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Chapter Two
African American vernacular dance as a model for dance as everyday discourse
In this chapter I present dance as a form of public discourse, developing the theoretical
notion of the public sphere developed in Chapter One with practical examples. Here, I begin
by asking how dance constitutes a public discourse. In what way is dance a public forum for
the discussion of interests and issues of relevance to the participants and to the wider
community in which it is situated? In answering this question I take the work of dance studies
scholars who have already discussed ways of reading dance as discourse, and touch on the
relationship between phenomenological research – the actual movements and physical
experience of dance – and theoretical context – the meaning of these movements in a dance
context. In this section I introduce the key concepts of this thesis: that dance is the process of
transferring knowledge between individuals and groups, and that it is also a forum for the
negotiation of identity – both individual and group.
With these points in mind, I move to a discussion of dance discourse as shaped by
cultural context. Dance is culturally specific, and so its function and content as public
discourse is also culturally specific. Analysing a particular dance culture thus reveals the
relationship between ideology and practise, and the ways in which public discourse
contributes to the communal negotiation of identity. This ‘identity’ is the confluence of
identity markers such as class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and so on. I argue that the
representation of these identity markers in dance indicates the ideological forces at work not
only within a particular dance culture, but also within the wider community of which it is a
part. I also suggest that this representation and negotiation of identity is not static – it is
always a work in progress, and furthermore, the resulting identities are hybridised not only by
the ongoing process of their production, but also by the ways in which they borrow from other
cultures and groups within a society.
To explore these issues in greater depth, I begin with the African American vernacular
dance culture that became the 1920s, 30s and 40s community in which Lindy Hop and other
swing dances developed. I argue that the nature of swing dances is a result of their
development within this community, and of the nature of vernacular dance itself. I see
improvisation – the unchoreographed development of new dance steps and forms – both as an
expression of individual identity, but also as contributions to an ongoing dance discourse.
Improvisation, while an essential part of African American vernacular dance, and hence of
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Lindy Hop and other swing dances, is balanced by discursive structures which allow
individuals to explore individual and group identities in a communal space. I suggest that
improvisation within a structured dance space allows for the ideological negotiation of
identity in public discourse, allowing both self-expression and a restatement of community
networks and bonds.
In contrast, I consider the contemporary swing dance community not as a vernacular
dance culture but as the product of capitalist interests. Here, the transfer of knowledge is
commodified through the formal class structure, and the relationships between individual
dancers and groups is structured according to a relationship of consumption and production.
Improvisation is replaced by an emphasis on formal structures and institutions, so reducing
the opportunities for individuals’ engagement with ideological conflict and negotiation in
public discourse.
This introduction of contemporary swing dance culture through a discussion of
African American vernacular dance not only presents two models for dance as public
discourse, but also suggests that dance as public discourse is contextually determined and
shaped. Analysis of dance, then, and the representation of identity therein, reveal the wider
social contexts in which that dance exists. This analysis of dance itself is complemented by a
study of the relationships between cultural practices within a community. I introduce this
notion in this chapter through a brief discussion of the relationship between music and dance
in African American vernacular dance, through which I open a discussion of the relationship
between dance and mediated cultural practice in contemporary swing dance communities.
How shall we talk about dance as discourse?
With African American vernacular dance as a public sphere I start at the place
contemporary swing dancers – revivalists in particular - suggest they are beginning. Analysis
of African American vernacular dance offers a model for discussions of dance-as-discourse to
which I will refer in my later discussions of contemporary swing dance. In beginning with
African American vernacular dance as a public sphere, I also establish a precedent to which
we can compare contemporary swing dance. As I argue in later chapters, the importance of
electronic communications media in contemporary swing dance informs and affects the
embodied dance practices and discourses of this community. I argue that the mediation of
contemporary swing dance enables the commodification of swing dance, and hence affects the
meanings of ‘dance’ in practice and theory in this community. African American vernacular
dance, in contrast, is significant for the ways in which embodied dance practices are not
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mediated by electronic media, and more importantly, the ways in which learning to dance –
acquiring dance knowledge – is carried out in everyday spaces, rather than the formal
institutionalised space of a dance class.
Dance as one aspect of (public) cultural production/cultural production = public discourse
While there has been much attention to the media as public sphere in media and
cultural studies, there has been significantly less work in cultural studies on how dance
functions as public discourse. In the following section I present a range of approaches to this
issue by dance and cultural studies of dance researchers and theorists. In considering dance as
discourse, we may ask how dance itself functions in relation to other cultural practices within
a community. Andrew Ward discusses sociological and cultural studies of dance in his article
“Dancing around Meaning (and the Meaning around Dance)”. As an example, he notes that
while there has been much written ‘about rave’ in cultural studies, very little time has been
devoted to actually discussing dancing itself in rave culture. There has been, he writes, “a
curious failure to discuss what is the defining feature of their subject-matter – namely dance.
…the point is that dance is only mentioned: there is no sustained address of dance per se” (5).
And while it may be difficult to expect researchers whose primary interest is media to discuss
dance in any particular depth, Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull makes similar arguments in her
discussion of dance studies’ neglect of the meanings of dance. She writes that
the challenge… lies in finding ways to reveal and understand the webs of meaning
created through the dance event. The challenge is a difficult and complex one, for,
often, writers on dance either leap quickly to generalized cultural conclusions, not
taking the time to notice what is actually going on in the dance they are writing about,
or they emphasize the experiential and descriptive at the expense of commentary and
analysis. Phenomenological accounts can sometimes capture the sensual qualities of
experience, but they tend to ignore how shared meanings shape the most ‘natural’ of
human actions and perceptions in dance and in life, slighting the cultural content
inherently applied by physical and cultural experience (269-270).
In an analysis of dance as discourse, we must not only consider the embodied practices and
experiences of participants, but also the cultural, social and ideological context in which
dance occurs. One of the most useful ways of achieving this analysis of dance in practice,
particularly in terms of ideological context, is to explore the representation of ideological
themes in other cultural practices within a specific community. In pursuit of this goal, I
position dance as one point on a continuum of cultural practice, where each activity in that
continuum is not unique and self-contained, but overlaps with the others, with intertextual
meanings informed by ideology and shared, social readings and values. In the case of
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contemporary swing dance, it becomes necessary to explore the other ‘public’ practices of
dancers. Analysing dance itself – the embodied nature of public discourse in dance – becomes
a part of a discussion of the relationships between media and cultural practice within the
‘public sphere’ or ‘public lives’ of a particular community. The high take-up of electronic
media by swing dancers today begs discussion, with key concerns centred on the relationship
between media use and social relationships within a community. This issue of dance as
mediated by technology is, however, the work of Chapter Two. In this chapter I am more
concerned with a study of the ways embodied dance practice necessitates a discussion of the
relationships between cultural practices and a discussion of the social contexts in which these
art forms develop. I introduce this issue with reference to the relationship between music and
dance in different dance cultures.
Jacqui Malone argues that
Most European conceptions of art would separate music from dance and both music
and dance from the social situations that produced them. Most traditional African
conceptions, on the other hand, couple music with one or more other art forms,
including dance. And most Africans experience music as part of a multidimensional
social event…Invariably audience members participate verbally and through physical
movement. Indeed, societal values encourage this kind of participation because it
allows members of the community to interact socially in musical situations. Moreover,
articulating the beat through motor response heightens one’s enjoyment of the music
and makes one feel more involved in the musical event (10).
Albert Murray and Angela Y. Davis – two amongst many – make the point that song and
dance in African American vernacular culture invites participation from audiences. Further,
the call-and-response between performers and audiences in African American music and
dance, Tommy DeFrantz argues reference paper, is carried on into other media forms (music
video clips in his specific example), inflecting and shaping the modes of mediated cultural
production in a vernacular dance culture. To suggest that an audience at a dance or music
performance sit quietly and ‘politely’ to properly appreciate an artist’s creative moment – as
one is expected to do at the ballet in Melbourne – is to suppress audience participation in
public dance discourse. One has only to observe a swing dancer’s inability to keep still when
watching a dance performance, the importance of clapping and cheering to dance
competitions; to consider a dancer’s comments that they “get all excited” watching dance
clips online; or to see the range of participatory roles available in social swing dancing to
understand that a holistic approach to dance is imminently more sensible.
In order to truly understand the ideological forces at work in the contemporary swing
dance community, we need to examine not only dancers’ mediated communication, or their
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embodied practices, but to explore the social relationships and aesthetic sensibilities between
these public acts of communication and community. We must trace the threads of ideology
across cultural forms and between cultural practice, reading dance as intrinsically related to
online talk or music or other social, cultural practices in swing dance culture today.
If dance=public discourse, then we need to understand how shared, ‘public’ ideas about identity are
developed within a community
If, as I have introduced in the previous chapter, dance functions as a public sphere for
public discourse, in part through its relationship with other cultural practices, how should we
begin to describe it as such – to analyse dance as discourse? Jonathan David Jackson refers to
Adrienne Kaeppler’s discussion of dance meaning where she writes that “dance is a socially
constructed movement system, … where the dance communication process …
involves…making sense out of … human bodies in time and space and according to the
cultural conventions and aesthetic systems of a specific group of people at a specific time in
specific contexts (Kaeppler 3, 41- 42). Jane Desmond encourages this view, arguing in her
article “Embodying Difference” that dance should be read as discourse, and dance aesthetics
as a “performance of cultural identity” (36), where the ‘discourse’ is interpreted not only in
terms of the dancer’s cultural context, but also in terms of the reader’s cultural position.
