The News & Observer

Swing shift

By Christina Nifong; Staff Writer

Page: wup14

At left, instructor Richard Badu demonstrates a move with a student.

Timmy Stanley spent New Year's Eve in Chicago, and while there, discovered something he wasn't quite expecting. This was bigger than the resurgence of martinis or cigars. It was loud and fun and got him out of his seat.

What he found was swing dancing - and he may never be the same.

But now Stanley's back in Durham, and watching that Gap commercial is just not enough. Like so many Triangle residents who have gotten a taste of the swing resurgence sweeping the country, Stanley wants to be out on the floor in his retro duds, feeling the music pulse through him, scoping the room for the best partner, someone who can show him the moves he doesn't know.

So what's the delay? With a little detective work and a willingness to travel to any corner of the Triangle, swing fans can find a place to jump, jive and wail right here nearly every weekend.

Turns out, there are enough who have felt swing firsthand other places, whose curiosity has been piqued by those khaki-clad Gap dancers, who love to dance in general, whose girlfriends have driven them to it, whatever, to add up to a healthy swing movement in the Triangle.

It's not New York or Boston or San Francisco (and it never will be). But hundreds of people regularly show up for swing dances in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. Places as different as the trendy Goodnight Lounge in North Raleigh and the wide-open, wood-floored hall from another era at the Durham Armory, with music from Royal Crown Revue, Bada Bing Bada Boom, Rebecca and the Hi-Tones or the recorded sounds of the Brian Setzer Orchestra, Benny Goodman or Ella Fitzgerald.

Now, there are those who say that these swing parties are unsustainable, that this kind of dancing, just like the lambada in the '80s and disco in the '70s, will fade. Maybe sooner than later.

But if even a third of those plunking down $35 for a month's worth of beginning classes stick with it, they'll create enough momentum to keep this thing going for a while. At a beginning class two Tuesdays ago, more than 80 people poured through the doorways at Carrboro's ArtsCenter.

"How long is this going to last? One-two-three years?" asks Wesley Boz, instructor at Mad About Dance Academy who has just formed the Carolina Dance Club to provide places for people to keep dancing. "I don't know. It depends on the dancers."

### How exactly one becomes a swing dancer is perhaps one of the more intriguing questions of this whole phenomenon. There are physical therapists and burgeoning filmmakers and business managers and lots and lots of students on the dance floor. It's not hard to figure out how they got their first taste of swing, but what makes them stay?

"A year ago you couldn't have gotten me on the dance floor if you paid me a million bucks," Ryan Bloom, a computer programmer for IBM, says as he waits for the dancing to begin at Goodnight Lounge.

Now, he says he swing dances "every Thursday, most Fridays and most Saturdays. This takes up most of my time." The difference is this: "There are rules to swing dancing," Bloom says. "In regular dancing, you have to improvise. Here, I know what I've got to do."

Basically, you can look good swing dancing. It was hard to look good disco dancing (even if you skipped the polyester). And who could do that John Travolta pointing thing for more than one song?

Hal Sanders agrees. He began swing dancing five years ago, when, he says he was "at a disco, not having very much fun. But I saw a swing dance in the next room. Now that looked like fun.

"I'm blessed to be a good leader," he says. "And women will line up to dance with a good leader. That other stuff, it's just bouncing up and down. With swing, you've actually got to know something."

### How Sanders or anyone else got the chance to happen upon swing, how swing moved from the history books back to the dance floor, is tough to track. There has always been a core group of students who studied and danced swing, like those who take ballroom dance classes or those who compete in dance contests. Even here, the Triangle Swing Dance Society was formed a decade ago.

But it was about two years ago that clubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Boston began looking back at swing - about the same time that new bands started playing swing-inspired tunes and that much of pop culture looked to the past (cigars and martinis, for example) to define what was hip. It took time (and a Gap commercial) for swing to spread inward from the two coasts, but spread it has.

Swing's origins go back to the '30s when the Lindy Hop, the most familiar swing step, was named for pilot Charles Lindbergh's first trans-Atlantic flight. Dancers, performing a wild variation of the Charleston, felt like they were flying, so they named their step after Lindy's "hop" across the ocean.

The swing people learn today is a hodgepodge of street dances that grew from jazz and blues. First the Charleston, then the Lindy Hop, then the jitterbug. Shag is a descendent of swing (and is close to East Coast swing in many ways). A West Coast swing style developed in the '40s. And in the '50s, rock 'n' roll left its own mark on the dancing styles. All of it was cleaned up when it moved from the streets to the dance studios.

Dancers now usually learn basic East Coast swing steps and combinations based on the Lindy Hop in their first two levels of classes. After that, they tend to specialize, taking advanced classes in West Coast swing or the Charleston, for instance.

But not all learning takes place in classes. True to swing's unorthodox beginnings, dancers learn from each other, derive new steps from old, even make up steps that are similar in style to those they've learned. All this happens at the swing dances themselves.

"Go to the dances," Richard Badu, swing instructor and founder of the swing society, tells students in his beginning class. "You'll learn ten times faster there than here."

Dancers learn by watching and listening and feeling. The band plays its thumping, pumping music. A talented dancer pulls his partner onto the floor. He twirls and dips her. She knows her part and she's always watching to see what he will do. Swing her free for a little syncopation on her part? Spin her closer to perform kicks and crossovers together? This, she could do all night.

"Some people can do it all night," says Peter Brooks, an engineering grad student at N.C. State University. "Me, I'm wiped out after about three hours.

Section: What's Up
Edition: Final
Estimated Printed Pages: 4

Index Terms:
LEAD

Article Type: LEAD

Caption:
2 c photos

A capacity class of beginners ready to swing and sway fills the

ArtsCenter.

Staff Photos By Robert Willett

Copyright 1998 by The News & Observer Pub. Co.

Record Number: 1998267003