When Might COVID Mitigation Policies Change?

10-3-22 Update:
From speaking with others in the Denver swing community that I respect for their evidence-based approach concerning COVID mitigation policies and data shown HERE, we are waiving the vaccination/immunity requirement for our dance parties. Whereas classes still require mask usage, masks will be optional at our October 5 dance. This is subject to change for our November 2 dance party.

9-28-22 Update:
Due to infection rates, statistics regarding acceptance of second boosters pre-bivalent and bivalent, individual self-reported decision-making, and advice from a respected epidemiologist, we have decided to remove proof of possible immunity from immune-competent individuals for our classes. To stay true to our goals of low to no transmissions, our mask policy does remain in place as our sole COVID transmission control.

Our COVID mitigation policies remain in place for our October 5 dance.

From 7-7-22:
We’ve been receiving more inquiries about our COVID mitigation policies, so I wanted to take a moment here to address what they are, why they exist, and what we look at when evaluating if they might change.

In its simplest form, our policies require that a person either provides one of the following for our indoor happenings:

• proof of a booster

• proof of being vaccinated with a two-dose regiment (Moderna or Pfizer) within the past 6-8 months

• proof of antibody levels > 1,000

One of these three is sufficient. Then we require masks for our classes and encourage masks for our dances. One of our primary goals is to run events, including dances and classes, with low to no transmissions. Because students have to interact with most their fellow students, we require the masks in that environment; whereas at parties dancers can readily decline dances.

Now let’s get into what would make us change our policies whether that is stricter or looser. One great resource is the COVID-19 dial dashboard for Colorado seen HERE. At the time of this blog’s publication, metro Denver counties and Denver are in rough shape with average positivity 12+% and 1 in 42 to 55 Coloradans are infected. The latter statistic comes from Colorado’s modeling team and published here.

Because, based on the June 23 modeling report, Colorado’s numbers had likely peaked, we chose to keep encouraging mask usage at our July 6 dance rather than making them mandatory. Since everyone who enters must be up to date according to CDC guidelines, or slight latecomers to being vaccinated, we felt confident we’d minimize transmission with the controls we have in place.

If we wanted to loosen our policies, we would likely need to the Colorado dial dashboard achieve Green Level and stay there. We’d also need to see better news from the Colorado modeling team. Right now, the new BA variants seem to be highly infectious though less severe than the delta variant. That mix of news makes it harder to forecast policies. What would help is if people eligible to be vaccinated and boosted (while recognizing that some immuno-compromised people are ineligible), would follow those guidelines and help our global community reduce the spread of COVID.

Keyword Trends - Lindy Hop vs Swing Dance vs Jitterbug

My first prominent swing dance instructor once told me to teach Shim Sham in the group class starting on the “1” because it’s easier. That explanation made ready sense to me as a newer dance teacher. Most, if not all, dances taught at this ballroom studio with the only all-ages swing dance in metro Kansas City started on the “1.” It never occurred to me that, as a dance educator, I could make finding the “8” easier for students. It did mean the Shim Sham was a hot mess when Frankie Manning came to town and led everyone in it (note: As I anticipated this train wreck, I hit “play” on the song and just watched).

I feel the same entrenched reasoning might exist for vernacular dance instructors still billing classes as “jitterbug” or “east coast swing.” These are marketing terms popular back in the late 1990s and early 2000’s when neo-swing was on the rise and white dance instructors, like mine in KC, saw those words as a way to get new students to gravitate toward their classes and swing nights.