Andrew Ward makes similar points in his work, though he emphasises the importance of
reading dance in context, rather than as isolated texts or as ‘just dancing’. To read dance as
discourse, then, we must also consider it as a contextually dependent system of meaning.
Participation therein demands familiarity with basic concepts and values.
Considering dance, whether vernacular dance or performance dance, as a public
discourse, allows us to analyse it for ideological content – for the ways in which identity
markers such as class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age and so on are represented and
valued by a particular community of people. Reading vernacular dance as everyday discourse
encourages us to see social dance as an exchange of ideas, and as a site for the negotiation of
identity and social relations between individuals and groups within a community. I draw clear
distinctions between vernacular dance traditions – where dance occurs in everyday spaces,
between ordinary people – and concert or performance dance traditions, where dance is
relegated to particular ‘dance spaces’ which are separate from the everyday spaces of a
community. Ward makes this distinction: “there is a categorical divide between dancers and
the audience in performance dance …that does not exist between dancers and spectators in
social dance, where those roles are interchangeable” (18). I read this dynamic relationship
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between the roles of ‘spectator’ and ‘dancer’ in social or vernacular dance as a clear example
of the ways in which readers participate in the making of meaning in textual interpretation. In
the case of dance, the text is a dance, or a dancer’s body, or just ‘dancing’, and the reader
makes meaning through reading the text not only as a spectator, but also through their
knowledge as dancers. As the following sections explain, this ability to make meaning even
from unfamiliar choreography is facilitated by the cultural knowledge of movement that we
all learn as social beings within a community. We know that this is dance – we recognise it as
such in this moment – because we have danced, we have seen dance before. We have
occupied and are occupying the roles of spectator and performer and are culturally familiar
with this as dance.
What sorts of shared ideas are communicated in dance?
I consider dance as a discourse in which ideas about identity and the body and
community and so on are represented in choreography, aesthetics of the body, the
relationships between dancers within a dance, the relationships between dancers and
audiences, and between community structures and individual dancers. If dance does function
as cultural discourse, how are different structures in dance shaped by ideology and the social
uses of dance? Joann Kealiinohomoku reads ballet as cultural discourse in her article “An
Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance”, noting the ways in which “all
forms of dance reflect the cultural traditions within which they developed” (533). This essay a key work in the field of dance studies – sought to position ballet as an ‘ethnic’ dance, rather
than as an articulation of an objective ‘norm’ or cultural ‘elite’. Kealiinohomoku’s work, in
this respect, echoes the cultural studies literature on whiteness, and the earliest interests of
cultural studies generally. Kealiinohomoku analyses ballet for evidence of its cultural
placement and meaning in western culture. She addresses issues of cultural framing in staging
and performance structure; aesthetic values in the preferred body shapes and movements of
dancers; and the actual social interactions involved in attending the ballet. The aesthetics at
work in ballet, she argues, reflect western ideologically informed understandings of body
shape and the meaning of movement, and these contrast with African American vernacular
dance aesthetics and ideology. Her discussion of the “the long line of lifted, extended bodies
… the total revealing of legs, of small heads and tiny feet for women, … slender bodies for
both sexes, and … the coveted airy quality which is best shown in the lifts and carryings of
the female” (545) contrasts with the descriptions of body types and ways of moving in
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Africanist or African American dance aesthetics in the work of Gottschild, Hazzard-Gordon,
Stearns and Stearns and Malone. Indeed, Malone writes
Africans brought to North American were no doubt affirming their ancestral values
when they sang a slave song that urged dancers to “gimme de kneebone bent.” To
many western and central Africans, flexed joints represented life and energy, while
straightened hips, elbows, and knees epitomized rigidity and death. “The bent
kneebone symbolized the ability to ‘get down’ (12).
Thus, regardless of specific form and culture, dance is mediated by wider ideological
forces and can be read for evidence of this ideology. Both vernacular dance and concert or
performance dance are continually changing in response to the ideological and discursive
needs of its participants, and of the community in which it is positioned. This is as true of
high-art dance forms like ballet as it was of swing dances in the 1930s. The key differences in
the expression of this ideological negotiation lie in the organisations and group structures
within a community that manage this negotiation. In the 1930s, African American vernacular
dance responded to community forces like churches, youth culture, musical developments and
the everyday social activities of community members. In the twenty first century, ballet,
swing dance and other contemporary dance forms are often mediated by institutions such as
dance schools and companies, and managed by company boards, government policy and
funding, and broader economic imperatives. In concert or performance dance, there is often a
clear demarcation of ‘dance’ – serious performance dance – as the province of the dominant,
or upper classes. In positioning ‘important’ dance as the work of ‘professional artists’, a
community limits access to ‘official’ dance discourse, and thus the negotiation of identity in
this discourse. Vernacular dance, in contrast is ‘for the people’, accessible to all and, in many
cases, required of all community members. Despite the differences between dance discourses,
both African American vernacular dance and contemporary western dance discourses are
characterised by competing ideologies and discursive power struggles, as evident in the
responses-by-change within these dance communities. While contemporary swing dance has
moved away from its vernacular roots, and is mediated by institutions and technology, it is
this very shift- this reframing and repositioning of a particular dance form – that offers
contrasts between vernacular and performative dance that allow us to untangle the
complicated systems of meaning at work in each.
Kealiinohomoku’s reading of ballet thus encourages us to read dance in Melbourne
culture as a cultural discourse inscribed by ethnic identity, and to see ethnicity as marked by
notions of class and gender as well as skin colour and cultural practice. Melbourne – as a
multicultural city – is home to a range of dance traditions from different cultures, yet the
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dominant culture and dominant dance culture is that of white, middle class Europeans. The
emphasis is on heteronormative behaviour and ‘traditional’, patriarchal gender roles and
identities, and marginalising alternatives as exotic ‘others’. In mainstream Melbourne dancing
itself is either confined to performance dance on the literal and figurative stage – ballet, and
contemporary dance or exoticised ‘ethnic dance’ – or marginalized in youth and subcultural
spaces – nightclubs, raves, queer clubs and bars. There are other, smaller social dance
communities – such as ‘African’ dance and belly dance – but these are marginalised by their
cultural positioning as an ethnic ‘other’. Social partner dancing in Melbourne is dominated by
Latin style dances and 1950s rock ‘n’ roll. Despite their identification as ‘social’ dances and
their growing popularity, the social partner dance cultures in Melbourne are mediated by
dance schools and do not exist as true ‘vernacular’ dance. Located in this latter category,
swing dancing is not a mainstream activity in Melbourne, though its participants are,
however, representative of dominant social groups.
How is dance knowledge shared: hybridity and change
In the previous sections I argued that dance constitutes public discourse, and that this
discourse reflects the cultural context within which it is positioned. With this in mind, how
might we examine the ways in which ideas about identity are negotiated and represented by
individuals and groups within dance? Dance does not stand still in history. It is constantly
changing and responding to the needs of the community and culture of which it is a part. It is
necessarily hybridised, whether the changes are slow and institutionally regulated, as in ballet
or faster and more immediate, as in vernacular dance. As a discursive site for the negotiation
of identity, Stuart Hall’s suggestion in his article “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” that
“Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact …we should think,
instead, of identity as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always
constituted within, not outside, representation” (222) seems particularly relevant. Cultural
identity is as mutable and changing as individual identity, a necessary adaptation for survival,
particularly under adverse conditions. Dance form – as an expression of identity - is
necessarily as flexible.
In an extension of this point, Hall argues that “we all write and speak from a particular
place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in
context’, positioned” (222). This point is echoed in Sanjoy Roy’s essay “Dirt, Noise, Traffic:
Contemporary Indian Dance in the Western City; Modernity, Ethnicity and Hybridity”, where
they write “a hybrid is not so much a thing as a way of understanding. We all, in fact, have
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plural identities that shift with context, place and time, often in contradictory ways; in short,
we are all hybrids” (43). Roy writes specifically about dance and ethnicity in multicultural
Britain, drawing on both Hall and Paul Gilroy for notions of ‘hybridity’, ‘identity’ and
ethnicity for dancers in a ‘multicultural’ world (a term which is itself explored). The notion of
‘diaspora’ in dance and the movement of dance forms and styles between cultural contexts to
create new dance is explored in detail. The idea that we are all hybrid as well as ‘doing’
hybrid dances uses the idea of multiple publics (in this case the multiple cultures and dance
traditions) of Indian dancers in Britain to suggest that we position ourselves ideologically and
physically when we dance across cultures.
Hybridity and vernacular dance: defining vernacular dance and the role of improvisation in acquiring
dance knowledge and contributing to dance discourse
A clear illustration of ‘hybridity’ in swing dance – in both African American
vernacular dance and contemporary swing dance – lies in the ways individuals acquire dance
knowledge and bring new dance steps and movements to public dance discourse. In
contemporary swing, this acquisition and introduction of dance knowledge is managed to a
great extent by schools, formal classes and other institutional structures. In contrast, African
American vernacular dance prioritises improvisation and innovation in individual dancers,
where they bring new ideas and steps to the common dance discourse of the social dance
floor, expressing their own ideas and experiences within a more flexible social setting. The
following section explores the differences between vernacular and performance dance,
exploring the transfer of knowledge in African American vernacular dance as a process of
public, everyday discourse.
