Top USA Blues dance teachers, Charlie Fuller & Heide Fite, are spearheading an international coordinated effort to document the Blues.

The output will be a website containing all you could ever want to know.

Are you interested? can you help? If so read on.........

The message from Charlie Fuller and his amazing dancing and teaching partner Heidi Fite....

While the roots of swing dance, Lindy Hop, and other swing-era dances, in addition to the music to which they are danced, have been fairly well researched and documented, the history of dancing to Blues music has not received the same attention. The history of Blues is tied to the history of jazz - the dance as well as the music - and this legacy merges with jazz dance as the music evolves, but it also maintains an identity of its own throughout the history of African dance in America. The goal of the Blues Dance Project is to document the personality of Blues dance, its forms, its context, and its development within the continuum of African and American dances and music.

Over the last 5 years, a modern version of Blues dancing has been quietly evolving. It has been established in late parallel with the resurgence of interest in Lindy Hop and has been directly and profoundly influenced by that dance as well as other modern forms of dance and music. As the modern social Blues dance form has gained momentum and interest across the United States, more and more students of the dance are asking about its roots. The Lindy Hop scene has always had a strong contingent of dancers who stress the importance of staying true to (or at least being familiar with) the original forms of the dance and their reasons for wishing to do so are sound. To be able to fully express yourself through an art form, knowing the background, philosophy, culture, and history of the form are essential. The Blues Dance Project aims to supply the same kind background information and cultural context to the Blues dance form as we are fortunate to have for Lindy Hop.

Blues dance in many ways is the red-headed stepchild of jazz dance.

It is many of the steps, movements, and emotions that were too "raw" to be widely adopted in performance or public dance. For this reason, documentation is not as plentiful or easily located. The Blues Dance Project is the search for this documentation; and the goal is to create a repository of video and film clips, stories, interviews, books, articles, and any other related materials that will help answer the historical questions about dancing to blues music; what was blues dance, what is it, and what is it becoming?

Please contact me if you would like to be a contributor, advisor, consultant, lackey, bibliographic assistant, liason, etc. for The Blues Dance Project."

Click to email Heidi & Charlie

See Charlie & Heidi's Website http://www.blues-dance.com/
...................full praise to Heidi, the site's webmaster