Even here we used “Jitterbug” as a way to label drop-in classes at the Arvada Tavern 6-7 years ago. Our thought process was akin to “if the Mercury Cafe, seen as the OG’s of the scene, is using it to sell classes, why not us?” Well…

Google Trends shows that people want to learn how to swing dance, specifically Lindy Hop. Even Instagram hashtag usage shows us what captivates people. Plus, as the below image shows, most people search “Jitterbug” for the cellular phone which debuted in 2006. Besides, maybe people just inherently know that a jitterbug just isn’t that cool unless you’re in specific regions like LA or Las Vegas where being a jitterbug is a badge of honor. Otherwise, “Jitterbug is primarily the white ghosting of a black dance,” a white thing and not as smooth as lindy (Frankie Manning in Margaret Batiuchok’s dissertation), uncouth, and an alcoholic drink giving you the jitters.

So, if you purport to teach swing dance within the vernacular scene (Vernacular refers to dance performed to the rhythms of African American music: dance that makes those rhythms visible - “Steppin’ on the Blues” by Jacqui Malone), then I’d highly encourage teachers to:

• Specifically name what you’re teaching whether that’s Lindy Hop, Balboa, Collegiate Shag, Vernacular Jazz, Charleston, etc

• Stop billing classes as Jitterbug or East Coast Swing. To borrow from Margaret Batiuchok’s dissertation once again - Jitterbug means different things to different people. Lindy means one thing. And East Coast Swing belongs to the ballroom dance community and was stripped of pretty much all vernacular values

• Make it easier for people to find Lindy Hop and other vernacular dances. By appropriating Lindy Hop and other Black dances, and renaming them to suit your needs, you’re making it harder for people to find Lindy Hop and discover the tenets of vernacular dance.

The main reason why I think people stumble over Lindy Hop’s varying pattern lengths and varying rhythms (triple steps, stomp offs, slows, quicks, etc) is because of dance instructors billing patterns using slows and quicks as east coast swing or jitterbug. This leads to a dissonance where dancers think these rhythms and some patterns live on islands separate from swingouts or triple steps, for example.

If you’re dancing with vernacular dance hallmarks and striving to impart these characteristics such as improvisation and spontaneity, propulsive rhythm, call-and-response patterns, self-expression, elegance, and control to your students while dancing to solid swing-era music, you ought to calling what you’re teaching Lindy Hop. Just do it.

Allowing Students Space To Find The Dance

One thing I've learned over the years, and this could be why I gravitate toward or value particular teachers, is to provide space for students to find the dance. From Peter Strom - "Many people come absolutely bereft saying 'please tell me what to do.'" And this is a fine place to be. After all, students are coming to learn, start a new hobby, join a community.

It's the teachers' job to teach culture, movement vocabulary, music appreciation and more, and then step aside. This could take the form of playing whole songs for the students to dance to, providing time for students to workshop ideas, or teach patterns that encourage call-and-response from students.

And then provide encourage, shout praise, give a thumbs up, make eye contact and nod "I see you," bring students up to demo what they've accomplished and/or created, or even dance demo what you saw from students as a way of encouraging greater exploration and then quickly turn the music back on.

As I state in the teacher trainings I lead - Lindy Hop is dynamic, full of choices, and ambiguous at times. You just have to believe your students are capable and project that belief to them, so they can believe it to and become independent dancers dancing as themselves.

Call-and-Response - In The Pocket

Last Friday, I attended a staged reading of Jeff Campbell's new play "In The Pocket: The Ballad of Bobby Trombone.” at The Savoy Denver. This was a collaboration between Emancipation Theater and Theatre Artibus.

One section that stood out was the first time Shane Franklin broke out his tap shoes to involve the audience by rhythmically tap dancing and getting us to respond with “in the pocket.” In the pocket, as you can likely guess from the play’s title, was a recurring theme. Since things can get lost in writing, I’ll say it was very similar to Frankie Manning calling out “uh1, uh2, uh you know what to do” - very rhythmic, timed, leaving space for the response of Shane’s taps’ calls to audience members. Innnn the Pocket.

And that got me thinking. Can we at Swingin’ Denver get our students more audibly involved in a similar way? And could that help them find Lindy Hop’s pocket?

Uh 1 Uh 2
We Know What To Do!