The word ‘vernacular’ in a discussion of dance refers to the everyday or ordinary,
common dance of a particular group or culture. Vernacular dance is distinguished from
concert or theatre dance through its positioning in everyday spaces, rather than existing only
as a formalised – and usually choreographed – performance of a particular dance on a concert
stage. Vernacular dance is intrinsically participatory and happens in all sorts of spaces, both
public and private. It is also necessarily mutable and reflexive, responding to the cultural
needs of its performers. Hazzard-Gordon focuses on social vernacular dance in her book
Jookin’, and it is this emphasis on interpersonal vernacular dance in everyday spaces that is
most relevant to this study.
Both Jackson and Malone draw on Ralph Ellison’s definition of African American
vernacular dance, quoting the following passage from Going to the Territory:
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I see the vernacular as a dynamic process in which the most refined styles from the
past are continually merged with the play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear improvisations from
which we invent in our efforts to control our environment and entertain ourselves. And
this not only in language and literature, but in architecture and cuisine, in music,
costume, and dance, and in tools and technology. In it the styles and techniques of the
past are adjusted to the needs of the present, and in its integrative action the high
styles of the past are democratized… Wherever we find the vernacular process
operating we also find individuals who act as transmitters between it and earlier styles,
tastes, and techniques. In the United States all social barriers are vulnerable to cultural
styles (Ellison 139 – 41).
Ellison’s description raises the key points of interest not only to Malone and Jackson, but to
most writers of African American dance history and culture. These are:
1) Vernacular dance is constantly changing – it is a process;
2) Vernacular dance necessarily involves improvisation;
3) Improvisation – and vernacular dance – are individual and group responses to cultural
environment;
4) Contemporary vernacular dance makes use of past dance movements and cultures;
5) Vernacular dance remakes ‘high’ art or dance culture, claiming it for ordinary people;
6) Individual dancers serve as ‘transmitters’ for past dances to the present, between
current dance cultures, and across boundaries of ‘style’ or ‘taste;
7) Vernacular dance moves across and between cultures and within – and between –
societies.
All of these points might be summarised with the comment that vernacular dance must remain
relevant to its dancers and to its cultural context, and to be one point on a continuum of
cultural production where different cultural and creative forms are linked by ideas and beliefs
- ideology. The various points listed above are the means by which this is achieved.
Improvisation – dancing without strictly planned choreography – is central to vernacular
dance. New steps enter a community’s dance discourse through a range of processes. Younger
dancers learn ‘old’ steps from older dancers, dancers ‘steal’ steps from other dance traditions
and dancers improvise new steps in response to the world around them and their own creative
inspiration. Improvisation is an essential innovative response to everyday life, produced
within the context of a given musical or dance framework. In African American jazz dance,
improvisation is directly related to the improvisation in jazz music and serves as a physical
illustration of musical form.
Improvised steps enter the wider community dance repertoire through individual’s
innovations. Just as tap dancers in the 20s became associated with specific rhythms or tricks
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(Friedland) and Lindy Hoppers in the 30s were identified as the creators of particular moves
(as with Frankie Manning and ‘air steps’). Improvisations and innovations became standard
moves or an accepted part of an individual or group’s repertoire through repetition in public
dance spaces, and are associated with their creators through repeated performances and
community consensus. In this way, an individual’s contributions to public discourse balances
individual innovation with overarching structures of meaning. New steps are integrated into
existing dance forms – wider structures of dance – just as new ideas are integrated into public
discourse through their positioning in reference to existing ideology. This integration is
achieved in public spaces by community consensus.
Repetition and reperformance play key roles in African American vernacular dance.
The repetition of a particular improvised movement positions it as a ‘new’ step, ‘belonging’
to a particular dancer or group, yet its repetition and ongoing presence in a dancer’s
vocabulary signal its value. Imitation of familiar characters in the community, or of particular
dancers not only develops new dance steps (as in the case of the Pimp Walk), but also offers
moments of shared social commentary and audiences ‘recognise’ the subject of the
impersonation or improvisation. Younger dancers imitating their elders’ dance moves enable
the transmission of dance steps across generations, a process made possible by crossgenerational dance in everyday, accessible spaces. This latter form of imitation also serves as
a valuable medium for developing dance skills, as Friedland discusses. This transmission of
specific dance steps between generations and the repositioning of everyday movements and
character roles in dance space as rhythmic movement is carried out in the bodies of individual
dancers, and in the relationships between dancers on the social dance floor. The ongoing
‘repetition’ of a step or characteristic or theme is evidence of its relevance. Its variation
equally serves as illustration of shared, ideological themes and the communal, cooperative
development of ideas about people and relationships within the community.
Learning to dance in vernacular dance culture: developing discursive capability/skills
In vernacular dance culture, acquiring dance knowledge and learning to dance,
developing ‘new steps’ and becoming conversant with dance floor politics, is not a formal
process conducted in dance studios, but a matter of acquiring life skills particular to a
community. Sheenagh Pietrobruno argues that vernacular dance is created in a “lived context”,
and is
not formally learned but… passed on from generation to generation. Most people who
grow up with the dance acquire it in childhood, its movements often taught indirectly
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through the corporeal language of the body, so that those raised with the dance may
not have a sense that they have learned it. Dancing usually is done to music: there is
no separation between the rhythm of the music and the steps of the dance (1).
Pietrobruno’s discussion of salsa is equally relevant to a discussion of African American
vernacular dance, particularly as salsa – as a Cuban-identified dance - has strong cultural links
with African American dance, as do many other vernacular dances of the Americas.
Pietrobruno introduces her discussion of teaching and learning salsa in Montreal by
emphasising the position of vernacular dance within the everyday, and learning to dance as an
everyday activity, rather than a ‘special’ event bracketed off into designated ‘dance spaces’.
In this way vernacular dance across cultures is bound to live music and other vernacular
cultural practice, it is communicated across generations, and it is an extension of ‘wider
cultural expression’.
The salsa that develops in a lived context involves more than a series of steps and
turns: dancers execute movements with their entire bodies. The subtle, but essential
elements of the dance, such as how dancers hold their bodies, move their heads,
position their hands and isolate various body parts are rooted in motor control and
movements that are extensions of wider cultural expression…A child may be formally
taught specific footwork and turn patterns of salsa, but picks up body isolations by
experiencing the family dance culture, similar to acquiring everyday gestures.
Although these subtle separations of parts of the body may seem effortless to the
outside viewer, their performance involves a great deal of skill and dexterity.
Individuals of Latin descent, who are dispersed throughout the Americas, often learn
the dance as an extension of their heritage (1).
Learning to dance in a vernacular dance culture is a process akin to learning to speak.
Children acquire ‘vocabulary’ – dance moves – through imitating adults, and through play:
everyday activities; and the process of gaining discursive proficiency requires constant and
everyday experiments with communication. Families, peers, and other groups and individuals
in day to day life contribute to a child’s acquisition of dance skills.
Dance skills as one part of a continuum of cultural practice
Lee Ellen Friedland explores the acquisition of dance skills in vernacular dance
culture in greater depth in her article “Social Commentary in African-American Movement
Performance”, where she discusses the role of dance in urban black children’s lives in
Philadelphia. Though researched in the 1970s and 80s, Friedland’s work is as applicable to
communities of dancers in the 1930s in Harlem as it is to black dance culture in Los Angeles
today. Friedland makes several key points in her work. Firstly, and most importantly, she
states that dance in African American communities is not segregated from everyday activity.
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Dance movement itself is part of a “complex of interrelated communicative and expressive
systems that constitute a whole world of artistic performance” (138). These systems include
body movement, sound (including music), visual forms (including drawing and wall art,
costume and hair style), language (including slang, rap, toasting and poetry) and ‘attitude’
(including ethics, creativity, aesthetics and social behaviour). Participating in all these
systems is central to black children’s lives, Friedland argues, and is – implicitly – as
important to black adults.
This continuum of creative cultural practice, and the continuity of themes and
interpretive and creative practices across media and practices – making intertextual or
multimodal meaning – is reflected in the cultural practices of contemporary swing dance
communities. Study of contemporary swing dancers’ cultural practices suggest that the older a
community, the more varied its inter- community networks and diverse its borrowing from
other cultures, the more sophisticated its own cultural practices and shared systems of
meaning. As Friendland suggests, systems of meaning in dance are not discrete. They are
echoing broader ideological and discursive structures within that community.
It is therefore unsurprising to find vernacular dance, as part of a system or network of
cultural practices connected by ideology and social networks, is not only ‘performed’ on
stages, in competitions or even on the dance floors of balls or social dances. Friedland makes
her second – and perhaps most important point – that dance and dance movement are part of
everyday life and movement in vernacular dance, and that dance carries with it social and
cultural meanings and relationships. Both Friedland and Pietrobruno argue that ways of
dancing are extensions of cultural ways of being. Friedland in particular extends
Pietrobruno’s point that dance “movements …are extensions of wider cultural expression”
(Pietrobruno 1). Friedland’s discussion of dance movement as a subclass or an extension of
the notion of ‘dancing’ encourages us to expand our conception of ‘dance’. Movement –
‘body language’- is not simply a visual illustration for spoken language. Dance and rhythmic
movement are part of a wider system of cultural production and communication as viable
discourse and communication in themselves.
