Wandering & Pondering

Karen continues her personal dance clip tour.  I got a message that Thigpen is buying booze somewhere.  Read the other parts here.

After Basie Ball in 2004, I started to officially travel like a crazy person for dancing.  I went to the Rhythmic Arts Festival (San Diego), Swinger’s Ball (Chicago), DCLX, Midwest Lindyfest, Camp Jitterbug, Herrang, and the San Francisco Exchange.  I was thus primed for ULHS 2005, the first year it was in the amazing Varsity Theater in Minneapolis.  In my opinion this event represents a marked change in the consistency of good lindy hop.  There were so many epic moments this year, and I think a lot of that is due to Todd Yannaconne and Naomi Uyama teaming up, along with the Silver Shadows making their debut with Frida and Todd  in the mix.  Todd and Naomi brought everyone to their feet in the fast division, then the premier fast competition, by doing really intricate footwork and Charleston variations to the Wolverine’s ridiculously fast “White Heat”—and they even danced on the beat.

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Karen Turman keeps blogging so I don’t have to.  Read the other parts here.

Between 2001 and 2004 I’d taken a break from the hard-core dance life and was a casual local dancer for a while, enjoying only events in Minnesota such as Midwest Lindyfest and ULHS, thanks to Amy Johnson.  I was still hanging out and practicing from time to time with Mike and other friends, during which time he very proudly showed me a clip of the “Mad Dog” routine from ALHC 2002, or NADC, I can’t remember which.  Everybody I’d ever heard of or seen in any competition was in that clip.  And despite the poor quality of the video, it was still possible to feel the incredible energy and rawness of the dancing.  This was the first time I’d really seen people successfully bust out fast dancing with aerials and all around ridiculousness.

(ed. note: The clip Karen is talking about is probably from Danvers New Year’s Eve Dance Extravaganza 2002-03 which made the rounds via Mad Dog’s website.  I’ve also included the original performance from ALHC 2002)

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Karen keeps writing, so I keep posting.  Oh, and Happy Birthday Thigpen.  More or less on time.  Read the previous posts in this series here.

Back in 1999, every Sunday we would all go to Lindy by the Lake in the Lake Harriet Bandshell, DJ’d by Jesse Miner, now of San Francisco.  We would all do the Shim Sham to that really cheesy song, not “T’ain’t what you do,” but “Wanna learn the shim sham?”  I thought it was the greatest thing ever.  It was like a show, we’d just all line up and do it on the bandshell stage to all the people passing by.  I’d actually already learned the tap version of the shim sham because I’d been a tap dancer for years before I started swing.  Andrew and I also definitely wanted to include the shim sham as a more modern and community-oriented Frankie reference.   To be fair, Frankie would have used “T’ain’t what you do,” which is a way cooler song, but we were going for silliness here.

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More goodness from Karen Turman.  Thanks to Andrew Thigpen for correcting the title of the last post.  Bastard.  Read the rest of this series by clicking here.

Once all of us in Minnesota started really getting into Lindy Hop in 1999, Mike would mail-order videos of Camp Hollywood 1998, Can’t Top the Lindy Hop, Buck Privates, Groovie Movie and Hellzapoppin’ and we would all go over to his and Amy’s apartment (nicknamed the “Swing Pad”) and watch footage until our faces were numb.   The “Can’t Top” video had a special significance for me—it was the first time any of us had seen Frankie Manning, Steven Mitchell, Ryan Francois, Sylvia Sykes, Sing Lim, and Ron from London.

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As promised, Karen Turman is here to keep things interesting.  This is part one of many posts to come about her ILHC Showcase performance with Andrew Thigpen.   I’d like to thank Karen for letting me post this super interesting and very personal account of their labor of love.

In July 2009 Andrew came to Santa Barbara for the first of what would become many weekend practice sessions.  We had just performed our first choreography, fondly named “the Hoedown”,  at Lindy Focus, and were watching Judson Laipply in his Orange Crush T-shirt doing his  “Evolution of Dance” clip to get new ideas for it (he quotes “Cotton-Eyed Joe”).   We ended up just enjoying the clip in its entirety—then  I looked over at Andrew and said “What if we wore Orange Crush T-shirts and jeans and did the evolution of lindy hop?  Andrew immediately googled “orange crush t-shirt,” clicked “buy” and we started brainstorming.[1] This became a project we would work on for over 20 months.   Many people have been asking me about this routine, so I’ve decided to share my thoughts on the process from an autobiographical perspective (I’m thinking of John Cusack in “High Fidelity,” organizing his record collection autobiographically).   Reuben Brown has created a playlist on youtube of all of the clips, and Ben Yau has written a thorough blog based on the historical significance of each clip we chose.  I feel like most of us have our own stories about the significance of a lot of these clips, so here are mine.

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