As usual, I've b---ered it up again and left out some pretty important dancing. The ethnic dancing I'll run as a separate poll [and that could be fun] but how I left jive and rock'n roll out of this weekend's is beyond me.
So, Michael Jackson comes out, as he more properly is in with Fred Astaire [they are very close in many ways]. Yes, I know I can't do that mid-poll; yes I know it skews everything but I'm gonna doowit. In his place, I'm running Bob B's jive suggestion.
Now here's an allegedly racist remark - those black girls in the vid above [*please see quote below] have more rhythm than the white girls although the guys in jackets are good. Bob, that's a nice vid and well done to the British Museum who ran the show last year.
* In the Irish Times of April 25th, 1998, Whoopi Goldberg was quoted as saying:
I dislike this idea that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called an African-American. I'm not an African. I'm an American. Just call me black if you want to call me anything.
Whoopi, your words are my command.
.
Oh, yes, swing me baby, swing me over the moon! ;D
ReplyDelete(and, was that a bit of the Charleston in there?)
Your comment on blacks having more rhythm? While I think in this vid it was a matter of talent and experience perhaps, I do think on the whole, blacks do have a more natural and free-flowing rhythm. I don't think that's racist, I think it's a compliment. :)
Jiving was 'the' fashionable dance style of my student years, half a century ago.
ReplyDeleteIt was certainly challenging and intimidating for the neophyte - just standing there twitching to the music wasn't good enough. The newbie needed a sympathetic and encouraging partner to start learning and to avoid going on looking a complete lemon. To complicate matters, there were different styles of jiving which didn't readily blend - a floppy, stompy style and a tight, fast style, as in the video. Adherents of the one found it difficult to dance with adherents of the other. The result was likely to look a mess and induce frayed tempers.
Bill Haley with: Rock Around the Clock, is what made jiving popular in Britain in the mid 1950s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN8yHdyLd9I
The rock music was popularised by the movie: Blackboard Jungle, where it was used as background for the opening sequence. The outcome in cinemas showing the movie was kids jiving in the aisles which brought the inevitable outraged editorials in the press and predictable calls for banning the movie before all youth was corrupted. Alas, the fashion for jive didn't last, perhaps because jiving was too demanding: by the mid 1960s 'twisting' or just twitching took over. The interesting insight is current efforts to revive jiving - I notice that several local dance schools now advertise jive classes.
As for rhythm, try Ann Miller with: It's Too Darn Hot, in the movie of Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate (1953):
ReplyDeletehttp://www.tudou.com/programs/view/G03lgA7eKb0/
My God, that Benny Goodman band really could swing.
ReplyDeleteThe Lindy Hoppers - and the Benny Gooman band - are absolutely fab but I have to admit that by my recollections jiving at students hops went rather more like this:
ReplyDeleteCathy & Gilbert, Jumpin' At The Woodside 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FmB1QbRisU&feature=related
Sylvia Sykes & Nick Williams, Jumpin' At THe Woodside 2008
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwNacxrsjo
They stopped making musicals like Cole Porter's 'Kiss Me Kate' or Marguerite Monnot's 'Irma La Douce' - probably because of the sustained assault on traditional values.
Rodgers and Hammerstein gained ascendancy until Andrew Lloyd-Webber arrived on the scene. His 'Cats' and then 'Phantom of the Opera' became the most successful Broadway musicals ever but the swing had gone.
The newbie needed a sympathetic and encouraging partner to start learning and to avoid going on looking a complete lemon.
ReplyDeleteI watched that Sylvia in the vid you suggested and that was her too. I was like that and the sympathetic partner was important.
Yep - BG could certainly swing.
HGF - there was a bit of Charleston, wasn't there, which I prefer to Blackbottom?
ReplyDeleteInteresting the separation in dancing which came in the sixties but it didn't - it came between the Charleston [which allowed touch] and the Blackbottom which was alone.