Dance and rhythmic movement is as important in the African American culture
Friedland describes as spoken and written language is in mainstream Australian culture. She
discusses a range of categories of dance movement, from ‘being rhythmic’, to ‘dancing’ and
‘movement play’. These categories are seen as testing grounds for children’s developing
‘dance’ or ‘movement’ repertoire, and concurrently, their social and cultural repertoires.
Friedland discusses black children’s ‘learning to dance’ as a process of enculturation, where
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children are not only taught formal steps from older children and adults, but also encouraged
to move in particular ways, and to read the movements of others on particular terms. This
approach encourages us to think of dance and movement not as innate or essential abilities,
but as learned cultural expressions. The popular culture mythic association of African
Americans with ‘natural rhythm’ and expressions like ‘white men can’t jump’ (as discussed in
Jade Boyd’s article “Dance, Culture, and Popular Film: Considering Representations in Save
the Last Dance”) are reframed by Friedland’s work as racialised, essentialist statements about
ethnic identity and culture. Dance discourse is culturally determined, and with this in mind,
we can draw on a range of dance studies literature to make observations about how dance
movement and dance culture cross-culturally function as discourse.
This cultural specificity can be represented in ‘ethnicised’ movements, such as “the
long line of lifted, extended bodies” Kealiinohomoku finds in ballet, or the bent arms and
angled bodies Malone sees in West African dance. Ethnic specificity may also be found in
aesthetic ‘styles’, as in the “coveted airy quality” of Kealinnohomoku’s ballet dancers, or the
‘grounded’, down-wards energy of Lindy Hop. Dance is as marked by ideology and cultural
values as speech, and the analysis of these markers brings us closer to a reading of ideological
themes and values within a particular culture. If this cultural specification is the case, how are
dance steps, styles or traditions from one culture or community acquired by another, whilst
still retaining ‘meaning’? The most obvious answer would be that the movement of dance
between communities requires some degree of ideological reframing. My key interest in this
thesis lies in the way the acquisition of physical, embodied signs are mediated in
contemporary swing dance culture – managed - both by the institutional vehicles of formal
classes, and by the electronic communications media of audio-visual texts, recorded music,
websites and emails.
Acquisition of dance skills reframed as cultural transmission: the movement of ideas and practice (where
change and hybridity are central to dance discourse)
In previous parts of this chapter we have asked “how does dance function as
discourse?” and “what is vernacular dance?” We have also explored the movement of ideas as
the acquisition of knowledge, and discussed the transmission of dance within a community
through the process of learning to dance. I will now expand this idea of acquiring dance
knowledge through reframing it as the cultural transmission of dance. This involves a
discussion of how African American vernacular dances made their way to contemporary
cultures, and the ideological changes that have been involved in this transmission of cultural
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form. The movement of dance forms – cultural forms – is significant to a feminist cultural
studies project as it is also marked by the movement of ideas and the ideological reframing of
cultural form in new contexts. Revivalism – the revival of historic swing dance forms – is the
most influential idea underpinning the ideological reframing of swing dance in its
transmission to contemporary audiences.
A key point in this process is the way in which difference is marginalised in this
cultural transmission. In vernacular dance, improvisation often serves as the medium by
which ‘difference’ is introduced to dance discourse, as well as the means by which individual
ideas and personality enter public discourse. The revivalist myth of contemporary swing
dance culture prioritises historical accuracy – the recreation of dance in specific and
undeviating attention to past examples. In this process, there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ way to
dance, a distinction determined by historical ‘knowledge’ rather than individual creative
expression. The institutionalisation of the communication of dance knowledge and ability in
schools and in formal teaching practices results in the limiting of improvisation and individual
difference and variation in contemporary swing dance. It results in the homogenisation of
dance discourse. This is a result of, or a precondition for, the development of a market for a
product. In contemporary swing dance culture, a community of dancers thus also serves as a
market for dance classes.
The black history of contemporary swing dance as a starting point for cultural transmission
I consider the African American vernacular dance history of contemporary swing
dance because this history is itself employed in the mediation – the commodification - of
contemporary swing dance culture. This history is, however, represented on particular terms,
terms which best serve either a revivalist hierarchy of dance knowledge and power, or the
capitalist intentions of dance schools. In presenting African American vernacular dance as the
product of a troubling history of slavery, oppression and marginalisation I problematise the
‘easy’ use of black history in swing dance. I also hope to highlight the ideological reworking
of this history that has been involved in the transmission of dance culture and form between
the communities in the past in which these dances developed, to the communities of the
present, where these dances are once again ideological and discursive media.
Historical consciousness and historical cultural mythology are used to greater and
lesser degrees by various groups within contemporary swing dance communities, mostly as a
reference to the ‘original swing era’. Dancers refer to archival footage of dancers, photos, oral
histories, musical recordings and written histories in their ‘recreation’ of swing dances, yet
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the texts they choose, and the ways they read these texts is guided by their institutional and
ideological affiliations. Their relationship to this past is a matter of positioning, in Hall’s
sense, where dancers negotiate their relationship to an African cultural diaspora. For many
dancers, this racialised reading is either uncomfortable, or simply not a matter of interest.
Others exoticise this history on terms that fail to account for the networks of power and
ideology which affect the transmission of cultural forms between cultures and communities.
For many contemporary swing dancers, the history of African American vernacular
dance is largely empty of institutional and cultural racism. Slavery is represented as a rich
ground for creativity, rather than as an oppression that necessitated cultural change and
subversion. 1930s Harlem is imagined a colourful place where men and women of all colours
came together to dance, rather than a ghetto where the creative moment of the Harlem
Renaissance was as much a response to poverty and overcrowding as an articulation of a ‘new
American black consciousness’. For most swing dancers today, the revivalist version of
African American history presented in dance classes and online talk is de-politicised, and
decidedly sanitised.
When removed from its original social and historical context, dance – as a discourse
and as a system of signs – changes in meaning and use. When dancers began ‘reviving’ swing
dance in the 1980s African American vernacular dance forms and elements of swing dances
still functioned in their original communities as active, hybridising and mutable cultural
practices. In imagining swing dance as ‘dead’ or in need of ‘revival’, contemporary dancers –
most of whom were not African American – positioned themselves within a particular
relationship to this dance culture and history. As will be discussed in the following chapter,
dance is ideologically reframed as it is transmitted to a new culture. This reframing is as clear
a statement of the individual ideology of the dancer, as it is a comment on the relationship
between cultures, and the attendant power dynamics and discursive relationship.
Cultural transmission as ideologically determined
Jane Desmond’s article “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural
Studies” argues that the transmission of dance styles and movements across cultures does not
chart a straight or one-way course. This history of the cultural transmission of elements of
African dance through African American communities to Harlem in the 1930s and the
development of swing dance, and then on to other cultures distinct in time and geography as
well as cultural space, is a clear example of this crooked course. Desmond argues that it is not
only the case that dance travels in both directions across cultural ‘borders’, but that this
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movement is culturally determined. These points are echoed by writers such as Jade Boyd in
her discussion of white American and British appropriation of Hip Hop, and by Les Back in
his discussion of black soldiers’ influence on white dancing in Britain in his article “Nazism
and the Call of the Jitterbug”.
The history of swing dance is a history of multiple movements of dance ‘texts’ and
‘signs’ between cultures, where they are reframed and ideologically renegotiated as they are
taken up by the receiving culture. The meanings and use-values of particular dances are
anchored by cultural context. As Desmond writes, in “formal or informal [dance] instruction,
and quotidian or ‘dance’ movement, the parameters of acceptable/intelligible movement
within specific contexts are highly controlled, produced in a Foucauldian sense by specific
discursive practices and productive limits (“Embodying Difference” 36). The development of
dance practices and traditions is not simply the random conflagration of fashion or
coincidence. It is a carefully managed discursive system, responding to the needs and interests
of the community, and reflecting dominant and competing ideologies.
A history of the mediation of the cultural transmission of dance draws clear
distinctions between African American vernacular dance’s use of dance from other cultures
and white mainstream culture’s appropriation of black dance in the 1930s. It traces the
relationships of discursive and social power at work in the uses of swing dance in
contemporary swing dance communities. These ideological negotiations in dance culture
reflect the cultural forces and discourses of the wider community of which dance
communities and traditions are a part. The study of the transmission of African American
dance forms to contemporary swing dance communities begins in the following section with a
discussion of African American dance culture as the cultural practice of a diasporic
community.
Here I am interested not only in the ideological ‘evidence’ to be found in the
transmission of dances between cultures, but also in the media by which this transmission is
conducted. The transmission of dance steps between dominant and oppressed groups in the
Americas throughout the history of slavery was achieved primarily through personal
observation and then imitation, followed by ‘public’ performances of specific steps in social
dances spaces. Travelling vaudevillian and other stage shows brought African American
dance steps to new audiences in cities and towns across the country. African American
soldiers took Lindy Hop to white audiences throughout Europe and Australia and the rise of
cinema and radio introduced the electronic mediation of dance in its transmission between
cultural groups. In the 20th century, this transmission was facilitated by increasingly complex
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communications technology and the dance studio. In the 21st century, the transmission of
dance in contemporary swing dance communities is achieved almost entirely through
electronic media and formal, institutionalised dance classes. The introduction of mediating
technology and institutions in the transmission of dance forms from the vernacular dance
culture to the dominant culture of 1930s America or Melbourne in the 2000s is a marker of
class and the role of dance in everyday culture in these different communities. It is also a
point at which we can begin an analysis of the representation of ideology in a particular dance
community.
