Call-and-Response - In The Pocket

Last Friday, I attended a staged reading of Jeff Campbell's new play "In The Pocket: The Ballad of Bobby Trombone.” at The Savoy Denver. This was a collaboration between Emancipation Theater and Theatre Artibus.

One section that stood out was the first time Shane Franklin broke out his tap shoes to involve the audience by rhythmically tap dancing and getting us to respond with “in the pocket.” In the pocket, as you can likely guess from the play’s title, was a recurring theme. Since things can get lost in writing, I’ll say it was very similar to Frankie Manning calling out “uh1, uh2, uh you know what to do” - very rhythmic, timed, leaving space for the response of Shane’s taps’ calls to audience members. Innnn the Pocket.

And that got me thinking. Can we at Swingin’ Denver get our students more audibly involved in a similar way? And could that help them find Lindy Hop’s pocket?

Uh 1 Uh 2
We Know What To Do!

Food for thought

Event Tips - Outreach, Communication and More

This post is sparked by two recent interactions I’ve had with board members from Collective Voices for Change. This organization is hosting an online “interactive workshop where we will come together to (re)imagine dance events and create the type of social space we desire and deserve.”

The board members expressed they were having difficulties in reading tone in potential participants’ questions, finding time to answer questions well, and sometimes struggling to build their audience. I’d like to tackle how I handle some online event management aspects here.

Some basics:

1. Strive to communicate promptly inside your event. Let’s first acknowledge that it has become more difficult for Facebook page admins to be notified when people comment inside an event. While I aim to respond to people the same day, event notifications do not come through my Meta Business Suite app. Instead I have to go directly to my Page Manager to see what messages I have. A good goal would be to have someone check notifications every 24-48 hours and respond under 72 hours at most.

2. If you’re a larger organization, have a shared system for communicating with your team like Slack. If you’re concerned about how to write a proper response, draft something for approval, tag some members in your group and ask for feedback within 24 hours. Side note: If it’s a complicated question and you need more time, respond publicly to let the asker know you’re working on getting them a good answer. Show you care and acknowledge them.

3. Try to answer your audience members publicly rather than privately. Perhaps if the question needs to be handled offline, consider reaching out privately and maybe delete the question so it doesn’t appear that you’re ignoring them. Or even respond something like “Thanks for the question, I’m going to contact you privately.” Even if this person asked a similar question both on your page and in your event, answer them in both places. You never know who is watching which location.

4. Personal outreach goes a long way. Just because your organization exist doesn’t mean people will come. Just because you invite a friend to your event doesn’t mean they’ll see it. If you’re running an event about running events, try posting in relevant groups to try reaching the people that ought to be involved. Taking it even further, and this requires much more time, is doing personal outreach. It is time-consuming, potential emotionally draining, and you might be ignored by people that you think need this the most.

5. Assume people mean their best when they ask a question. I was recently accused of being publicly critical and rude toward an event when expressing skepticism that an event would be worth my time while asking for more pertinent details. At that moment in time and still nearly two weeks later, the event hadn’t shared any details about their instructors nor their event’s format. Being that everyone’s time is valuable and participants likely want to maximize their learning opportunities, these are important things to know. For so many of us, our swing dance projects exist alongside full-time jobs, kids, etc.

6. Be pro-active about sharing your event details increases accessibility and can help overcome hesitation. So have a robust event description, share updates in the discussion tab and what’s even better - having all this information published at the same time as when your event debuts online.

We Teach Lindy Hop

It’s taken us a while to get to this point, but we’re no longer teaching jitterbug, east coast swing, or swing dance for our quick < 30 minute lessons. Jitterbug is a person, east coast swing is an American rhythm ballroom dance, and swing dance is just a generic umbrella term.

You’ll more than likely find us teaching Lindy Hop, maybe Charleston, or perhaps another style during these 15-30 punchy entertaining lessons. Whatever you’ll see us teaching, we’ll be honoring it with its actual name rather than appropriating or renaming it.

