ABOUT SWING
What is Swing?
Swing is both a style of Jazz developed by Black American musicians in the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s (becoming the dominant popular music of that era) and a rhythm present within that music characterised by splitting a beat into a longer note followed by a shorter note. Some well-known examples are Splanky, T'Ain't What You Do and Flying Home.
Swing dance is an umbrella term for a set of dances created by Black Americans to fit swing music. Swing dance is known for being upbeat, flashy and acrobatic, but it has the range to cover many different tempos.
The cultural dominance of swing was brought to an end by World War 2, both because the war made it harder to form the Big Bands that produced the music, and due to a wartime Cabaret Tax levied in 1944 that made social dances extremely expensive to host.
The Cabaret Tax helped motivate less danceable, more instrumental Jazz, and drove partner dancing back into smaller, private venues. After it was lifted, Rock and Roll took centre stage and the most popular dances in White America gradually became solo dances (starting with The Twist). Swing music and social partner dancing persisted in the Black American community.
The current worldwide swing dance scene was set in motion in the 1980s, a period in which interest in Swing grew significantly in Europe and the USA, closely associated with Frankie Manning and the Herräng Dance Camp (both pictured below), and reaching its peak in 1998 with a famous Gap commercial.
What is Lindy Hop?
Lindy Hop is a partnered dance that was created in Harlem, New York by Black American dancers during the Swing era, as part of the Harlem Renaissance. It was traditionally danced to Big Band Jazz music and evolved from dances such as the Charleston, Tap dance and the Breakaway.
The dance is closely associated with the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, the first desegregated ballroom in the country (pictured below, now closed). The Savoy was a White-owned ballroom that would host 3,000-5,000 people on a single night, grossing roughly £4–5 million per year in 2026 money.
Being a social dancing venue, the Savoy's rules specifically precluded "exuberant dance innovation", but as the Great Depression swept America, the Savoy Ballroom became one of the last affordable public dancefloors left in New York. Under this pressure, Lindy Hop was developed in the northeast corner of the Savoy's dancefloor, an area that gradually became known as The Corner.
Conventionally, the name "Lindy Hop" is said to be inspired by Charles Lindbergh's first non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927, but alternative accounts exist that suggest this may simply have been a market-savvy retcon by the Savoy Ballroom themselves.
Another common association is Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, a legendary performance group featuring Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, Al Minns and Leon James amongst many others. You can see their work in this famous sequence from Hellzapoppin' (1941). They were incredible dancers, but suffered great mistreatment and prejudice both from Whitey and others in the industry at the time.
Don't let the acrobatics scare you! Steps that have dancers flying through the air are very much intended as a performance piece, not a regular social dance. While modern dancers certainly try to emulate their work, the average dancefloor is much more sedate.
Black American values and aesthetics
As White interest in Lindy Hop grew, it was modified in order to make it easier to teach and more palatable for White audiences, who at the time knew partner dancing mostly in the form of highly structured Ballroom dancing. The "jockey step", which we now call the "basic", was created artificially, specifically to make the dance teachable to large classes.
This was one of a number of changes that drew the dance away from its cultural roots, straining and constraining the artform. The dancers produced by this structured, static tuition were derisively called "Jitterbugs" by Black Americans due to their habit of sacrificing rhythm to complete more complex moves, showing an apparent disregard for the music.
The culture that created the dance holds a set of values quite different to those of the sanitised, codified version that arose later. Some of them are West African, carried to the Americas by enslaved people; some are shared across Black communities throughout the Americas; some are specific to Black America.
Several are counterintuitive to dancers raised on European forms, where the ideal is often the exact opposite. They include, but are not limited to:
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Individual expression within community. In Black American culture, individuality is encouraged, celebrated and answered by the community around you. The individual is the reason the jam circle is there.
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Improvisation over reproduction. Musicality, creativity and expression matter more than the ever-more-perfect, ever-faster chaining together of fixed step patterns.
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Visible rhythm and pulse. Someone who can't hear the band should still be able to feel the beat by watching the dancers.
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Polyrhythm and polycentrism. More than one rhythm at a time, coming from more than one centre; one pattern in the feet, a different pattern in the torso, shoulders or hips.
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Lag. An elastic relationship to the beat, where movement is carried inside the beat and inside the melody rather than landing squarely on top of it. This is not the same as being late or casual about timing.
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Groundedness. A solid connection is made with the floor, and featured within the dance. Ballet dancers are superbly grounded too, but their technique conceals it. In Black American dance, it's on show.
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Asymmetry and angularity. Bends, angles and offsets in a pose communicate life and action, while a symmetrical, upright, evenly-weighted pose communicates motionlessness.
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Ephebism. Youthfulness and vigour are celebrated, at any age.
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Call and response. European dance has call and response too, but here the response is expected to answer with something of its own rather than repeat what it was given. Jam circles grow out of this spontaneously, at a variety of tempos, as collaborative and experimental spaces rather than scheduled showcases for elite performance.
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Making the easy look hard and the hard look easy. In a tradition passed on by watching, concealing the mechanics of something difficult keeps it yours a little longer. Things look simple once they've been mastered, and complicated when you're starting out.
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The follow's voice. Follows carry more of the dance and express more of their own individuality within it than the codified version allows for.
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Learning by watching. The dance is passed on by oral tradition, watching and copying, rather than by reading and explaining. The best moves are taught on the floor, during social dances and in smaller groups, rather than in a formal class setting.
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Personal expression in dress. What you wear says something about who you are, rather than adhering to a 1950s vintage aesthetic.
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A party atmosphere. Flirting, alcohol and other intoxicants, not a restrained, abstinent "regency ball".
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Connection over efficiency. Interpersonal connection and community-building matter more than productivity.
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Mastery over reach. Developing the dance matters more than appealing to the widest possible audience.
These points are only the beginning. The look and feel is best learned the way it has always been learned: by watching a great deal of Black American dance, music and performance, and letting it change how you move.
We seek to respect both the dance's cultural roots and the enormous efforts made since, deprioritising without wholly disposing of the values that were introduced later on.
References