Key features of African American dance (improvisation, hybridity, etc) as reflections of African American
social and cultural experiences
Swing as descendent of African American vernacular dance
The next section describes key features of this dance culture, in which mutability and
change – hybridity – is central. Mutability, change, hybridity, all are also in conflict with the
institutionalised dance of contemporary swing dance culture. Why is a description of the key
features of African American vernacular dance of use to this thesis’ discussion of the ways
contemporary swing dancers use mediated communication in their embodied practices? We
may answer that question by asking what was the role of vernacular dance in African
American culture, and what were the conditions that gave rise to this dance culture? The
answers require attention to the ideological context in which this specific dance culture
developed, emphasising the ways in which dance serves as discursive commentary on public
and social life.
Paul Gilroy has argued that African American vernacular dance is the product of a
history of “unnameable terrors” (as discussed in Kelly 318), where “slavery, pogroms,
indenture, [and] genocide….all figured in the constitutions of diasporas and the reproduction
of a diasporan consciousness, in which identity is focussed less on equalizing, protodemocratic force of common territory and more on the social dynamics of remembrance and
commemoration defined by a strong sense of the dangers involved in the forgetting the
location of origin and the process of dispersal”. African American vernacular dance –
including lindy hop and other swing dances – remember this history with specific steps as
well as general themes and ways of acquiring and disseminating new steps. It is important to
describe African American dance as product of historical and social forces not only for
reasons of conscience and to avoid the dangers Gilroy implies, but also to explore how
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reframing African American vernacular dance in contemporary communities has had
particular ideological consequences.
It is also important to frame swing dance as a descendent of African American
vernacular dance because the form of a dance is a direct result of its cultural context. Dance
itself communicates ideology in its very structures. We have to consider embodied practice –
to analyse it – if we are to comment sensibly on the ideological uses of dance. Why analyse
the historical form of the dance in a study of contemporary dance? Because the changes a
dance undergoes in its transmission between communities and cultures reflect the ideological
and social relations between those communities and cultures. When we do this analysis we
can ask ‘why did they change these specific features?’ The most pertinent point here, is to ask
‘why were the most transgressive, resistant characteristics of Lindy Hop removed in the
revivalist project? The answer no doubt lies in the fact that the prioritising of structure over
improvisation, consensus and homogeneity over difference and heterogeneity makes dance
more marketable. The result of this process is also to marginalise differences in identity – in
gender, class, age, sexuality and so on – in dance discourse.
African American vernacular dance history of swing dancing
Lindy Hop began in Africa, where dance was firmly planted in the everyday life of
every person. Africanist dance forms – dances brought to various other communities
throughout the Americas and beyond – not only share steps and specific movements, but also
more general tropes in terms of aesthetics of choreography and physiology. They also share
similar approaches to the social function of dance. Dance is seen not only as a ‘leisure’
activity, or ‘work’ or ‘performance’ as it is mainstream Australia culture today. It is in
everyday life as dance movement. This everydayness is read as a key feature of vernacular
dance, wherever and in whichever culture it is found. It is also the key feature distinguishing
it from concert dance traditions in western European culture. Some ten million men, women
and children were sent in slavery to the Americas from Africa - primarily West Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries. They brought with them the music and dance traditions of
a number of different African nations and cultures, as well as a history of slavery prior to the
European invasions. Dance in West Africa was a significant part of public and community
life, and Hazzard-Gordon writes in Jookin’ that “We can say without exaggeration that dance
competency, if not proficiency, is required of all individuals in West African society” (4), and
she extrapolates from this to site dance in all West African descended communities.
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A shared valuing of dance is complemented – or facilitated – by common technical
features in the dances of African diasporic communities. Africanist dance forms – those
dances brought to various other communities throughout the Americas and beyond – not only
share steps and specific movements, but also more general patterns in aesthetics of
choreography and physiology. Many of these Africanist movements still exist today in
various African American and other vernacular dance forms, but have also been appropriated
by white audiences and then re-presented in mainstream versions of the original dance.
Marshall and Jean Stearns’ discussion of an evening in the early 1950s illustrates this:
That evening we had dancers from three different countries: Asadata Dafora
from Sierra Leone, West Africa; Geoffrey Holder from Trinidad, West Indies; and Al
Minns and Leon James from their Savoy Ballroom, New York City. All of them were
alert to their own traditions and articulate, eager to demonstrate their styles.
So we began with the Minns-James repertory of twenty or so African
American dances, from “Cakewalk to Cool,” asking Dafora and Holder to comment
freely. The results were astonishing. One dancer hardly began a step before another
exclaimed with delight, jumped to his feet, and executed a version of his own. The
audience found itself sharing the surprise and pleasure of the dancers as they hit upon
similarities in their respective traditions. We were soon participating in the shock of
recognizing what appeared to be one great tradition (11).
It is interesting to note that Al Minns and Leon Jones were reputable members of the ‘first’
generation of Lindy Hop, with Minns playing a great part in the Swedish Rhythm Hot Shots’
1980s research into swing dance and contributing to the communication of form again, in the
contemporary swing dance ‘revival’. Despite the similarities, the shared features of Africanist
dance do not prescribe uniformity.
The transfer of specific features of Africanist dance through African American dance
and then on to other dance traditions is not simply a process of appropriation. It is evidence of
a more complex history of the movement of ideology and discourse through history. Jane
Desmond draws on the work of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price in noting that it is important
to remember that African American dance and culture is unique, marked by the experiences of
slavery and diaspora (41), rather than simply a reproduction of Africanist dance in a new
land. African American dance was a revision of Africanist themes to suit the new
communities and lands in which African slaves found themselves.
Improvisation as example of cultural transmission. cultural transmission as survival tool
To survive slavery and segregation, oppression and violence as well as integration,
African American dance has needed to maintain relevance to the day-to-day lives of its
participants. It had done so primarily through the prioritising of improvisation as
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choreography, which offers flexibility and mutability of form. Improvisation is facilitated and
encouraged by an emphasis on social dance - rather than performance dance.
Dance therefore functions not only as an ‘interpretation of the music’ in African
American culture, but also as a discursive site for individual and group negotiations of
ideology and identity. Tracing the history of African American vernacular dance thus
provides a history of an enslaved peoples’ ideological negotiations with the discourse of
European slavers; with the ideology and discourse of other African cultures in shared slavery;
and with their own histories and cultures. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon argues that “whether they
grew rice, tobacco, cane or cotton, served in a household, or worked as an urban artisan,
slaves had limited opportunity to establish independent culture” (Jookin’ 14). The
development of African American culture, while involving degrees of poaching and
appropriation, and other cross-cultural pollination, was still a development conducted under
the conditions of slavery. The white slave owners managed the slaves’ retention of Africanist
culture structurally, through the imposition of new family and social relationships;
practically, through forbidding specific activities and punishing ‘inappropriate’ activity; and
ideologically, through disrupting the cross-generational transmission of cultural knowledge by
destroying families and forbidding ‘traditional’ social relationships. As a result, “serious
dancing went underground, and dances which carried significant aesthetic information
became disguised or hidden from public view. For white audiences, the black man’s dancing
body came to carry only the information on its surface” (DeFrantz, discussing black
masculinity in dance 107).
In the case of slavery, dance proved a medium for the appropriation and reframing of
white dance by otherwise disempowered African slaves. It functioned as a discursive
opportunity to retain African cultures through combining them with the white culture
enforced by slave owners. It also proved a medium for the development of a new,
contextually relevant discourse for emerging African American identities. This theme of
recombination – of the transmission of cultural form across cultures and generations - is
present not only in dance, but also in story, art, song and music. In music, for example,
Christian gospel texts and songs – mandatory parts of an enforced white religion – were
appropriated by slaves not only in melodic and performative structures, but also thematically,
as the gospels of ‘salvation from slavery’ and oppression for the Israelites assumed particular
relevance for African American people.
Gottschild insists throughout her work, but most notably in her book Digging the
Africanist Presence in American Performance, that various communities throughout
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American history have drawn on Africanist dance traditions for movements, styles and
themes. Researchers such as Jonathan David Jackson in his discussions of vogueing, and
other dances retraces this movement of black dance into mainstream American – and
international – popular culture. In the 1930s swing dances themselves moved from black
dance culture to mainstream white American culture, and then on to international
communities, to be introduced again into mainstream communities around the world in the
1980s. This transmission of dance from African American culture outwards into other
cultures echoes earlier adoption of dance movements – and inspiring environmental themes –
by African American dancers in their own cultural production. In this thesis I read this
movement as cultural transmission.
Cultural transmission as example of hybridity
This history of African American dance is one of multiple borrowings and
appropriations, and African American dance itself is characterised by hybridity. Stuart Hall
makes the point in his article “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” that diaspora necessarily
involves diversity, hybridity and difference
The diaspora experience …is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition
of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives
with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those
which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through
transformation and difference (235).
This hybridity – a willingness to change, and to be changed and respond to cultural change
and adversity with a flexible adaptation – is a marker of a people oppressed by slavery and
subsequent social injustice. Hybridity is also a part of the reason why, as Hall argues in “Old
and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities” “identities are never completed, never finished;
… they are always as subjectivity itself is, in process. …Identity is always in the process of
formation” (47).
