Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown: A Lindy Hop Battle This year The Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown lived up to its name by adopting a tournament style format, whittling down couples until there was only one left.
Random DCenes: Dark Eyes . . . Toniiight
I wandered through the National Law Enforcement Officers’ Memorial on my way to Chinatown last night. I do that often enough that it didn’t take me very long to notice how unusually bright it was. I noticed them replacing many of the light fixtures around the memorial not long ago. Apparently it’s been a long time coming, because not only was everything brighter, but light was coming from little niches that I didn’t even know were supposed have them. As I popped out of the other side, I noticed that F St. by the Verizon Center was blocked off. Judging from the police and tents, I thought that it was some sort of emergency preparedness drill until I spotted skate boarders casually rolling past the tents.
Flashback to about a year ago, doing the same walk and finding the same scene. Not nearly as pleasant as it was last night. Raining lightly, but heavy enough to warrant an umbrella. The sounds of Fats Waller’s band playing the moody “Dark Eyes” on my ipod.
As I approached the tents, I smelled them before I noticed them moving. Horses. Lots of them. A sign for the Washington International Horse Show hung on the fence separating the passerby's from the makeshift corrals.
I stopped for a moment under a street lamp and got a better view of those handsome creatures. I made eye contact with one of them and I forgot where I was going for a moment, wondering what I was looking at. Fatigue? Sadness?
Back to last night. I'm greeted by the same scene. Horses at rest. Humans at work. Stalking the stalls, shuffling hay, checking out the competition.
No ipod for me , but I still hear music as I approach the metro. Less Russian inspired Harlem jazz, but instead more like early 80’s r & b.
“Toniiiiiight I celebrate my lovvvve for you . . .”
There’s something off. It's not a recording. Someone is singing. And not very well.
I round the corner into the metro entrance to find a guy playing a keyboard on the sidewalk. A Middle-aged Asian man. He’s singing a duet with a much older black gentleman whose reading words from over the piano players shoulder. A similarly older Asian woman tries to get me to stop. She doesn’t need to waste energy since the sheer surrealness of it all keeps me from ignoring them. Its only when she tries to convince me to sing the next song that I snap out of it to peel myself away and hit the escalator down.
“What I want most to doooooo Is to get close to yoooooou
Toniiiiiiiight . . .”
ULHS 2009 Round Up
Still no official results posted on the ULHS website, but Breanna Perry was kind enough to post what she could remember in the comments of my previous post.
Random Videos: Non-ULHS French Dancing and All Girl Bal music
Still no word on official ULHS results. Some more videos are making it online. I'll post the better quality ones together later this week or next. While we're waiting on that stuff, apparently not all the action was in New Orleans this past weekend. Here's a quick round up of performance videos from Provence Swing Festival in France.
ULHS 2009: First Impressions From Afar
Wonders of modern technology. I can comment about ULHS so soon after it ended, and I wasn’t even there. First up was the Street dance contest. Seems to be a straight up coupled contest. People dance until they’re tapped out, leaving three couples to dance off jam style. Dancing on the actual street just might be a little too hardcore for me as my knees hurt just from watching them dance on the concrete.
Random News, Bboy Videos & a note about AIR
I know quite a few people heading down to New Orleans for the Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown this weekend. For those of us who can't go, Slick Rik posted news on his blog that NOLA.com will be streaming live video of the Saturday night dance and contests on their website. If we're lucky, they'll also have it available for viewing afterwards too. Don't worry, I'll keep an eye out for you. For those of you wondering when the next installment of "Artistry in Rhythm" is going up, you may have to wait a little longer. As you may know, I wrote it two years ago, and up until this point I've been posting it with minor edits. A little over half of it has been posted, but now I've hit a point that needs to be updated and re-written. I'm going to try to get it up by Friday, but if not, I'll work on it during the long weekend while everyone else I know is partying it up at ULHS.
ULHS is Dead! Long Live ULHS!
The Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown has been the standard bearer and trend setter for the Lindy Hop community ever since it started in 2002. This weekend’s 8th annual ULHS marks the event’s debut in New Orleans, LA as well as its first major format restructuring since 2003. This year, ULHS is breaking away from the phrase jam for the finals that it helped to pioneer. Instead, event promoter Amy Johnson is instituting tournament style, head to head battles for the formerly known "Liberation" division to determine which two couples will dance against each other in the final . . . wait for it . . . Showdown.
I won’t be down there this weekend, but it sounds like it’ll be the start of an exciting new era for ULHS. I’m pretty excited to hear and see how it turns out. Until then, let’s take a look back at ghosts of Liberation divisions past.
AIR pt 12: The Movement Meets The Music
The most obvious was the re-emergence of faster classic swing era and hot jazz music at dance events. People were now encouraged to work on their improvisation skills at faster tempos like they previously did to slower, groovier music.
This led people to mine and more vintage film clips for more ideas to move to this music instead of trying to force hip hop or other modern movements into the music. Since most of the Lindy Hop clips had already been found, the search expanded into tap and other jazz inspired black dancers of the past from the Nicholas Brothers to Josephine Baker.
BMJB & TCO in DC
I like dancing. I like it even more with great live music. This was a fun weekend for that here in DC. Actually, more like Glen Echo Park in Maryland. The Boilermaker Jazz Band played the Bumper Car Pavilion on Friday night while The Tom Cunningham Orchestra held its monthly dance in the Spanish Ballroom on Saturday evening. It was a beautiful Friday night for the Boilermakers. Donna Barker and Mike Marcotte hosted Paul Cosentino on clarinet and saxophone, Rich Strong on drums, Mark Kotishion on piano, and Ernest McCarty on bass with Jenny Luvv singing.
Frankie Manning Soul Session at Lindyfest 2009
This is a pretty nice set of clips from one of Frankie Manning's last public appearances. It's the Soul Session at Lindyfest which was held last March in Houston, TX, and hosted by the Houston Swing Dance Society. He would pass away a little over a month later. Here, Frankie shares a few tid bits and jokes about some of his favorite dance clips.