The smile was the lure. Nalla Kim, a computer programmer, noticed the joyful expressions in the social media post of a fellow programmer whom he had never seen smiling at work. Curious, Kim asked his usually serious colleague what had made him so visibly happy. The answer: swing dancing.
Kim had never heard of the dance form — which is not surprising, considering that swing was created by Black Americans in the 1920s and ’30s, and Kim is a Korean man who discovered it when coming of age in Seoul in the early 2000s.
But Kim got hooked. He started attending swing dance events in the United States, and after a few years entered international competitions. He traveled to dance, but he didn’t have to. In the past two decades, the swing dance scene in his hometown has grown into the largest in the world.
For a vintage American cultural practice to spread overseas and thrive there more robustly than at home is a story at least as old as jazz. Not in every case, though, does the transplanted form evolve into a local variant. That’s what has happened in Korea.
In Seoul these days, there are around 10 clubs dedicated full-time to swing and its core partnering form, Lindy Hop. “In New York, where Lindy Hop was born, we have zero,” said Caleb Teicher, a prominent American Lindy Hop and tap dancer.
Those Seoul clubs are filled with dancers of high skill. “I’ve heard it joked among the New York dancers who’ve gone there that a bad dancer in Korea is a great dancer in New York,” Teicher said.
What’s more, in the jazz tradition that artists honor by developing their own voices and style, Korean dancers have worked out their own fresh approaches to the form. “When I go there to teach, I feel like I’m their student now,” Teicher said.
Wanting to display these developments to New York, Teicher has organized a mini-festival. On Saturday, K-Swing Wave, a group of eight all-star Korean swing dancers, will perform a free show at Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City. On Sunday, the group will appear at the Korean Cultural Center New York and at a swing dance party at 92NY.
Kim, K-Swing Wave’s project director, said the dancers selected were “the best of the best,” most of them leaders of their own groups. Andy Seo, the group’s artistic director, added that everyone had been so busy dancing, teaching and performing that they seldom had opportunities to collaborate. This is their first chance to figure out what an extended production of Korean swing dance might look like.
Like Kim, Seo discovered swing dancing in the early 2000s. The swing dance revival of the 1980s and ’90s in the United States and Sweden had arrived in Seoul in 1999, imported by the Korean American dancer Alex Nah. “Couple dancing was not that familiar in Korea,” said Seo, who had belonged to clubs for street and K-pop dance. “But I fell in love with dancing with others.”
In the beginning was what Kim called the “copycat” phase: “We each chose our favorite dancer, and we would try to copy that dancer.”
Americans brought to Korea to teach noticed a serious work ethic among the students as well as an extreme emphasis on imitation. Laura Glaess, a jazz dancer, said, “You’d be able to tell which American dancer they had patterned themselves after.”
Nathan Bugh, one of Teicher’s colleagues in the popular production “Sw!ng Out,” recalled how a Korean couple memorized and performed the improvised social dancing of an American duo (preserved on video) exactly, including the mistakes.
At social dance occasions, Bugh added, rather than following the normal practice of pairing off with one another, Korean dancers would either stand and watch or wait in line to have the foreign instructor as a partner, sometimes bringing cups of water so the teacher wouldn’t have to take a break. “It was like a factory,” Bugh said.
But every time these Americans returned to Korea, they noticed changes. For Authentic Jazz Weekend, an annual event that Kim and Seo founded in 2013, the Korean dancers invited foreign instructors (often found on the internet) who were specialists in areas where the Koreans felt they were weak, especially solo jazz dancing and improvisation.
At the same time, the Koreans were discovering their strengths. “Maybe it’s a cultural thing,” Kim said, “but Korean dancers are really great at group formations.”
Numbers created by Seo — whom Bugh called his favorite vernacular jazz dance choreographer in the world — have the kaleidoscopic complexity, sharp synchronicity and clever details of the most intricate K-pop routines, while remaining recognizably in a jazz dance idiom. On multiple scales, they swing. Broadway producers should take note.
“The first piece by Andy I saw was made for students,” Teicher said. “And when you looked at the dancers individually, they were not the strongest. But the choreography — it was genius. I had never seen a team jazz piece that good before.”
Seo said that after attending international competitions year after year, he realized that swing dance was still being developed. And for that reason, he could make his own way.
“Maybe in the beginning we thought, ‘We must be authentic,’” Kim said. “But later we thought, ‘What is authentic?’ We are different people. We better contribute something different, something from the heart.”
“For people in the U.S., especially African Americans,” Kim added, “they start from their own culture and express the music in their movement. We started from the outside, learning the moves first, then the deeper things.”
Kim has made a project of interviewing international swing dancers about the history of the dance and their experiences, and then translating the videos into Korean. Talking with African American dancers, he said, he was surprised to discover commonalities. Swing dance was born from the blues of oppression, and “Korea also had colonization and caste,” he said. “Many Korean art forms are from that sadness, even if they look as happy as the Lindy Hop.”
“Dance is such a great way to learn about other cultures,” Kim added, sharing the hope that K-Swing Wave will contribute to a two-way exchange. Seo agreed, but he stressed something simpler about swing dancing, and why it should be spread everywhere: It makes people smile.
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