This issue of necessary mutability and cultural flexibility – hybridity - is embodied in
the principal of improvisation in Africanist and African American vernacular dance. Jonathan
David Jackson defines vernacular dance as a “continuum of evolving artistic endeavour” (41),
where developing new steps and movements on the spot is not only an essential marker of
dancing proficiency but also an important adaptive feature of African American dance culture.
This improvisation ranges from invention through to admiring emulation and derisory
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impersonation, and Freidland sees the latter categories in a particular as social commentary in
dance.
Improvisation and hybridity as culturally determined
Yet improvisation does not equate to random or unguided movement. Improvisation –
as with hybridity is culturally ‘managed’ by communities and cultural structures. Dance
aesthetics are as rigorously pursued and encouraged in African American culture as in
European. Yet the means by which they are communicated to new members of the
community – children – and enforced in the wider community varies. The mechanisms of
aesthetic ‘management’ in vernacular dance are quite different to those of institutionalised
western dance forms, as the previous section of this chapter suggests. African American
vernacular dance’s emphasis on improvisation as choreography differs from main-stream
concert dance traditions, where the introduction of new moves is managed by an official
process of choreography. This issue of improvisation as choreography is discussed by Rajika
Puri, and Diana Hart-Johnson in their article “Thinking with Movement: Improvising Versus
Composing?” and where they suggest that improvisation – central to many vernacular dance
cultures – is a studied combination of rational and artistic production, guided by thought and
process as well whim. Improvisation, as these and other authors argue, is as important a
process of cultural production as officially sanctioned and institutionalised choreography. The
positioning of dance as everyday for all people in vernacular dance contrasts with the place of
dance in mainstream Australian culture. It has also facilitated the informal transfer of dance
between generations, and other groups within communities.
Hybridity/cultural transmission as cross-generational – cultural transmission between generations
The prioritising of innovation in African American dance encourages dancers to
consult their immediate, everyday environment for inspiration. At a structural level, change –
through improvisation and innovation – is a necessary feature of vernacular dance. Representing everyday life in dance offers a medium for self-expression and critical ideological
engagement with society for a disempowered or ordinary person to recreate and hence explain
or discursively regain ‘control’ of their often hostile everyday life. African American
vernacular dance occurs in cross-generational spaces, from the home to street parties and
other community dances. As a result, dance forms do not simply die out or disappear – they
are present in the dancing bodies of older generations in the community, and are regularly
revisited and ‘borrowed’ as inspiration for improvisation or innovation by successive
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generations. Jackson argues that black movement traditions are ‘choreologically
contemporaneous’.
Decisive evolutions in which new vernacular traditions are developed in different
black communities, such as the emergence of the Lindy Hop in the 1930s and the
development of breakdance in the early 1980s, appear at the same time that particular
steps and forms are recast and recycled and principles of physical, spatial, aural, and
qualitative action are passed on from one tradition to the next (41).
In other words, the development of new dances in African American dance culture coincides
with – or perhaps necessarily involves – the rediscovery of older dances. This suggests that
the contemporary generation of innovators – usually youth – refer to the dances of previous
generations through their living relatives and older community members for inspiration. This
cross-generational ‘choreography’ also implies and responds to social change within the
community and wider society. Lindy Hop was a response to the development of swinging jazz
and the rise of the Harlem renaissance: new music demanded new dance steps.
Inspiration and opportunities for dance are available in all parts everyday life
There is potential for rhythmic movement in all everyday activities. The use of these
vernacular activities and movements and people as inspiration emphasises the placement of
dance in everyday life, but also the value of a ‘creative eye’ which sees potential in the most
ordinary of activities. For both creators and observers of this type of step, the pleasure lies in
part in the recognition of this everyday activity, and humour is often a key part of this
pleasure. The Black Bottom, a 1920s dance craze with its roots in rural plantation slavery, is a
dance whose movements are said to imitate being stuck in, and wiping off mud. The dance is
still present in contemporary swing culture, but its historical roots are not well known. The
Pimp Walk, a standard stroll step in Lindy Hop and swing culture today and throughout Lindy
Hop history, is explained by popular mythology as the strutting walk of a pimp in Harlem.
Variations on the pimp walk theme also occur in swing dance cultures’ references to zoot suit
wearing pachucos – Latin American youth gangs of the 1930s. The Itch, discussed in Stearns
and Stearns (27) and Hazzard-Gordon (“African American Vernacular Dance” 430) is a dance
step accredited to Africa pre-European slavery, which is still danced today in swing
communities around the world. The Cake Walk – a series of prancing and preening steps
originally functioning as slaves’ competitive imitation of white slave owners – has also
moved through time between communities of dancers, as Desmond describes in “Embodying
Difference” (40) and Malone notes (18). The Itch is – as its name suggests – a series of
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stylised ‘scratching’ tableaus, with accompanying grimaces and facial expressions. The Itch
has been revisited at various points in history, most notably in the 1900s, the 1930s, 1950s
and today. The Itch’s jerky grasping and ‘scratching’ at the body make a humorous comment
on physical discomfort which has cross-cultural appeal. It has provided a contrast for dancers
paused in ‘open’ position in Lindy Hop, and offered a staccato counter-point for
contemporary 1920s style solo Charleston dancers.
Dance as part of continuum of everyday activities. Music-dance relationship as an example
It is important to remember that dance is but one point on a continuum of cultural
practice in African American (or any) culture – it is but one part in a range of everyday
activities. The different cultural practices of a community are linked by ideology. Before we
can continue with this discussion, we should explore the most obvious relationship between
two cultural practices in African American vernacular dance culture: music and dance. I read
this relationship not only as cause and effect – hear music, must dance – but more
importantly, I read this relationship between music and dance as culturally and socially
constructed and ideologically managed. It becomes more a case of ‘hear a particular musical
form, respond with a particular dance form only in certain circumstances, and only if one is of
the correct gender and age’. How one dances and how one makes and hears music are related
by the broader characteristics of African American vernacular dance – improvisation and
innovation within particular ideological frameworks, repetition and imitation, crossgenerational social dance spaces and so on. These are, of course, evidence of the cultural and
social contexts in which dance operates. So the relationship between dance and music is
socially constructed. The following section explores the cultural relationships between music
and dance in African American vernacular dance culture as an illustration of the ways in
which ideology informs dance. Or the way dance constitutes discourse.
The development of African American vernacular dance is tied to the music of the
day. Almost every history of African American vernacular dance makes the point that jazz
dance is jazz music made visible, and that swing dances developed in social dance spaces to
live music always before the invention of recorded music media, and almost always to live
musicians even after the invention of the gramophone and the introduction of radio. This
point is made explicitly in Jacqui Malone’s book Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms
of African American Dance and in Albert Murray’s book Stomping the Blues. The audible
contribution of tap dancers to live jazz makes this most evident, as both Malone and Stearns
and Stearns have argued. Sheenagh Pietrobruno makes a similar point about the development
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of salsa and other Latino vernacular dances: “dancing usually is done to music: there is no
separation between the rhythm of the music and the steps of the dance” (1). Similar points
may be made about the contemporary swing dancing community. The brief mainstream
popularity of swing dance in the US in the 1980s is attributed by many to the popularity of
‘neo swing’ music at the same moment. Neo-swing, though not technically swinging jazz,
attracted people to dancing through its representation of an ‘original swing era’ in its use of
brass instruments, the emphasis on 1930s and 40s clothing, slang and ‘style’ from that era,
references to historical events from that period, and swing dancers featured in its video clips.
The increasing interest in historically ‘accurate’ music for dancing Lindy Hop or 20s
Charleston and so on amongst swing DJs has seen a consequent shift in swing dancers’
dancing styles – their emphasis has moved from ‘dressing up’ in vintage clothing, to
recreating ‘authentic’ dance styles in response to ‘authentic music’. Chapter Four’s discussion
of audio-visual media use in contemporary swing dance communities expands this reference
to the relationship between embodied practice, digital communications technology and
revivalist ideology.
In a specific history of the relationship between music and dance in the African
American context, John F. Szwed and Morton Marks discuss the African American
Transformation of European Set Dances and Dance Suites, paying particular attention to the
musical appropriation at work. In this article the authors emphasise the liberal interpretations
of European musical scores, often learned by ear by African American musicians, and almost
always embellished to include Africanist dance steps and music: “what was being developed
was a form capable of absorbing folk, popular and classical musics and molding them to new
functions” (32). Black musicians took the music for European partner dances – reels, waltzes,
polkas and so on – and reshaped them to harmonize with African American dance aesthetics
and the cultural purpose and use of dance. Jazz eventually developed in Southern America in
the 20th century as a mélange of gospel, blues, ragtime and many other influences. It moved
north with bands and musicians until it became the popular music of the 20s and 30s and was
disseminated by live musicians, records and radio. The rise of the big band in the 30s is linked
to the popularity of Lindy Hop and other swing dances, as the popularity of the Charleston
was linked to rise of jazz itself in the 1920s. Without the mainstream popularity of swinging
jazz, Lindy Hop would not have moved into the mainstream.
