When I first saw the video that hooked me, I assumed it was a hoax.
“Improvised Partner Dance,” the overlay text said, along with: “Random Partner & Song.” The song was the 2007 chart-topper “Forever” — wedding DJ music, the kind of track that might get both grandparents and grandchildren on their feet. The partners — Emeline Rochefeuille and KP Rutland — moved with impossible fluidity, playfully connecting their movements to the rhythm and the familiar lyrics.
I couldn’t quite place the dance style. There were partnered turn patterns I recognized from mambo, flicks of the leg that seemed borrowed from Argentine tango, a moonwalk, the running man. But as I watched, mesmerized, I felt sure of one thing: No way did they improvise this.
Then I saw that the video — which has more than 20 million views on TikTok — was hashtagged #westcoastswing.
This was … swing dance?
A recent wave of viral videos has been spurred by this kind of two-pronged disbelief. The West Coast Swing clips are often filmed during competitive “Jack and Jill” events, at which dancers are paired randomly and do improvise together to a random song, however unconvinced viewers might be. (“I had a commenter say the other day, ‘If you believe this wasn’t rehearsed, I have a bridge to sell you,’” Rutland said in an interview.)
West Coast Swing is a descendant of the Lindy Hop, the swing dance that originated in Harlem in the 1920s. But today’s West Coast Swing has few of the markers traditionally associated with swing dance: not much big-band jazz, little of the Lindy Hop’s irrepressible bounce. The music selections are broad, the dance’s smoothed-out standard steps are friendly to interpolation, and the dancers are often fluent in a range of other styles. Participants in a high-level West Coast Swing Jack and Jill can seemingly lead and follow each other anywhere — right across song and dance genres.
Robert Royston, a West Coast Swing champion and historian, believes those qualities make the dance thrilling to perform and watch. “What we do, from a musical standpoint, from a connective standpoint, ” he said, “is so different from every other dance.”
There are continuing discussions about whether West Coast Swing has strayed too far from its roots. Swing dance, the Lindy Hop luminary and dance scholar LaTasha Barnes said in an interview, emerged from and is inextricably linked to Black jazz music and culture. “It is inherently Black,” she said, “and should be respected as such.” Most swing dancers today are white, and because West Coast Swing disconnects swing steps from jazz music and sands down their swung rhythm, “some people consider it to be a further whitewashed interpretation,” Barnes added.
The swing dance scene is large and varied, and different corners of it offer different perspectives on these ideas. The Open World Swing Dance Championships, which featured a West Coast Swing Jack and Jill competition at its 40th anniversary event in Burbank, Calif., this fall, has almost no Lindy Hop. The International Swing Dance Championships in Houston, which turns 10 this week and is supported by many of swing dance’s Black leaders, has relatively little West Coast Swing.
The partners Markus Smith and Trendlyon Veal — West Coast Swing champions who have attended both events, and also had their share of viral fame — said in a joint interview that they think of swing dance as a continuum.
“Lindy Hop, that’s the foundation,” Smith said. “Then in West Coast, everything’s always evolving,” Veal added. “So you get the magic of the unknown. And it’s all swing.”
Like most social dance histories, the story of West Coast Swing — written night by night by hundreds of moving bodies — can vary depending on the teller. But it always starts with Lindy Hop, which is itself a combination of other social dances: the breakaway, the Texas Tommy, the Charleston. The Lindy Hop spread across the country in the 1930s and ’40s. “As it grew, it shaped itself to different locations,” Barnes said, spawning variants like the Carolina Shag and DC Hand Dance.
The strain that took hold on the West Coast changed both the dance’s look and its relationship to music. Song choices were more varied and often slower, reflecting the bluesier style that was popular in the area; the movement began to glide more than hop.
West Coast Swing dancers flattened the Lindy’s circular shape into a “slotted” dance, with a north-south axis. That allowed more dancers to crowd onto the floor in California’s bars and roller rinks. It also gave the dance a natural front, making it more presentational — and particularly competition- and camera-friendly.
Over the years, West Coast Swing music choices grew even broader, evolving along with popular music. While Lindy Hop and many other swing styles are still primarily danced to jazz, West Coast Swing can be danced to nearly anything. “It’s the perfect dance for your favorite style of music, whatever your favorite style of music is,” Royston said. “Except maybe Gregorian chant.”
In recent decades, West Coast Swing has begun to attract dancers with extensive experience in other parts of the dance world. Rochefeuille, who along with her regular partner Jakub Jakoubek has become a fixture at swing events, started out as a Latin ballroom dancer; Jakoubek danced the Brazilian partner style Zouk and studied modern dance before discovering West Coast Swing.
