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| Lindy: Blues Dances & Parties (Updated) |
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| on Wednesday, January 03, 2007 - 06:00 PM - 696 Reads |
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So over the holidays I made it to 2 evening blues dances in Portland, one after hours blues event at SONW, and one house party in Seattle. Each of these things had a distinctly different flavor, and I ended up being a little surprised at my attitudes towards each afterwards.
So, first off the evening blues dances. These were more enjoyable than I expected. It helped that there were a handful of follows that I really enjoyed dancing with and a fair amount of the music was fast enough to do good lindy with these follows. I did get asked a few times by follows that I didn't know, but they were infrequent enough that I wasn't overly frustrated, and at least as a guy I'm better able to set the boundaries for the dance. On each evening there was one DJ I really liked, and one not so much. It didn't really matter how good my partner was on the bad music songs. Looking around the dance floor there was still a lot of wiggling, but for the most part no grinding that is mostly inappropriate at a public venue. The wiggling still bothers me. Especially the bad wiggling. I blame the teachers/better dancers for this. Younger dancers try to emulate what they see, and whatever possible minimum dancing value gained from good dancers doing these things is completely absent in these newer dancers. There are so many much better things that can be taught to beginners to keep them from going down this path, either ever, or at least for a long time. Anyway, for at least half of the evening each night, I did enjoy the blues dances I had at this venue.
I did a blues after hours at SONW. I was up there mostly when David was spinning his Vinyl, and most of it I enjoyed. The problem was that there weren't many people I really knew well enough to want to blues dance with them. I got a few dances, but mostly sat out while up there. This is the kind of forum in which I usually like blues dancing best, but in this case it wasn't so great.
Finally I went to a blues party. This is the one that I found kind of weird. A lot of the things I normally speak out against as not liking, I didn't mind so much in this setting. A private, crowded room is a distinctly different feel than a public dance with a larger floor. I had some great dances with some fun dancers - Lessa, Monica, Karissa. So, while I've always maintained that I really enjoy private blues parties, it was surprising to me how much I was willing to forgive in my snobbish blues dance philosophy.
Note: Updated 1/18 to remove non-public items |
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