Music Matters

Consider the following excerpts from Jacqui Malone’s Steppin’ on the Blues:
“The term vernacular refers to dance performed to the rhythms of African American music; dance that makes those rhythms visible.”

“Vernacular dance gave birth to several international dance crazes, including the cakewalk, the Charleston, and the lindy hop. Its hallmarks are improvisation and spontaneity, propulsive rhythm, call-and-response patterns, self-expression, elegance, and control.”

Being that Lindy Hop is a vernacular dance, it is inseparable from the music that birthed it. This goes with any of the vernacular dances. As a vernacular dance teacher of Charleston and Lindy Hop, for example, you should be playing as much good swing music in your classroom as possible to elicit the hallmarks of vernacular dance from your students. Counting, scatting, silence, clapping aren’t as powerful as the music that gave rise to these dances. They’re useful tools, yes, but just tools.

And students of vernacular dance, if you’re reading this, are you dancing to enough good swing music in class? If you’re only getting 1-2 songs or less than 10 minutes of music in a 60-minute class, I recommend asking for more. Some ideas would be raising your hand and asking - “hey, can we dance to some music?” or, if you’re 20+ minutes into a class, “hey, when can we try this to music?” Sometimes teachers can get carried away and just forget. Other times teachers may not place enough importance on dancing to music.

Regardless, music matters. And playing music allows for other things such as -

• Teacher huddles

• Open dance practice for students

• The time to give individual attention where the other students are distracted by music

• Opportunities to see if your teaching is effective and where to shore up your students

Music matters so much and for so many different valuable reasons. Play the music.

Maximize Your Instagram Name

TIL that your Instagram name is searchable. Well, not today, but a few days ago at a farmers markets conference in San Diego. One of their speakers, Molly Balint, spoke about how to maximize your Instagram efforts. It was amazing material and I immediately started editing my name.

Being that it is only 30 characters long, I had to get a bit clever. You see, you also want your business name in there preferably with some choice keywords. As you can see, I ended up breaking up our name since it’s also meant to be said and read as “swing in Denver.” Then I also wanted to work in dance, so now I have four searchable keywords - “swing,” “in,” “Denver,” and “dance” with a Call to Action.

Additionally, I made sure to include What we do, Where we do it, and How to learn more. It’s worth checking out that link in our Instagram profile too and ponder why we made that choice. More on that later!

Increase Marketing. Increase Accessibility.

Back in 2017 or 2018, I attended a talk at Lindy Focus led by Breai Mason-Campbell, Artistic Director at Guardian Dance Company. One of the discussion topics was increasing accessibility for BIPOC in predominantly white swing dance spaces. One solution I remember (and there were certainly more) was to make sure your marketing efforts included print materials.

In a digital age, you want to cover all your bases in terms of outreach. If you’re the one-person street team like me or you have people that can flier neighborhoods for you, make sure to hit up the immediate surrounding neighborhoods and then branch out from there. You never know where someone will be when they spot your flier; they could be in their neighborhood, maybe near work, or getting coffee with a friend.

A sample of the front of our class flier before we decided to switch dates to help out the Mercury Cafe. Our classes will reopen Wednesdays starting March 30, 2022.