Herrang Instructors by the Numbers

I can get a little obsessive compulsive sometimes. For example, I was looking at the Herrang Dance Camp website and was amazed by the fact that they have 107 teachers. Granted, they are spread out over a month, but they still employ about 30 teachers a week. Only a handful of other events like Camp Jitterbug, Lindy Focus, Lindy Shock, Beantown, and Rock That Swing each have a comparable number of teachers, but those are over long weekends or one week. Herrang usually takes place over four weeks, and this year its going to be five.

Anyway, I was curious as to how they scheduled this mass-o-teachers, so I plugged them into a spreadsheet just to see what it looked like. I’m not going to Herrang this year. I’ve never been actually. I’m just that much of a planning nerd. Simple things like this amuse me.

Jazz Era Voices Goes Live and Needs Your Input

A couple of months ago I posted about Kelly Porter's oral history archive called Jazz Era Voices, and today I got word via Facebook that it is now live. As far as the Lindy Hop community is concerned, I think this is one of the most important projects out there along with The Lindy Hoppers Fund.

Weekly Video Highlights: Goodnight Sweetheart Festival 2010

Last week we had videos from Korea, and now we're across he pond the other way from Hertford, England. This week’s videos brought to you by the 2010 Goodnight Sweetheart Festival. I already talked about one performance from that weekend, so I thought I'd highlight a few others from that event.

Know Your Jazz Dancer: Marie Bryant

Sometimes it takes me a little while to piece things together. A few months ago I attended a presentation of jazz film clips. One of them was Jammin’ the Bluesfeaturing an all star list of musicians such as Sid Catlett, Jo Jones, Lester Young, Illinois Jacquet and a host of others. I hadn’t seen the whole thing in such a long time that it wasn’t until that night that I realized that I knew who the vocalist and dancer was.

Australia Routine Interestingness

This is from Mikey Pedroza who seems really intent on doing this on every continent. It's a routine originally choreographed by Mike Faltesek.

A couple of minor things that caught my eye.

Weekly Video Highlights Camp Swing It

South Korea has got a prety big scene with several large scale events thoughout the year. The first one this year was Camp Swing It which happned a few weeks ago, Jan 22-24. Lots of great teachers and top notch performances

Random DCenes: Triggers

Metro Center. February 13, 2010 at about 6:00 pm. I saw a woman on the metro platform stretching out her hip in the same way a friend of mine does. My friend actually just had surgery on it, so I briefly wondered if the older woman in front of me had the same kind of problem.

She was with her family; her husband or significant other and their teenage daughter. A homeless man came by offering people some pitiful looking short branches that looked like he just plucked them off of a snow covered bush from outside. The gentleman in the family took one and the mother took another. I didn’t see if they offered anything in return, but I did catch them later trying to adorn their daughter with them. She had pigtails, but from her stance and her age, you could tell she was wearing them to be ironic in a budding hipster kind of way. She was not interested in the shrubbery.

Then and Now: Skye Humphries

Staying home most of last week due to the two biggest snowstorms in recent history here in DC, you would think I would have gotten more writing done than I did. Instead I ended up passing the time by ripping a bunch of VHS tapes to digital videos. Last count, I had about 200 clips ripped, but my internet connection isn’t that fast, so it’ll take me some time before I get them all online. It’s been fun going down memory lane with these videos though. Over on the last post for "Artistry in Rhythm," I’ve gotten a couple of comments from Julius whose been talking about the element of joy that seems to be missing in many dancers coming up these days. It’s hard to talk about something like that, but fortunately I’ve dug up some clips that I think illustrate his point.

The Legend of Minnie’s Moochers

As I’ve noted in my Artistry in Rhythm series, we’re getting to a point where things that happened in the early part of the revival are starting to feel a little bit like ancient history. Minnie’s Moochers is a big part of that as I outlined in part three of that series.

ILHC 2010 Registration is open and other notes

For those of you who haven't been checking the website every day, registration is now open for the International Lindy Hop Championships happening on August 19-22, 2010. It'll be August there's so no chance of being snowed out at least. Register now to get the cheapest registration price possible. It's just going to get more expensive as the days past, so you might as well get it out of the way now.

Also, get the latest updates through our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter at ILHCtweets.

A few other blog related notes:

Sorry about the lack of updates lately, but the impending Snowstorm of the Century II will hopefully help me out in giving me more time to finish off a few posts for your consumption.

Hopefully that will include the last few parts of "Artistry in Rhythm." Posting everything before was easier because all of it was written over two years ago and I just updated and edited as I went along. I’m basically starting from scratch with the next few posts, and its reminding me why the paper was so much work the first time around.

In the meantime, be sure to check out "The Lindy Loggers" post as I'll be updating it with new Lindy related blogs as I find them. I've even added it as a link to the right just for you.

I'm also finishing up an interview that I'm doing for the DC Lindy Exchange website. Keep an eye on the DCLX website for it. I've had a long association with the event going back to it's beginning, and I'll be dj'ing there once again this April. I hope to see everyone there.