time, directing our attention – first here (boom BAH de-ba-buh) and then there (shoulders parallel with the floor) – as we chase each other’s footwork around the big wooden floor of Round House Chapel in Clapton.
This class is part of the Wednesday Moving, a six- week series of dance workshop that spans genre and discipline. Andrew is teaching Lindy Hop, the 1930s partnered jazz dance from Harlem. Lindy Hop became a worldwide phenom in the 40s – sometimes called the Jitterbug – and later evolved (or was cross-bred) into a multitude of offspring dances, including Boogie Woogie in Europe.
In her preamble, Andrew refers to the films Hellzapoppin’ and Day at the Races; films with incomparable Lindy Hop dance sequences performed by the elite top dancers of the day. Andrew points out that these now infamous dance scenes were originally made to be extractable, featuring anonymous characters superfluous to the plot. These scenes – choreographed and performed by Black dancers, comprised largely of a professional company known as Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers – would be removed when the films screened in the segregated Southern United States. Nowadays, the films themselves are by and large forgotten, while the dance scenes and the dancers remain, choreographies immortalised on YouTube and the dancers’ legacies celebrated worldwide.
Andrew keeps our focus on the syncopated swing rhythm in a set of lead-follow exercises. While the explicit focus of the exercises is the rhythm, the structure of our practice implicitly established a founding principle: that leaders are followers and followers are leaders, that jazz is first and foremost a conversation, it can be creative and it can be critical, so long as it’s on beat. And there’s the magic trick, we’re learning Lindy Hop – an arguably archival form with a history both triumphant and troubled – but she’s teaching jazz. Without a sermon or a Ted talk, she’s grounded jazz, particularly partnered jazz, right down on into the African Diaspora, in an artistic framework cultural scholar Dr. Brenda Dixon Gottschild calls the Africanist Aesthetic. It’s conversational, contradictory, collective. Jazz as partner dance and partner dance as jazz.
If we shove Lindy Hop into contemporary terminology for dance forms, Lindy Hop could be considered a club dance. (It seems that Lindy Hop is the only club dance series in this otherwise somatic-leaning space.) Lindy Hop took off at the now-mythical Savoy Ballroom, a grand, opulent dance hall as large as an entire city block, located in Harlem, New York City; the Savoy was owned by Moe Gale, a Jewish man, and managed by a Charles Buchanan a Black man, and the clientele, upwards of 4,000 a night, were admitted regardless of race. The ballrooms and the live swing bands of WWII, precedes — and perhaps prototypes– discothèques and DJs by decades; this dance was co-created with the music and musicians of its era, in the hippest pay-to-party spot in town.
Andrew is proudly of and for the East End. She has maintained a commitment to teaching on her home turf, including ongoing classes at Chisenhale Dance Space. She grew up in Clapton, went to school across the street from the Round Chapel, and learned to Lindy Hop from Frankie Manning (who became her mentor) in the 1990s. Manning is revered and beloved by Lindy Hoppers around the world, known just as much as the originator of the high-flying acrobatic partner moves in the 40s as he is for his cheerful teaching demeanour and catchphrases that helped to re-popularize Lindy Hop globally in the 1990s. (Manning passed in 2009 at 94 years old.)
You can catch Andrew jazzing around her neighbourhood, pondering gentrification, in ‘Yacht Club Swing’ a short film made by Silvia Cherneva, a former student of Andrew’s. This sense of place and lineage is baked into Andrew’s approach, including in our unexpected warm up: a version of the Electric Slide, which Manning learned from his grand-daughter and adapted to a swing time syncopation. As we shuffle and dip in loose unison across the roundhouse floor, there’s a bittersweet resonance of two different Black American popular dances from different decades, dances repackaged – drop the Black – and declared generalised pop culture.
Leaders and followers. Followers will lead the group around the room. Andrew says the followers will ‘Lead the movement.’ It is confusing. But she insists and the class stays curious – finding an activity where one person proposes the pathways in space, and the partner accepts and expands on this invitation – while everyone keeps the beat. The proposition here is that a leader’s purpose is to support and a follow’s purpose is to imagine. It’s brilliant. Everyone is dancing, attending to their partner, keeping the beat, not worried about shapes or sequences. Next, she applies a similar premise to teaching ‘swing outs’ the iconic slingshot move of Lindy Hop. In less than an hour, she has everyone swinging out and in and out and in and around. Easy breezy.
These students gather here weekly for a curated series of classes, usually an improvisation practice. They’re just as ready to roll on the floor as they are to learn rhythmic footwork. Someone’s kiddo is playing in the corner. It feels easy to come as you are into the room. Wednesday Moving is curated by Galit Criden and Olly Otley, who also participate in class and run a WhatsApp group for questions from participants, to help make class more accessible. They describe themselves as hosts, stewards of a shared space. There is a total absence of self-importance. The students here today are, by and large, a blank slate.
This works in Andrew’s favour; this group is self-selectively willing and curious. Lindy Hop approached as somatic practice? Sure. Lindy Hop as a contemporary form? Why not. As long as it’s on beat. In Andrew’s hands, Lindy Hop pulses with post-modern mischief, camp, irony, and rebellious joy.
Lily Kind is a critically acclaimed choreographer, dancer, producer, and writer based in Philadelphia & London. Lily practices and researches 20th century Black American Popular Dances, as well as contemporary dance and physical theatre. Kind is currently a permanent lecturer at De Montfort University in Leicester.