Food for thought

Event Tips - Outreach, Communication and More

This post is sparked by two recent interactions I’ve had with board members from Collective Voices for Change. This organization is hosting an online “interactive workshop where we will come together to (re)imagine dance events and create the type of social space we desire and deserve.”

The board members expressed they were having difficulties in reading tone in potential participants’ questions, finding time to answer questions well, and sometimes struggling to build their audience. I’d like to tackle how I handle some online event management aspects here.

Some basics:

1. Strive to communicate promptly inside your event. Let’s first acknowledge that it has become more difficult for Facebook page admins to be notified when people comment inside an event. While I aim to respond to people the same day, event notifications do not come through my Meta Business Suite app. Instead I have to go directly to my Page Manager to see what messages I have. A good goal would be to have someone check notifications every 24-48 hours and respond under 72 hours at most.

2. If you’re a larger organization, have a shared system for communicating with your team like Slack. If you’re concerned about how to write a proper response, draft something for approval, tag some members in your group and ask for feedback within 24 hours. Side note: If it’s a complicated question and you need more time, respond publicly to let the asker know you’re working on getting them a good answer. Show you care and acknowledge them.

3. Try to answer your audience members publicly rather than privately. Perhaps if the question needs to be handled offline, consider reaching out privately and maybe delete the question so it doesn’t appear that you’re ignoring them. Or even respond something like “Thanks for the question, I’m going to contact you privately.” Even if this person asked a similar question both on your page and in your event, answer them in both places. You never know who is watching which location.

4. Personal outreach goes a long way. Just because your organization exist doesn’t mean people will come. Just because you invite a friend to your event doesn’t mean they’ll see it. If you’re running an event about running events, try posting in relevant groups to try reaching the people that ought to be involved. Taking it even further, and this requires much more time, is doing personal outreach. It is time-consuming, potential emotionally draining, and you might be ignored by people that you think need this the most.

5. Assume people mean their best when they ask a question. I was recently accused of being publicly critical and rude toward an event when expressing skepticism that an event would be worth my time while asking for more pertinent details. At that moment in time and still nearly two weeks later, the event hadn’t shared any details about their instructors nor their event’s format. Being that everyone’s time is valuable and participants likely want to maximize their learning opportunities, these are important things to know. For so many of us, our swing dance projects exist alongside full-time jobs, kids, etc.

6. Be pro-active about sharing your event details increases accessibility and can help overcome hesitation. So have a robust event description, share updates in the discussion tab and what’s even better - having all this information published at the same time as when your event debuts online.

We Teach Lindy Hop

It’s taken us a while to get to this point, but we’re no longer teaching jitterbug, east coast swing, or swing dance for our quick < 30 minute lessons. Jitterbug is a person, east coast swing is an American rhythm ballroom dance, and swing dance is just a generic umbrella term.

You’ll more than likely find us teaching Lindy Hop, maybe Charleston, or perhaps another style during these 15-30 punchy entertaining lessons. Whatever you’ll see us teaching, we’ll be honoring it with its actual name rather than appropriating or renaming it.

What has helped us get here is -
A. Acknowledging that Lindy Hop is a Black vernacular dance, dancing that makes African-American rhythms on the dance floor. Hallmarks of authentic jazz dance, African-American vernacular and West African dance include community, vocal encouragement, call-and-response, joyousness, groundedness, improvisation, polyrhythms and syncopations (“Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches,” edited by Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver).

B. Accepting that Lindy Hop is comprised of several different rhythms including what we refer to as single-time rhythm or taking a single step in two beats. Oftentimes, you’ll find swing dance instructors calling this rhythm jitterbug or east coast swing, which is likely a holdover from the neo-swing era and the need to mass-market teaching dance, and reserving Lindy Hop to mean triple steps and/or 8-count rhythms. This has just led to confusion.