The improvisation of jazz music is embodied in swing dances. This improvisation is,
however, not random or unguided movement. It is contained by over-arching musical, social
and dancing structures. Jazz musicians work with a set theme or ‘riff’, and then improvise in a
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27
looser structure, around and using this riff. This structure varies in its formality between
individual bands, regional trends and different genres of jazz. Just as jazz musicians
incorporate improvisation into a given musical structure, Lindy Hoppers maintained the basic
beat and the eight-count syncopated rhythm within their variations and improvisations. As a
couple, dancers always share the basic rhythm of a song, though they may vary in their
interpretation of other elements. While the leader does initiate moves, the follow is free to
interpret the ‘lead’, and to adjust the timing suggested. This vast range of possible timings and
responses to the music not only makes visible the rhythms of the different instruments in the
music, but also often adds to the music. This movement is a marker of African American
dance, a key vehicle for – or marker of - improvisation.
As well as utilising broader themes of improvisation in African American vernacular
dance step-creation, the Lindy Hop specifically incorporated the soloists’ moments of musical
freedom and improvisation in the ‘break away’ dance step. Borrowed from another popular
dance of the time, the Lindy Hop’s foundational move, the Swing Out, incorporated both the
familiar closed embrace of European partner dance, but also innovated with the open position,
which dominated most of the 8-count move. In open, both partners are free to improvise,
interpreting the music and their partner’s movement. This break away – a structured form
containing the improvisation – revolutionised the European partner dance format. It also
embodied the relationship between individual creativity and difference and communally
determined structures of meaning.
Music-dance relationship an example of the relationship between structure and improvisation in af-am
public dance discourse
This discussion of the relationship between music and dance in African American
vernacular dance, and in particular in swing dances of the 20s and 30s emphasises the
relationship between the expression of individual difference through improvisation and
consensual or communally negotiated systems of meaning. The following section explores in
detail the ways in which this relationship between improvisation and structure are employed
in various African American vernacular dance practices. This issue is taken up here as an
introduction to the point argued in the following chapter, that difference is managed in quite
different ways in contemporary swing dance culture. The defining feature of this difference
lies in the way electronic communications media is employed in contemporary swing dancers’
embodied practices. The use of mass media – media which addresses a diverse community or
group of individuals as a group with consensual notions of community (as Hall argues in
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“The Determinants of News Photographs”) – dissolves difference, and suggests that
community membership necessitates the suppression of individual difference for the sake of
outward similarity or homogeneity. This idea is manifested in the ways contemporary swing
dance culture – particularly in Melbourne, where one major school dominates the local dance
community – revalues and represents improvisation. While improvisation is managed by
community structures in African American vernacular dance, improvisation is almost negated
from contemporary swing dance culture by the emphasis on formal learning processes and the
institutionalised transfer of knowledge in hierarchical settings.
Discussing examples of way structure and improvisation are balanced in managing ideological
conflict/negotiation in African American vernacular dance
Competing ideologies and individual conflicts are addressed in public discourse in
African American vernacular dance, where individuals represent their own argument or
grievance through their own dancing, yet within a wider context of a socially sanctioned
public forum. There is a range of structures in place for the representation of conflicting
beliefs and personalities in African American vernacular dance, which both facilitate and
manage conflict and its resolution in public discourse.
Competition in social dance again has its history in Africa, and was in its African
American and African context, a space for dancers to not only challenge an opponent’s
dancing ability, but also to resolve wider social conflicts. Malone and Hazzard-Gordon
explore this point, Malone in her attention to African competitive dance, and Hazzard-Gordon
in her discussion of competitive social dance in spaces like the street party. The competitive
social dance provides a forum for the public resolution of private or ongoing ideological,
interpersonal and inter- and intra-group tensions and conflicts. They are carefully managed
spaces, where dancers must still subscribe to dominant dance aesthetics and models of dance
floor etiquette, while also demonstrating individual flare and creativity, to which
improvisation is essential. In this space, more violent conflicts might be averted, the dominant
ideology either reinforced, or publicly, consensually amended, and youths and challengers
integrated into the wider community, rather than isolated as ‘sub’ or extra-group members.
Called dances and competition and conflict management – improvisation and structure
Throughout West African and African American vernacular dance, the ring dance
form – dancing in a circle - is the site of carefully managed contestation and competition. In
the following section I will consider the relationship between the formal structures of a
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29
number of dance traditions utilising the ring formation. Here, I see the individual expressions
of creativity and rivalry managed by formal dance structures and traditions, so providing
socially sanctioned, public spaces for the negotiation of individual identity, and of
relationships between individuals and groups within the community. I begin with the Big
Apple as a recurring example of called dances with integrated opportunities for improvisation;
continue with the ring or circle on the social dance floor as the forum for jams and battles
between dancers; and close with a discussion of public displays of derision in ‘formal’ dance
contexts such as the jam or battle.
Szwed and Marks (32) discuss the importance of called dances in African American
musical history, noting the relationship between dance and musical form. Dancers were
challenged by callers to perform the called steps to the best of their ability in the earliest
moments of black appropriations of European folk dances. Credible performances required
dancers not only be familiar with named steps, but also be able to perform them immediately,
and often with variations on the step that still maintained a recognised structure. This
discussion echoes a tradition from earliest African dance. Hazard-Gordon notes that “the
challenge posed by the fiddler-caller, familiar to West Africans, calls upon the dancer to
perform difficult combinations of steps. The best performers are those who can meet the
challenge while maintaining control and coolness” (Jookin’ 21).
Malone and others draw clear connections between the ring dances of Africa, the ring
Shouts of African American gospel churches and with ring dances of the 20s and 30s such as
the Big Apple. The Ring Shout was a slaves’ reworking of ancient African ritual, remade to
accord with European religious expectations. Performed in a ring, most often in churches or
religious services, Ring Shouts placed an emphasis on innovative interpretations of set moves
(Stearns and Stearns 27). The Big Apple, popular in the 1920s and 30s and choreographed by
New York dancer Frankie Manning, reworked the Ring Shout with new, formal choreography
and was performed in a circle by partnered and solo dancers. A range of other ‘Apples’ were
popular throughout the period, and are today in contemporary swing culture, joined by new
pieces such as the Japanese swing dancers’ ‘Fuji Apple’ and unchoreographed version.
In their simplest forms, ‘Apples’ are ‘called’, requiring dancers to perform steps
chosen and demonstrated by a leader, a role that is shared by all in the circle. The more
complex and famous Apples are more strictly choreographed – as with the Big Apple – but
individuals’ executions of these set steps were always marked by individual style and
variation often with a competitive edge. Despite the constraints of called dances, Big Apples
in swing dance maintained a strong sense of improvisation and a valuing of innovation. The
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proving of a dancer’s skill lay not only in their recognising the step called, but in their
interpretation and performance of that step. Footage of Frankie Manning’s dance troupe the
Hot Chocolates performing Big Apples is still consulted by dancers today (Hot Chocolates).
Jams, battles and competition and conflict management – improvisation and structure
In African American vernacular dance in the contemporary world and in the past, the
jam or battle – competitive dance between two individuals or teams of dancers - offers a
competitive space on the social dance floor where dancers can present their most impressive
tricks and moves. Break dancing, hip hop, popping and locking, tap dancing, Lindy Hop and
so on – all feature the battle or jam as a site of contestation or competition. While the battle is
often a more aggressive forum, the jam may serve as a friendlier site for the performance of
skill in a cooperative setting. Appreciation and status are conferred by the audiences’ reaction
in most cases, though more formal battles may be more formally judged.
Ralph Ellison describes ‘cutting contests’ reference in his discussion of live jazz in
the 1930s, explaining the role of the cutting contest as a public forum in which musicians
would take turns playing solos to impress an audience of their peers. The ‘jam’ is a familiar
feature in live jazz music even today, though the heightened sense of contestation or ‘battle’
of the cutting contest is often replaced by a more cooperative approach to making music. The
‘jam’ or ‘shine’ is discussed in the autobiography of Malcolm X, where the author discusses
the importance of a couple’s ‘pulling it out’, or ‘bringing it’ to impress watchers on the social
dance floor. Particularly affective dancers would clear a space around them on the social
dance floor as other dancers recognised their skill and gave them room to ‘perform’. A natural
circle or ring of clear around the dancers was formed on an otherwise crowded dance floor.
Similar behaviour happens spontaneously on the social dance floors of contemporary swing
dance culture, with couples taking turns entering the ring to ‘perform’ trade mark moves. The
jam circle has become more formalised in contemporary swing dance culture, however, with
many of the newer communities prescribing the size and duration of a jam, formally pausing
social dancing specifically for a jam circle to form, rather than allowing them to develop
organically.
The inter-troupe dance competitions held in the ballrooms of the 1930s offers a more
formal example of competitive dance in African American vernacular dance culture.
Surviving dancers from the 30s describe formally organised competitions where dance
troupes from rival ballrooms would compete in organised public dance events for the respect
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of their peers. The development of ‘air steps’ or ‘aerials’ – acrobatic steps historically
associated with ‘flash dancers’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – is popularly attributed
in swing culture to Frankie Manning’s first ‘over the back’ flip with his partner Freda
Washington which won the a battle with a rival dance troupe. Dance troupes originally
developed as representatives for specific ballrooms – the Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, named for
Herbert ‘Whitey’ White, manager of the Savoy Ballroom – but often went on to perform for
wider audiences around the country and internationally. The Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers visited
Melbourne in 1938-39 tour of Australia and New Zealand, fuelling the popularity of Lindy
Hop in the region.
