Swing Dance and Lindy Hop on Maui | E-mail Lee

Lee A1tenberg' s
Swing Dance Classes
Maui, Hawai`i

Group classes are listed here. Private lessons can always be scheduled, and my rate is $40/hour, for one or two people.

What You'll Get

The thriving Swing scene of Durham, North Carolina is where I first learned Swing dance from Richard Badu and Dori Drachman. I began teaching Swing dance to high school and college students in Nashville, Tennessee. I became a Mauihopper after I returned to Maui from Nashville in November 1998, and have taught Swing dance on Maui at Maui Community College, the Movement Arts Center, the Maui Academy of Performing Arts, Dance Time Studio, and Hapa's Brewhaus. I am working to create a real Swing "scene" on Maui by organizing the Maui Swing Dance Society.

My studies of Lindy Hop have continued in workshops with Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, Erin Stevens, Steven Mitchell, Chris Yee, and Marcus Koch and Barbl Kaufer. At Duke University and the Tennessee Dance Theater I have had four years of training in Humphrey-Limon and Graham-Cunningham Modern Dance technique, on Maui have studied West African dance with teachers from Guinea, Senegal, and Congo, and Salsa and Tango from a variety of teachers.

Lee and Ann swing out at the Classic Car Show, Peggy Sue's, Kihei, Maui, 9/24/2000. Videography by Roger A1tenberg.
More video clips


I have a very definite goal in teaching Swing dance – to turn people on to the whole vibe and style of what was originally invented in Harlem. Here's what I'm talking about.

Where Swing Dance Came From

Swing dance is a product of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, when hundreds of thousands of African-Americans, many free from the oppression of the South for the first time, created an urban culture in Harlem that had never been seen before. A series of new dances were invented to dance to the new jazz music, and jazz was being invented to propel the dancers. The Lindy Hop, named in 1928, was the culmination of that development, born in Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, folding into itself many old dances, the Charleston, and European partner dancing into a wild, free, and improvisational dance form. The new dance fertilized the creation of a new kind of Jazz music – Swing – with a walking 4-beat bass instead of the oom-pah 2-beat rhythm of Dixieland jazz. Lindy hop incubated in Harlem for some ten years before the White culture was ready for it. Then Lindy Hop became the national dance, renamed ``Jitterbug'' or ``Swing dance'', and caused that time to be called ``the Swing era''.

Where Swing Dance Went

After the 1950s, when the African-American community moved on to create other forms of music and dance, Lindy Hop was practiced by far fewer people, and much of what was passed on were the altered versions of Swing taught by the commercial Ballroom dance studios.

In the Ballroom dance context, Swing became just one selection in a cafeteria of dances – Foxtrot, Tango, Cha Cha, Mambo, Samba, Waltz. There was little chance that the depth and character of these indigenous dances could survive their codification by the commercial Ballroom dance studios.

The culture of competitive Ballroom dancing also is quite the antithesis of the jazz culture of the Harlem Renaissance. As one writer put it:

As ballroom dancers get more and more advanced, their dancing approaches "perfection", which is measured by comparing against a known ideal; hence the various ballroom dancers' technique tends to *converge* on the ideal. Whereas swing dancers are encouraged to use and even invent new patterns, new body positions, new footwork variations, etc., etc. ---"What is West Coast Swing?", The US Swing Dance Server
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Where Swing Dance Is Going

A synchronistic series of events brought the Lindy Hop out of near extinction, when Lindy Hop societies were formed in 1984 in London and Stockholm, and when a young couple from Pasadena – Erin Stevens and Steven Mitchell – looked up Frankie Manning in New York (one of the Savoy Ballroom's greats from 1935 on) and convinced him to come out of retirement and teach a new generation Lindy Hop. This original Lindy Hop has been building and building new Swing dance communities across the country for 15 years, and finally hit the big time with the making of movies like "Swing Kids" and the famous Gap Khakis commercial.

I am working to bring this revival to Maui. I take a `jazz' approach to teaching Swing dance --- as a system for two people to improvise dance together to Swing music (Jazz, Bluegrass, Country Western, Rock and Roll, and yes, '30's-'50s Hawaiian). I try to faithfully pass along several main parts of the original Lindy Hop scene in Harlem: the original jazz movements, the impulse to create brand new movements, and the social customs that made Lindy Hop a great creator of community wherever it went.

The East Coast Swing Move System

O.k., you'll probably look at the graphic below and say, "The man, he crazy!" I created it to help me remember the moves I was paying good money for. It shows the combinatorial possibilities for improvisation in Swing dance, by depicting the relationships between different moves in ``East Coast Swing''. The names of the moves vary from one region and teacher to the next; these are as taught me by Swing dance teachers Dori Drachman and Richard Badu, who learned Swing dance in the Boston area.
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