What has helped us get here is -
A. Acknowledging that Lindy Hop is a Black vernacular dance, dancing that makes African-American rhythms on the dance floor. Hallmarks of authentic jazz dance, African-American vernacular and West African dance include community, vocal encouragement, call-and-response, joyousness, groundedness, improvisation, polyrhythms and syncopations (“Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches,” edited by Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver).

B. Accepting that Lindy Hop is comprised of several different rhythms including what we refer to as single-time rhythm or taking a single step in two beats. Oftentimes, you’ll find swing dance instructors calling this rhythm jitterbug or east coast swing, which is likely a holdover from the neo-swing era and the need to mass-market teaching dance, and reserving Lindy Hop to mean triple steps and/or 8-count rhythms. This has just led to confusion.

C. Realizing that learning Lindy Hop is easy, mastering Lindy Hop is difficult. Anyone can learn to Lindy Hop and be instructed in the hallmarks of vernacular dance. Being comfortable embodying these trademarks can be a long journey and that’s okay. As teachers, we should be paying proper homage to the creators of these dance styles we enjoy so much rather than renaming them so as to make these easier for the masses. Besides, students can and will rise to the occasion.

So, yes, those single-time rhythms and patterns you’ll see us teach at Little Man Ice Cream or Aspen Grove - that’s Lindy Hop. The jury is still out on some of those steps (I’m looking at you, pretzel), but at least take a moment to reflect on vernacular dance’s hallmarks. And then we’d like to see more swing dance schools stop calling it Jitterbug (a person) or East Coast Swing, unless you’re teaching the ballroom dance. Cheers!

Google My Business Checklist

Have you claimed your swing dance and/or music business on Google? If not, I’d encourage you to do so. It offers many benefits which include managing content, accurate information, improved presence for the Google search engine, and helping people find you easier..

The following checklist comes from the “Yelp My Business” talk at the 2022 InTents Conference. I’ll also add helpful tips from what I’ve found useful after recently revamping my GYB profile.

• Claim your business profile HERE or click “Own this Business?” as shown below:

• Fill out all the information in your profile: days, hours, exact location, business description, and go through Google’s suggestions in case they’re relevant to your business.

• Set a regular day of the week or month to check your profiles: update information, upload current photos, thank kind reviews, respond to neutral or negative reviews.

• Respond promptly to: questions, messages, reviews that need clarification.

• As needed, update hours: holidays, special events

From my recent experience:

• Make contacting you easy and strive to respond within 24-48 hours to emails and voicemails. If you don’t have a business phone number, get a Google Voice number with a local area code too.

• Experiment with posts. You can post events, announcements, and offers. Currently, we’re not getting that many views, but our search ranking has seemed to improve over the last 1-2 weeks. We cannot say there is a correlation, but everything helps.

• Lower the barrier to entry which includes finding you and reaching pertinent details.

March 2022 Class Playlist

I am ridiculously pleased with the amount of music we played opening night in both our Intermediate and Beginner Lindy Hop classes! 50+ minutes were played and we were maximizing students’ dance time. The same goes for Boulder Swing Dance too!

These are the classes I love to teach and participate in - where it’s movement focused and we can put into practice what we’re learning to music. Anyway, we’re building a Spotify playlist of music below that students are dancing to in class.

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Get Out Of The Way Of The Dance

Lindy Hop speaks for itself. It’s wonderfully dynamic, playful and powerful. As Jacqui Malone writes “its hallmarks are improvisation and spontaneity, propulsive rhythm, call-and-response patterns, self-expression, elegance, and control.” A Lindy Hop social dance rarely repeats itself because the partner, the song, and your life experience are rarely the same at that moment in time.

So why do some lindy hop instructors get in the way by trying to share the dance verbally when it’s a physical expression? When teaching, strive to let your dance students experience Lindy Hop through dancing as much as possible, especially dancing to swing music. This is because, as I sit here and reflect on my past dance experiences, there is nothing quite like dancing it out for yourself, dancing through mistakes, and trying to connect to a different partner to a new section of music. Lindy Hop is best experienced kinesthetically.

