Sunday, February 18, 2018 at 15:39 Harlem Shout, Swing Dancing, dancing in dancing, swing Wednesday, January 15, 2014 at 8:58
Updated on Thursday, March 20, 2014 at 12:28 by
MCJ
Blues dancing has a problem: many dancers, even within the swing scene, see it as creepy and overly sexual. This used to baffle me until I danced outside Melbourne and discovered that quite a number of blues scenes are creepy and overly sexual.
Melbourne has a pretty ‘clean’ blues scene. This is due to deliberate efforts by the scene’s founders and its senior teachers over the years. While dances can certainly be intimate, they are not sexual, and that’s a key distinction.
There are dancers who do not share these attitudes. For them, a sexual element in blues dancing is acceptable – indeed, it may be part of the attraction. There is a tacit conflict in the Melbourne blues scene between these dancers and the ‘establishment’ dancers (both minorities), but I don’t intend to address that here.
What I will address is an example of how this conflict and concern about sexual elements can manifest itself, and how (not) to deal with it.
