"Business"

He goes

"Business" is the term that old vaudevillians used to mean a bit in a script that was left open to the performers for general slapstick. Some bits of a script would be set, some left up to the person on stage to handle as they saw fit. I was thinking last week about whether sometimes it might be better for leads to consider their footwork as "business" or not.

Now obviously the open nature of some moves in lindy hop mean that either partner can just improvise. The extended steps of a swing-out, for instance, are notorious spots for putting in fancy footwork that might have nothing to do with the "normal" steps, or what your partner is doing. So once you're comfortably social dancing you can to some extent do what you like with your feet. I don't have anything more to say about that that isn't super-obvious.

Also, I'm not going to argue that it isn't better for us leads to learn both our footwork and our lead if we can. That would be madness.

But what I am thinking - and I don't know why I'm only really understanding this now - is that if I can only learn one part of a move in a class, it should probably be the lead. I should do the lead, and just tell my feet: business.

I've always (which is to say, before I was swing-dancing) been keen on learning how to properly lead rather than just going through a choreography, but it's only in classes with swing-style partner rotation that you realise how important it is for the poor follows. If I fail to learn my footwork it just means that I can't do a particular move. If I fail to learn the lead, there's a whole bunch of follows that get nothing from me, and I have to hope that some other lead is doing better than I am.

There are moves where the lead and the footwork are the same thing, and in those I guess I just have to suck it up and learn, but they tend to be simpler leads anyway. And footwork is quite an important part of keeping time with the music. But in general in a social dance people aren't looking at my feet, they're looking at my partner. If I give her everything she needs to dance, I can probably just forget about footwork. Indeed, late in the night when my legs are tired I can still dance, but if I'm so tired my lead starts to get lazy, everything falls apart..

Nothing profound, and I guess there will be quite a few leads reading this who roll their eyes and murmur 'well duh', but it was on my mind a bit this last week. Now over to Spoon, who is probably dancing giddily in Sweden as I type this...

"I don't know what I was expecting"

She Goes

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