So let’s dance more and speak less.

Learn to Lindy Hop for Free!

It’s difficult to replace the in-person learning experience, but sometimes you need to learn from home for whatever reason. One of the best sources to learn Lindy Hop is to watch any one of our Learn to Lindy Hop in a Day recap videos on our YouTube channel like this one featuring Kenny Nelson and Allison Frey at Lone Tree Brewing Company back in 2019.

And, if you ever want more of this kinds of recap videos from our Learn to Lindy Hop in a Day workshops, click HERE for a list of those on our YouTube channel. If you do live within driving distance of Denver, we suggest taking our classes which you can find out more about HERE.

Music Matters

Consider the following excerpts from Jacqui Malone’s Steppin’ on the Blues:
“The term vernacular refers to dance performed to the rhythms of African American music; dance that makes those rhythms visible.”

“Vernacular dance gave birth to several international dance crazes, including the cakewalk, the Charleston, and the lindy hop. Its hallmarks are improvisation and spontaneity, propulsive rhythm, call-and-response patterns, self-expression, elegance, and control.”

Being that Lindy Hop is a vernacular dance, it is inseparable from the music that birthed it. This goes with any of the vernacular dances. As a vernacular dance teacher of Charleston and Lindy Hop, for example, you should be playing as much good swing music in your classroom as possible to elicit the hallmarks of vernacular dance from your students. Counting, scatting, silence, clapping aren’t as powerful as the music that gave rise to these dances. They’re useful tools, yes, but just tools.

And students of vernacular dance, if you’re reading this, are you dancing to enough good swing music in class? If you’re only getting 1-2 songs or less than 10 minutes of music in a 60-minute class, I recommend asking for more. Some ideas would be raising your hand and asking - “hey, can we dance to some music?” or, if you’re 20+ minutes into a class, “hey, when can we try this to music?” Sometimes teachers can get carried away and just forget. Other times teachers may not place enough importance on dancing to music.

Regardless, music matters. And playing music allows for other things such as -

• Teacher huddles

• Open dance practice for students

• The time to give individual attention where the other students are distracted by music

• Opportunities to see if your teaching is effective and where to shore up your students

Music matters so much and for so many different valuable reasons. Play the music.

Maximize Your Instagram Name

TIL that your Instagram name is searchable. Well, not today, but a few days ago at a farmers markets conference in San Diego. One of their speakers, Molly Balint, spoke about how to maximize your Instagram efforts. It was amazing material and I immediately started editing my name.

Being that it is only 30 characters long, I had to get a bit clever. You see, you also want your business name in there preferably with some choice keywords. As you can see, I ended up breaking up our name since it’s also meant to be said and read as “swing in Denver.” Then I also wanted to work in dance, so now I have four searchable keywords - “swing,” “in,” “Denver,” and “dance” with a Call to Action.

Additionally, I made sure to include What we do, Where we do it, and How to learn more. It’s worth checking out that link in our Instagram profile too and ponder why we made that choice. More on that later!

Increase Marketing. Increase Accessibility.

Back in 2017 or 2018, I attended a talk at Lindy Focus led by Breai Mason-Campbell, Artistic Director at Guardian Dance Company. One of the discussion topics was increasing accessibility for BIPOC in predominantly white swing dance spaces. One solution I remember (and there were certainly more) was to make sure your marketing efforts included print materials.

In a digital age, you want to cover all your bases in terms of outreach. If you’re the one-person street team like me or you have people that can flier neighborhoods for you, make sure to hit up the immediate surrounding neighborhoods and then branch out from there. You never know where someone will be when they spot your flier; they could be in their neighborhood, maybe near work, or getting coffee with a friend.

A sample of the front of our class flier before we decided to switch dates to help out the Mercury Cafe. Our classes will reopen Wednesdays starting March 30, 2022.