Syncopating Cultures With Music
The fascination with moving to American swing
Foreign dance teachers I’ve known in the U.S. love swing music, so much so that I’ve wondered how the genre of music is marketed outside the border.
Each teacher has presented a swing routine to the American class with a type of pride that they know of it, and with smiles bright enough to light a harbor at night.
After I’ve heard the first few bars of a swing song in class, the inside-my-head voice says, “Oh no, not that.” It doesn’t have the same resonance for me.
I like swing music from the audience's perspective, at concerts or musicals, and I even like watching the ballroom versions, both East Coast and West Coast swing, but to bop up and down to it for a long three minutes in a class is probably my least favorite dance form.
Beto Perez seemed determined for a long while to incorporate swing into his Zumba® latin format. I never understood how the two styles could jive together, and so I didn’t try to teach the mishmash.
But Beto sure did.
I took classes with a Hungarian Zumba teacher who reveled in any type of swing. In each class, at least one swing song.
My Russian dance teacher loves, loves, loves swing. She has a rendition of one song for the high-intensity part of class that she plays over and over. It ends up looking something like this, not exactly, but something:
Whenever she plays it, my heart drops. Ugh. But, I give it my all so as not to disappoint her. I wear a fake smile during the song as if, “This is so fun!”
The fun part for me though is to muse, how do these foreign dancers latch onto swing so tightly? Except for maybe square dances and hip-hop, Americans haven’t contributed all that much to the music of popular dance repertoire, which at present seems mostly Latin.
But someone along the dance education strada overseas must sell it well.
I know of one accomplished dancer from Columbia who is nuts about it, and another from Russia who grooves to Elvis, and another from Budapest who thinks it’s divine.
Go figure.