After six months of deliberation and voting, it has been determined that this is the Best Lindy Hop Performance of the 21st Century:
The rest of the standings from the last round of voting:
2nd: The Silver Shadows - Frankie's 95th Birthday Festival (Frankie95)
3rd: Frida Segerdahl & Skye Humphries - ILHC 2009
4th: Liberation Final - ULHS 2005
5th: Ramona Staffeld & Remy Kouakou Kouame - ILHC 2016
This project was focused on the 21st century but if we had to include the 20th century then I think we would have to talk about these two videos.
First, I think what is generally considered the greatest Lindy Hop performance of any time period is from the 1941 movie Hellzapoppin' as performed by Whitey's Lindy Hoppers
My hot take is that the next important performance is the “Khakis Swing” Gap ad from 1998.
Note that I said “most important,” not "best." I'll accept arguments that there is actually no lindy hop in this commercial, but it was still a major part of the surge of interest into swing dancing in the late 1990s. I went into more detail in this blog post where I drew a direct line from this commercial to Skye Humphries & Frida Segerdahl's performance to Twenty Four Robbers in 2007. However, this selection of Frida’s dance with Michael Seguin in 2013 might actually best represent the bridge between the Hellzapoppin' clip and “Khakis Swing.”
The Hellzapoppin' performance is universally recognized as the pinnacle of Lindy Hop excellence. Few modern dancers have the ability or the time to come close to performing at the level that the Whitey's Lindy Hoppers did in that film. The Gap ad is partying like it's 1998. The dancing itself is no where near as good, but it does have elements that make lindy hop an attractive activity today: lots of energy, style and fun, all while being portrayed by cutting edge technology.
Frida and Michael at Lindyfest comes 15 years later as a more grounded version of that Gap Ad. That Invitational contest is filled with some of the best lindy hoppers at that time. Despite the high level competition, Lindyfest has a much more casual competitive environment; more hang out than contest. The premise of that specific contest is improvised social dance between randomly assigned partners. The resulting dance between Frida and Michael is an adventure that pulls the audience in. They're only able to pull off such an accidentally entertaining dance is because of how skilled they are; skills they learned after they were inspired to take up the dance in the late 1990s and then honed by studying old film clips like Hellzapoppin’.
The final round of voting for this project was not particularly close.
Frida & Michael, 77 votes
Silver Shadows, 45 votes
Frida & Skye, 40 votes
ULHS 2005, 32 votes
Ramona & Remy, 28 votes
One good theory for why the voting played out the way it did is that, out of all the performances, the winner most resembles the nightly experience of lindy hop as a social activity today. However, no other social dance videos got very much wide spread support in the nomination or voting rounds. The next highest voted social dance video was the one featuring Frankie Manning & Dawn Hampton from 2007 which just barely made it into the voting round. Does this really say anything about the scene at large or is this just an isolated result of this project?
Closing Thoughts
If I had to do this project again, which I will never do, there are a lot of things that I would do differently. Firstly, this project could have benefited greatly with more planning and forethought. This whole thing started out with a fun question I had one night that turned into an email to 200 people the next. The irony is that if I had mapped out what needed to be done to do this comprehensively and fairly, then this project would have never left the draft phase; especially if I had known that this whole thing was going to take up six months of my life. Ultimately, curiosity won out. Astute observers of this project may have noticed that at every phase, I vaguely signaled that each one could be the end. I wanted to give myself an out at every turn, but I always wondered "what if we keep going?"
I had a lot of theories and assumptions going into this, but one aspect where I was wrong was how seriously people would take this project. The most common response I got from people who could not vote at different stages was that there was too much homework involved. Personally, I didn't expect people to put that much thought into it. I figured that people would look at those long lists, and just vote for familiar videos or names. I was pleasantly surprised by how much time people told me they spent going through all the videos eligible for voting. A few people told me that they even made non dancing family members watch all the final videos before submitting votes. Could the voting numbers been higher with less work involved by the voters? I have no idea, but I'm confident that this was a very informed electorate.
I think one of the more useful outcomes of this project is that we now have some semblance of a modern lindy hop canon of videos; a reference list for people who want a starting place to get a feel of how the modern scene developed. “Canon” sounds terribly formal and rigid, but those of you familiar with how it is used in everything from genre fandoms to the foundations of religious faiths know that canon is very malleable. What is canon now, can very easily not be tomorrow.
For the record, I know there are some very notable videos missing from this project. Michael Seguin did an excellent job summarizing that discussion. I did anticipate objections to including those videos, and thought I would be able to address them by talking to several people who work with safe spaces and codes of conduct and victims of abusers. However, some people still disagreed with me. I'm not sure there was a better way to do it outside of not doing this project at all. Different ways for sure, but one thing I know I did not want to do was to ask people relive some truly harrowing experiences just for the sake of this project. It just didn’t seem worth it. Despite the amount of time and effort I put into this, at the end of the day, this is just a fun project.
The last thing I'll say about this is that the point I posed to those objections still stands: Those videos featuring objectionable people are still out there, and can still be easily found. Intimidating people into ignoring them with evangelical fervor doesn’t seem like a long term solution. It isn't even a short term one since one of those videos just got posted in a major forum with a discussion that doesn't include any of the concerns that have been raised.
