About half a year ago, I had a conversation with one Daniel Burnand about Swing whlist teaching in Saigon. It was when he had just started Swing dancing, and we got into a conversation where he expressed his relationship with the dance, and I really liked the way he articulated his relationship with the dance. So half a year later, I managed to convince him to set what he expressed in that conversation in writing. Here it is: –
“When I first started dancing, I was too preoocupied with grasping how the tripple step fitted in with a growing dictionary of moves I was absorbing, and my mind had little time to think about the ‘bigger picture’. But as my repertoire grew, and my muscle memory developed, I began to think about why it was that I loved Swing so much, and why it continued to capture my interest.
Instead of seeing Swing as an activity, I began to see it as a medium. It facilitated a kind of conversation as I moved from one partner to the next, punctuated by one song after another. Swing was a language. A living breathing non-verbal method of communication.
I had been learning the basic vocabulary of Swing, preoocupied with the mundane yet essential grammatical technical details. But very quickly I was able to communicate with other fellow Swing linguists. And it felt great- I was engaged in SwingTalk.
As my vocabulary expanded, I began to enjoy more conversations accross the dance floor, and just as one begins to discern different speach patterns, I began to recognise my different partners’ dance voice.
So why did this revelation wait until the Beijing exchange to reveal itself to me? That was the first time I realsied I was different. WEB Dubois called it double consciousness, I would like to think of it as Swing consciousness. I encountered a language familar, but very different from my own, and became conscious of how my feet were speaking.
I had encountered Dialect.
These accents from around the world were confusing me on the social dance floor. I had thought my dancing skills were good enough to understand and talk with anyone, but I soon found that I had learnt my lanugage in a bubble, shut off from the media of the outside community. And so, like the incomprehensible dock worker with his thick local accent, I felt a little embarrassed in these halls of Recieved Pronunciation, were dancers spoke with refined eloquence.
And now? Now I have realised that I didn’t need speach therapy, it just took time to really understand the language, before I could discern and communicate with these other dialects. And it’s great. Since although thick accents can make it difficult for two people to communicate, if these dancers are good enough, it can also add vibrancy and colour to the conversation, as you both learn the quirky peculiarities of each others’ dialect, borrowing and adding to your own routine.
Swing is about conversation. Modern dance has drifted into the realm of monologues, where each party wishes to outshine the other, and lose that connection which is so essential to dialouge. Speaches and oratories are wonderful when done well, but if we truely want to enrich ourselves, dialouge between two dancers is surely the only way? Two dancers can achieve that Hegelian synthesis, against the backdrop of the music.
And yes, lets not forget the music, our sonorous voice, those vocal chords that articulate our thoughts, without which we just mime like mutes.”
– Daniel Burnand, England via Saigon Swing