The invention of Lindy Hop itself is most commonly attributed to ‘Shorty’ George
Snowden’s innovative work in a marathon dance competition held in 1928 – where he ‘threw’
his partner out into open position, revolutionising social partner jazz dance and coining the
name ‘Lindy Hop’ for Charles Lindberg’s recent ‘hop’ across the Atlantic. Dance
competitions were a part of popular culture throughout the swing era, with footage from high
profile competitions such as the Harvest Moon Ball competition playing an important part in
the revivalist project. Carol Martin outlines the importance of dance marathons, an
entertainment popular throughout the Depression era and on into the 40s until the rise of
television in the 50s.
Derision dance and conflict management – improvisation and structure
Social dance not only provided a forum for the resolution of inter-group tensions
within the community, but also tensions between individuals and between the African
American community and other social groups. Animosity towards a rival within peer groups –
particularly with youths – as well as wider struggles with social injustice and oppression have
been expressed and represented in social dance throughout African American vernacular
dance history. Derision for another is often indicated through derisory imitation in dance.
Malone explores the importance of impersonation and imitation in her discussion of derision
dance in The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. She notes that
dances of derision are legion among African peoples. Pride and pretension are targeted
by dancers as well as singers…. In contemporary Ghanaian nightclubs, those showing
off on the dance floor might be satirized and imitated by other dancers, but an
awkward dancer who cannot do better will not suffer the same treatment (18)
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The African tradition of derision dance continued in slave culture in America. Dance
was often a site for black dancers to respond to white oppression through performing the
white public persona on their own terms:
Slaves’ dances served to deconstruct the imposing and powerful presence of whites. In
the etiquette of slavery, blacks could not openly criticize whites, so dance was a safer
tool for self-assertion, ridicule and criticism than song. Deriding whites through dance
probably originated in dances of derision common to many African groups (HazzardGordon Jookin’ 56).
DeFrantz’s comments about black dance ‘going underground’ is an indication of the
sublimation of meaning – or the multiple layers of meaning – within African American
vernacular dance, where approaching the ‘preferred’ reading is a matter of cultural capital
within a community. The lack of which on the part of observers often saved dancers from
brutal retribution from the objects of their derision. The Cake Walk is an oft-quoted example
of slaves’ resistance through disguised derision, referred to by Stearns and Stearns, as well as
Malone and many others. In the Cake Walk, slaves – with the encouragement of white owners
– would compete for a prize cake by performing caricatured versions of European couples’
promenading. Despite the obvious ridicule or white movement and dance, whites usually did
not read the subversive undertones to this performance. The Cake Walk itself later became a
national craze and is still danced today in contemporary swing dance communities, integrated
into the Lindy Hop and performed as a dance in its own right.
Ideological negotiation and conflict management – improvisation and structure in af-am v contemporary
swing dance
The public airing of grievance through dance stemmed from African dance culture,
and continued in African American vernacular dance, and has been taken up – to varying
degrees – by contemporary Melbourne swing dance culture. A dancer may imitate a
competitor’s trademark moves with exaggeration for comedic effect, encouraging audiences
to laugh with them, and at the move and also – implicitly – at the competitor. This ‘airing of
grievances’ has been adopted not as a conscious reenactment or appropriation of Africanist
tradition, but as a natural extension of the themes of Lindy Hop and swing dance with their
emphasis on public innovation, improvisation and impersonation within the structural
limitations of the dance. This use of dance usually takes the form of imitation or derision,
rather than direct confrontation or challenge, and almost always has a comedic function.
Ch2 draft5-1 16th May 2006
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Humour itself serves an important function in dance, where physical movement as satire
provides a commentary on current culture and requires – and so encouraging – an awareness
of current community politics and discourse.
The limits of this potential for transgressive social commentary and the negotation of
conflict in public dance discourse are, however, severely limited in Melbourne today, where
swing dance is mediated by dance schools and electronic communications media. Swing
dance culture in Melbourne today is shaped by the online and pedagogic discourse of schools
as well as the organic nature of social dancing. The prevalence of formal classes as the
dominant dance experience for most Melbourne dancers marginalises the social dance
experience, and so marginalises the mechanisms for conflict resolution and public discourse
present in social swing dancing. Classes and other official, institutionalised discourse offer
official comments on community conflicts, and do not allow for contributions from any
individual other than those highest in the school hierarchy. This is not to suggest that social
dance – or all dance – in contemporary swing dance communities is without conflict or public
negotiations of identity. It is, however, suggesting that the more organic and participatory
nature of African American vernacular dance has been replaced by the hegemonic processes
of commodified dance culture. The value of a particular dance step is determined not by its
use-value on the social dance floor, but by its public advocacy by high-status members of
dance institutions. The meaning of dance steps – the ideas circulating in swing dance
discourse – is mediated by classes and formal teaching practices, but also by the
accompanying discussion of dance in emails, websites and other electronic communications
media. Conflict is most often resolved by official intervention by institutional representatives,
rather than by negotiation by all parties in public discourse. Improvisation and individual
innovation is marginalised by an emphasis on official, institutional voices and bodies.
In adopting the dance form, but not the wider dance tradition or ideological import of
the competitive dance, the contemporary swing dance community effects a more total
quashing of resistant ideologies. In a community where the dance floor is the most
authoritative space for performing identity and veracity, denying another the opportunity to
dance, or framing their dance performances as disruptive or divisive effects a hegemonic
restatement of dominant ideology.
Conclusion:
Ideological negotiation and conflict management – suggesting that dance as a discourse is also site for
ideological negotiation
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34
Discussion of the public management of conflict through dance leads inevitably to the
idea that the dance floor is also a space of contesting ideologies and discursive management
of conflict. Throughout international swing dance culture today, the belief that the most
valued performance of knowledge and authority is on the dance floor – in dance – permeates
all other swing dance cultural practice. While contemporary swing dance is highly mediated,
with digital media providing the most significant contribution to this mediation, the myth of
‘bringing it’ to the dance floor still dominates. My discussion of African American vernacular
dance in this chapter is intended as an introduction to the notion of dance as cultural discourse
– as a public forum for the discussion and negotiation of individual and group identity, and of
ideology. I present contemporary swing dance as a descendent of African American
vernacular dance to emphasise the differences between social dance in both contexts – despite
similarities in specific dance form – and to draw attention to the ways in which these
differences are affected through the process of cultural transmission. As Desmond writes,
cultural transmission of a particular dance from one community to another involves the
ideological reworking of the meaning and uses of dance. This ideological reworking can be
read in the ways dance culture reflects the broader social context in which a dance exists.
African American vernacular dance is the product of communities of people whose history
includes slavery, institutionalised racism, oppression and marginalisation. For these people,
dance also functions as social commentary, and offers opportunity for cultural resistance to
oppressive social structures and bodies. Lindy Hop and other African American swing dances,
then, hold both the potential for active engagement with ideology in public space, and the
technical structures by which to express and explore this ideological negotiation.
Contemporary swing dance is a product of a revivalist project, where this African American
history has been reworked to suit a new cultural context. Swing communities in each city
reflect the social context of that city and culture – Melbourne swing dance culture is
dominated by the school structure where swing dances have been commodified by the
promotional work of the schools, work which has utilised the revivalist myth within this
project.
In beginning with this discussion of African American vernacular dance, I offer an
alternative to the revivalist history of swing dancing. I hope to make clear the ideological
function and content of dance – as public discourse – through contrasting its uses in two
different communities. The following chapter continues with closer attention to contemporary
swing dance culture, discussing the process of cultural transmission in greater depth. This
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chapter also discusses in detail the role of electronic communications media in contemporary
swing dance culture, noting the important role this technology plays in the ideological
negotiation of identity in contemporary swing dance discourse. Here, the positioning of
dancers as members of a ‘consensual’ audience or community disavows the legitimacy of
ideological conflict and negotiation through positioning dancers as consumers of a dance
product, rather than as participants in the production of social meanings of dance in public
space.
The social dance floor, while it is the most interesting discursive space in
contemporary swing culture is complemented by the formal performance, competitions and
classes in contemporary swing. As the next chapter on contemporary swing dance culture as
mediated culture will demonstrate, the increasing emphasis on mediated dance – classes,
performances and so on – rather than the social dance floor – has effected changes in the
cultural uses of swing dance. These changes reveal the differences in cultural context which
re-negotiate the uses and meaning of dance as they are transmitted between cultures.
This discussion of specific dance floor practices in African American vernacular dance
introduces not only specific practices and mechanisms for the negotiation of identity in dance
discourse, but also highlights the differences in use and form of these practices as they are
transmitted between cultures. The history of African American vernacular dance – of swing
dances – is one of cultural transmission: the movement of cultural form between cultures and
groups. This movement is a feature of discourse – the movement of ideas and the ideological
negotiation of practice by groups and individuals in cooperative, social space.
The following chapter not only explores the contemporary swing dance culture, but
also the ways in which this culture has made use of specific African American vernacular
dance forms, practices and themes. This use is contextually dependent and can be read for
evidence of how mainstream Melbourne culture in particular is represented in Melbourne
swing discourse. this study also discusses the ways in which local community cultural
practices localised dance culture and discourse. The key interest of this feature lies in the way
contemporary localised swing dance communities are also a part of a global swing culture and
discourse. Cultural transmission is read in the following chapter as a process by which
relationships between localised cultures and communities are affected.
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36
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