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Ranting About “Six-Count Swing”
It’s not even Friday yet, but it’s been a long week, I’m grumpy, so I’m going to talk about a peeve. Actually I’m going to rant. I can’t stand that we teach beginners a six-count basic. You know, I can...
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On Being “Not Musical”
I am haunted by the specter of a great tragedy that exists in swing dancing today. It is this: You just would not believe how many dancers there are, not only newer dancers but even fairly accomplished...
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Clapping on 2
So yesterday I started this thing about dancers who don’t think they’re “musical.” I was saying how everyone actually does have the same sense of rhythm whether they know it or not, but that some...
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Structural Problems
To continue my wheeze about rhythm… Some dancers feel like they have no rhythm when it’s really just the structure of the music that they’re not hearing. This accounts for that well-known phenomenon...
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Challenge #3: New Music
Okay, last week when we went out dancing, whenever we had a free arm we were focusing on that free hand to make sure it was expressing something. How did this go for you? I found it difficult to...
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More About Structure
Okay, in my post on Thursday I talked about the structure of swing music and how it’s put together in groups of four eight-count phrases. The example I used was AAAB structure. If you spent any time...
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Dance to the Music!
Why do swing dancers have such a hard time dancing to music? Latin dancers know what steps to do to which music. If it’s a salsa, they do salsa. They wouldn’t do chacha or bachata or merengue to a...
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The Next Big Apple
I haven’t talked about musicality in awhile. So here goes. If you’re serious about getting your dancing to be more creative and musical, there’s one thing you can do to fix that. It isn’t easy, and it...
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What Is Swing?
A few months ago I posed the question: What is Swing Dancing? In that post, I offered my definition. To me, swing dancing only deserves to be called that if it includes rhythmic variety, humor, and...
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Dancing Slow
Thursday we had a band, and it was fine and nice and everything, but there was this problem. See, they insisted on playing different tempos. In our scene we have an extremely high percentage of swing...
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