What Swing is All About

For those unwary individuals, Swing dance is a dance form that is mainly partnered with Jazz’s swing music during the 1920s era up to the 1940s. Swing jazz cites the kind of music that utilizes a mixture of quavers and crotchets, particularly from African American and West African dance forms and music. These consolidated timing, primarily consisting of quarter and eight notes, are termed by performers as steps and triple steps.

There are various styles of swing dance that have been created from the original dance of Swing. In fact, each region has their own unique style of dancing Swing as well as the background music to partner it with.

History

Swing dance origin came to be in the year 1920s wherein the black people unfolded Charleston and Lindy Hop as they were performing to the tune of Jazz music which was very popular at the time. Jazz bars opened their doors and lent their stage for dancers who wanted to discover more about the dance style of Swing. After time passed by, various styles were produced such as the Lindy Hop which is also one of the original dance styles of Swing. As of now, Swing has innumerable dance forms or styles.

Various Swing Styles

Examples of Swing dance styles are Savoy Swing and Lindy Hop. Savoy Swing was known to be more of a formal dance style which applied quick and active dance steps. On the other hand, Lindy Hop was a far smoother and more famous dance style of Swing.

One of the versions of Lindy Hop, the East Coast Swing is a 6 count adaptation of the dance and is highly praised among dance studios. Whip is the kind of Swing dance style that works with the lead dancer whirling the follower to place him/her to the next dance routine. Meanwhile, Jive is a dance style which is widely utilized for dancing competitions within the USA.

Swing Music

Most of the development in different swing dance styles can be attributed to the different trends and influences in popular music. There are actually a lot of different music that influenced the different styles, such as traditional jazz music for Charleston, swing music for the Lindy Hop, and Pop, R&B, Funk or Blues are used for West Coast Swing.

Swing Competitions

Basically, there are four main patterns for swing competitions – classic, showcase, strict and Jack and Jill format. The first one, classic format, involves a pair of dancers who will perform for a recently choreographed music yet will have certain restrictions or limits in terms of their lifts, movements and drops. The second one, showcase format, is similar with the classic format; however, they are not accountable to any limitations whatsoever. The third one, strict format, forbids dancers to have pre-choreographed movements or steps and will have to perform with randomly chosen songs in different beats. Lastly, Jack and Jill, it indiscriminately partners dancers with each other.

Criteria For Judging

Judging Swing dance competitions involve three particular criteria for judgement which are teamwork of the couple dancers and how well they blend together, the dancer’s timing with the tempo or beat of the song and the accuracy of the techniques shown by the different dance steps of the dancers.

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Tags: Art, culture, dance, entertainment, society, swing