Often, these dancers are drawn by the style’s musical variety. “In a lot of partner dances, the music is similar, it all has the same color,” Rochefeuille said. In West Coast Swing, there’s a much wider spectrum. “I got hooked when I saw a dance to hip-hop music,” she said, “with hip-hop moves inside of it.”
Bryn Anderson, another champion and Rutland’s dance partner, described West Coast Swing’s smoothed-out versions of standard swing steps as “a pretty spare syllabus.” Its stripped-down quality makes it easier for dancers to add in bits and pieces of their various movement backgrounds, and to echo the variety of the music.
“I can dance West Coast Swing like I came from hip-hop,” Anderson said, “and then I can dance West Coast Swing like I came from ballet.”
“It’s addictive,” she added.
Today West Coast Swing is immensely popular beyond the West Coast, both nationally and internationally. You can attend a West Coast Swing workshop in Johannesburg or compete in Kuala Lumpur. Benji Schwimmer, a third-generation swing dancer (and the winner of Season 2 of “So You Think You Can Dance”), thinks it should be renamed “Modern Swing” — partly to reflect the music it’s danced to, and partly because “West Coast” becomes meaningless in, for example, China.
Jack and Jill events, where random partners ad lib to random songs, have become more central to West Coast Swing in the last 20 years, as it has attracted increasingly skilled dancers who can pull off increasingly complex improvisations. First popularized by the influential West Coast Swing dancer Jack Carey in the 1950s (he was, the story goes, the original Jack), the Jack and Jill format is now common throughout the partner dance world.
The on-the-fly thinking and musical sensitivity that Jack and Jills require, Royston said, is baked into West Coast Swing thanks to the style’s “basic step,” the foundation on which its technique is built. Though it is typically danced to songs that have eight beats in a phrase, its basic step uses just six beats: walk, walk, triple-step, triple-step (one, two, three-and-four, five-and-six). “So the journey of the West Coast Swing dancer is to attach an inherently off-phrase dance back to the music,” Royston said — to figure out ways to make a six-beat pattern fit inside eight-beat phrases. It’s a brain-teasing task that encourages and facilitates improvisation.
And it requires that dancers be intimately attuned both to each other and to the music. All partner dancers are expert communicators, but at the highest levels of West Coast Swing, they’re practically telepathic. Anderson and Rutland compared a typical social partner dance experience to a segment on a talk show, with the leader as the host and the follower as the guest. When two West Coast Swing champions dance together, they said, it’s more like “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”: Partners sync up so completely that followers sometimes contribute as many ideas as leaders.
The West Coast Swing connection, Barnes said, is different from the relationship between partners in Lindy Hop.
“The way movement lives across these partnerships is like a sine wave,” she said. In the buoyant Lindy Hop, where there are surging transfers of momentum back and forth between the dancers, “you get the full volume of the pulse, so the waves have big crests,” Barnes said. In the more fluid West Coast Swing, often danced without the propulsion of jazz, “it’s more of a low cresting.”
It’s still swing, but it’s farther away from the Black rhythms and music that make swing swing. (And though Barnes said she’s had some good West Coast Swing experiences, to her, it’s just less fun — “like trying to do Lindy while wearing a lead jacket,” she joked.)
Even West Coast Swing die-hards believe that the style could better balance preservation and innovation. “We don’t have a strong culture of lifting up and holding with reverence the people that came before,” Royston said. “We have a tendency in West Coast Swing to overdo,” to chase too hard after the new.
The viral success of Jack and Jill videos — which often perform best when they’re set to pop songs and feature a crowd-pleasing variety of movement — has amplified that tendency. During today’s Jack and Jills, dancers say, there is pressure to create the kind of viral moment that will keep social media viewers from scrolling past. The communication between partners can sometimes feel secondary to the imagined communication with an online audience.
“What is the dance that we have been doing, what is the dance we are doing, and what is not the dance we are doing?” said Jakoubek. (He and Rochefeuille have nearly 1.5 million followers across Instagram and TikTok.) “Those are always the questions.”
Sometimes, West Coast Swing and Lindy Hop dancers can hash out those questions together on the dance floor. At “crossover” events like the annual Boston Tea Party, which caters to both West Coast Swing and Lindy Hop enthusiasts, a West Coast dancer like Smith might end up improvising with a Lindy Hop expert like Barnes.
“You dance one of the songs in your discipline, and then you dance one in the other dancer’s discipline,” Smith said, discovering points of connection along the way. “It’s always different, and it’s always very cool.”
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