C. Realizing that learning Lindy Hop is easy, mastering Lindy Hop is difficult. Anyone can learn to Lindy Hop and be instructed in the hallmarks of vernacular dance. Being comfortable embodying these trademarks can be a long journey and that’s okay. As teachers, we should be paying proper homage to the creators of these dance styles we enjoy so much rather than renaming them so as to make these easier for the masses. Besides, students can and will rise to the occasion.

So, yes, those single-time rhythms and patterns you’ll see us teach at Little Man Ice Cream or Aspen Grove - that’s Lindy Hop. The jury is still out on some of those steps (I’m looking at you, pretzel), but at least take a moment to reflect on vernacular dance’s hallmarks. And then we’d like to see more swing dance schools stop calling it Jitterbug (a person) or East Coast Swing, unless you’re teaching the ballroom dance. Cheers!

Google My Business Checklist

Have you claimed your swing dance and/or music business on Google? If not, I’d encourage you to do so. It offers many benefits which include managing content, accurate information, improved presence for the Google search engine, and helping people find you easier..

The following checklist comes from the “Yelp My Business” talk at the 2022 InTents Conference. I’ll also add helpful tips from what I’ve found useful after recently revamping my GYB profile.

• Claim your business profile HERE or click “Own this Business?” as shown below:

• Fill out all the information in your profile: days, hours, exact location, business description, and go through Google’s suggestions in case they’re relevant to your business.

• Set a regular day of the week or month to check your profiles: update information, upload current photos, thank kind reviews, respond to neutral or negative reviews.

• Respond promptly to: questions, messages, reviews that need clarification.

• As needed, update hours: holidays, special events

From my recent experience:

• Make contacting you easy and strive to respond within 24-48 hours to emails and voicemails. If you don’t have a business phone number, get a Google Voice number with a local area code too.

• Experiment with posts. You can post events, announcements, and offers. Currently, we’re not getting that many views, but our search ranking has seemed to improve over the last 1-2 weeks. We cannot say there is a correlation, but everything helps.

• Lower the barrier to entry which includes finding you and reaching pertinent details.

March 2022 Class Playlist

I am ridiculously pleased with the amount of music we played opening night in both our Intermediate and Beginner Lindy Hop classes! 50+ minutes were played and we were maximizing students’ dance time. The same goes for Boulder Swing Dance too!

These are the classes I love to teach and participate in - where it’s movement focused and we can put into practice what we’re learning to music. Anyway, we’re building a Spotify playlist of music below that students are dancing to in class.

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Get Out Of The Way Of The Dance

Lindy Hop speaks for itself. It’s wonderfully dynamic, playful and powerful. As Jacqui Malone writes “its hallmarks are improvisation and spontaneity, propulsive rhythm, call-and-response patterns, self-expression, elegance, and control.” A Lindy Hop social dance rarely repeats itself because the partner, the song, and your life experience are rarely the same at that moment in time.

So why do some lindy hop instructors get in the way by trying to share the dance verbally when it’s a physical expression? When teaching, strive to let your dance students experience Lindy Hop through dancing as much as possible, especially dancing to swing music. This is because, as I sit here and reflect on my past dance experiences, there is nothing quite like dancing it out for yourself, dancing through mistakes, and trying to connect to a different partner to a new section of music. Lindy Hop is best experienced kinesthetically.

So let’s dance more and speak less.

Learn to Lindy Hop for Free!

It’s difficult to replace the in-person learning experience, but sometimes you need to learn from home for whatever reason. One of the best sources to learn Lindy Hop is to watch any one of our Learn to Lindy Hop in a Day recap videos on our YouTube channel like this one featuring Kenny Nelson and Allison Frey at Lone Tree Brewing Company back in 2019.

And, if you ever want more of this kinds of recap videos from our Learn to Lindy Hop in a Day workshops, click HERE for a list of those on our YouTube channel. If you do live within driving distance of Denver, we suggest taking our classes which you can find out more about HERE.