Lindy Hop is a partner dance, mostly improvised, using vernacular jazz steps and rhythms, danced primarily to swing music (jazz music). It was created, developed, performed and danced in the Black American communities in Harlem, New York during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s, most famously danced at the Savoy Ballroom (one of the only integrated ballrooms of its time). From here the dance spread quickly and widely across America and also here to the UK and Europe, through live travelling shows and performances on film too by some of the originators and greatest performers including the incredible Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers.
It is a social swing dance with a rich and complex history and culture and is now danced and loved by communities the world over.
Lindy Hop is also great fun and fab exercise for both bodies and minds, and allows us to connect with each other, the rhythm and the music, and let go a little of the worries and concerns of our daily lives.
Any gender can dance any role (lead or follow) and you can learn to switch dance too. There is a lot of balance in the partnership within the dance with leads and follows both exchanging ideas throughout the dance responding to each other and the music.
Exploring You Tube:
If you’re exploring YouTube looking for videos to see more of what Lindy Hop looks like today you’ll find a lot of of performance videos for competitions which are hugely exciting to watch and be inspired by but not necessarily fully representative of what it looks like to social dance Lindy Hop and we teach social dancing Lindy Hop in our main classes.
However one good competition format to look at are ‘Mix and Match’ or ‘Open Draw’. Especially at open level. These dancers are randomly selected to dance with each other and the music they dance to is also randomly selected. Which is just like a social dance. No one knows what’s coming. The partners have to connect with each other and the music in that moment and it’s all improvised around the skills, rhythms, and patterns we learn in classes.
Now obviously they’re still competing so there’s a little showing off in there too but it’s a lot closer to regular dancing.
This was from a big European dance weekender ILHC Europe 2022 (International Lindy Hop Championships) which has a lot of videos online to watch but here is their Open level, Open Draw competition playlist … it has the added bonus of a warm up and final all skate video in here too which gives you a bit of an idea of what it looks like at a social dance when lots of partners are on the floor together.
Warm up skate:
Also see the full Playlist from that comp: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL00oSiWZlEA04AZ05hTqjl_lYBQxpT-Yi
Enjoy!
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More info on swing dancing, it’s history, and culture:
If you want to know more information about the wonderful world of Lindy Hop and swing dancing you can continue your YouTube deep dive (and post Covid a lot of the top pro dancers have some excellent material on there) also I’d highly encourage you to head over to the amazing archive of posts over at Bobby White’s ‘SwungOver’ website and blog: https://swungover.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/#swing-101-contents
Nottingham Lindy Hop 