This does bring up another issue that I think affected participation in this project, and that is the splintering of the online lindy hop community. The modern lindy hop scene benefited immensely from the growth of online communication in the mid to late 1990s and into the 2000s. It matured just in time for the rise of social media. Relatedly, it was accompanied by the build out of the infrastructure to host high quality online videos, which is hugely important for arts like dance. Much of the scene was eventually connected through Facebook, but since around the mid 2010s, it seems as though the scene has been slowly moving on to other platforms or leaving social media altogether. The community is now struggling to find ways to promote events or just communicate locally and internationally. That may have limited my reach for this project.
When I started, I had no idea what the response could be. At the very least, I figured it was a good excuse to reminisce with some fellow nerds. Now that we're done, I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I have produced a definitive list of the 21st century's best. It is entirely possible that a different person with a different network of people could produce a very different list of videos. However, I'm not entirely sure that the overall result would be that much different even though the winner was one that I would not have selected myself.
One of my other mistakes is that I sorely underestimated how popular the Seguin & Segerdahl video is. It won handily at every level of voting. This includes the initial nomination stage before the more controversial videos were removed. I am pretty familiar with most of the people who nominated videos, but even those people I did not know, from random corners of the international scene, held that video in high regard. Much higher than I did at least. It's not that I didn't know that it was popular. Back when I was tracking such things on an annual basis, I noted that it was the most popular lindy hop video of 2013. I might just be too used to seeing Michael dance. It really took this project and the input of hundreds of voters to open my eyes to how much people around the world admire this video.
I definitely believe in the brilliance of Frida Segerdahl. If it wasn't for the controversy, I'm very sure that she would have finished in the top vote getting video in every category, where she would have danced with 3 different partners. She was in three of the most nominated team performances, which were all different teams. She was in 4 of the 18 top nominated couple performances with two different partners. During our presentation, Karen Turman made it a point to say that this woman has accomplished all of that all while raising three children and being a key leader of the most influential dance camp of the international scene.
Photos from my presentation with Karen Turman where we announced the overall voting results of this project. Courtesy of Devon Rowland.
One thing that I was hoping for that did not materialize was more online discussion of people's favorites. I'm curious as to why and if that is indicative of something larger. Are people today too self conscious about talking about lindy hop like that? Have we successfully freed ourselves from the shackles of hierarchy in dance? Are people too afraid to get into conflict? Are they just too pre-occupied with everything else happening in the world?
Interestingly enough, many people were more than willing to engage with me directly either in private messages or in person. They loved bringing it up unprompted in person even when I was working blues dance or slow balboa events during this time. Yet few of them submitted nominations or voted. The most common conversation I had at this most recent Lindy Focus was with people who were eager to learn the results, but confessed to not participating in any of the voting rounds before. Someone on one of my reddit threads also questioned whether this was even a good way to talk about the dance, but a quick survey of that forum doesn't show very many good examples of people doing it in other ways. I’ve noticed that online discussions tend to be more about technical details about certain moves or about broader cultural or social issues about our community. People seem hesitant to say “I like this dancer or this performance for these reasons.” At best, you might get a reposting on an expiring “story” feature on some platform.
I have a lot of other observations to share about the dance and the community from surveying all these videos and talking with so many people about them, but I'll save those for future posts. I do want to end with something I said recently in a post about Lindy Hop being key to saving humanity. I wrote it hyperbolically, but I think I’ve talked myself into it as a serious take.
For most of my involvement, I have very much been of the mind that lindy hop is a side activity that I take seriously for fun. But with the way that the world is unraveling around us, I think that activities that encourage people to interact in creative ways in person, like lindy hop, are going to be key to building a healthier society moving forward.
With the rise of social media I used to be really annoyed with how some dancers or musicians seemed preoccupied with self promotion. I have since realized that if you don't advocate for yourself in a world with a dizzying array of choices and noise, then no one will as noted above. Personally, I've enjoyed this project as an opportunity to do a little cheerleading of friends and other people I've gotten to know through this community. That being said, even social media is losing the "social" and is reducing everything into content to be consumed by audiences more than giving different community members the opportunity to interact and collaborate with each other.
The Frida and Michael clip is the platonic ideal of how we can share and enjoy our love of something with each other. Two people from opposite sides of the world, coming together and being so good at something that they draw people around them into their journey to the point where it literally makes everyone jump for joy.
I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to this project either through the nomination process or voting in the last few rounds. I also had a ton of fruitful discussions early on that really shaped the direction of the project. Those people include Dani Brown, Hannah Lane, Breai Mason-Campbell, Omar Myers, Michael Seguin, Sarah Sullivan, Jon Tigert, Karen Turman and Christi Jay Wells. Special thanks to Devon Roland for taking photos during talk I hosted with Karen Turman where we revealed the winning overall video at Lindy Focus in December.
I'm sure it will raise some flags to see Michael Seguin feature prominently on this last list. You're just going to have to take my word that his involvement didn't affect the nomination or voting process. It was quite challenge to keep our conversations away from his place in the standings once that video started to look like it was going to win. I don't know if that makes me the most trustworthy person to know or the least trustworthy one.
What I will admit that the place that he and Sarah built, The Mobtown Ballroom, played an instrumental role in this project because it attracts some of the most thoughtful people I know in Lindy Hop on a regular basis. Almost all of these conversations took place at the bar when I would arrive a little early to grab some dinner and inevitably run into someone more than game to have an intense philosophical discussion about lindy hop and the world at large. It's also a fun place to dance.
And if you've read this far and watched any (or all!) of these videos, then Thank You for being a part of this.
P.s. Don’t forget about the Legacy Library project sponsored by the Pacific Swing Dance Foundation to which is trying preserve audio and videos of the generations of dancers who originated the dance.