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(STLBX) an impressive Blues Dance Weekender in USA see:http://www.stlbx.com/moreblues.html
http://www.gse.uci.edu/Lessons/blues.html In the post-Civil War rural south, African-American men had very few job options: They could be labourers, field hands, share-croppers or musicians. Understandably, the successive callings of minstrel, songster and bluesman quickly became established professions. While the itinerant musician's life was less back breaking than that of a labourer’s, a professional bluesman needed to have both substantial instrumental and performing skills as well as a vast reserve of songs and the improvisational skills necessary to create new ones instantly. He further needed the physical stamina to play and sing all night long. This is because the blues was a celebratory music, played to accompany dancers revelling at rowdy all-night country dances. These "frolics" retained elements of African tribal dance and, unlike the carefully circumscribed social dance practices of Europe, individual dances could become extended affairs, often an hour or more long. The bluesman served as a "living jukebox" and each song/performance had to last as long as participants wanted to dance. Obviously, at this stage of the folk process, neither individual "songs" nor the musical form of the blues itself could exist in a final, fixed state. One of the defining talents for a professional rural bluesman in the first decades of this century was the ability indefinitely to sustain a single performance by improvising new verses and instrumental figures. This required that blues performers' conceptions of both "song" and musical form be sufficiently elastic to allow for the accommodation of such improvisation to expand their musical ideas in performance.
http://www.lindymessengers.com/lm.htm Contrary to popular belief, Blues Dance is not automatically about sex. It is automatically about emotion, Intense Emotion. It is very personal and intimate in ways that other improvisational dances like Lindy Hop cannot be simply because in blues there is so much less complexity in the music. What is left is raw, unpolished, human vulnerability. Blues dancing is an intimate expression or conversation between dancers that can be personal, spiritual, and emotional in ways that verbal communication fails. When done correctly, Blues Dancing can be one of the most rewarding and indescribable experiences any level of dancer can have.
http://www.thebluehighway.com/manila.html At the heart of it is the underlying pattern of call and response. The singer belts out a statement: I've got the blues all night 'cause my woman's done gone. And then, typically, there's musical space, inviting a response, offered up by the guitarist, keyboardist, harp, sax or trumpet player. The singer's call also allows room for the listener's response, too. It's like an intimate conversation, touching upon one's deeper emotions.
http://www.docker.demon.co.uk/dance/bluesmusic.html "Blues can be thought of as a way of dancing to slow music. It has several styles, some of which could be described as informal, formal (performance), and latin. Regular dance moves are broken down or adapted to focus on musical interpretation, or strict moves abandoned altogether to allow for free improvisation and interpretation of song and melody" Plus an informative article on the history of Blues dancing and music in the UK by Nigel Anderson and a list of Blues dance music.
After the first World War, Blues tunes came to Europe, although Blues style is known from the beginning of the 20th century. Blues is a smooth dance, with tender movements and crawling steps borrowed from the Foxtrot. In 1923 the first Blues Ball took place in Great Britain.
Tracingpaper's review of "Stomping the Blues" by Albert Murray (1989) (see http://www.amazon.com) The title "stomping the blues" refers to Murray's contention that the blues -- and that african-american music generally -- isn't simply about moaning low or expressing your despair. It's about being honest about "what a low-down, dirty shame" life is -- and then setting that fact to a beat, moving to that beat, and shaking the blues off, if only for a while. That's the heroism of the blues and of jazz -- they aren't about giving in to the blues, they're about "stomping the blues." charlie parker? it's "dance music for the mind."
A useful perspective on musicality from a dancer and musician "Other teachers and dancers use the term "syncopation" to refer to fancy footwork or a deviation from some basic pattern of steps that they have learned. This is getting closer to the true meaning of syncopation, but it still misses the mark. You could being doing fancy footwork that deviates from a basic step and still not be syncopating the steps. So what then is syncopation? Defining Syncopation. In my book What Makes Music Work, I define syncopation as "the shifting of an expected accent , moving it from the usual strong beat to a beat that is usually weak. " Other writers offer similar definitions. For example, Miller, Taylor, and Williams in Introduction to Music write: "The shifting of the accent to a weak beat or to an off beat is known as syncopation. " "
Blues dancing is almost indescribable. Well, okay, you could easily refer to it as “floorplay”… because it looks pretty… um, sexy. There’s not really a basic step, other than moving with the downbeat. However, it isn’t that easy… this dance requires some concentration. Like most swing dances, the blues is rooted deeply in early African American culture and is a fusion of several different styles – from Lindy Hop to Ballet. The dance was born in smokey dives and at house parties right around the same time as other swing dances were starting to catch. It was pure reflection of the music. However, it lacked the social acceptance that more popular dances had, and therefore stuck closely to its African American principles of movement. Those movements are based mainly in the hips and in the body’s center. see: SwingColumbus |
