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Hiring Swing Dance Instructors: From a College Organizer Perspective
For this post I am addressing a different crowd then I usually do, this post is mainly geared is those who consider themselves swing dance instructors or those who are trying to become them. However,...
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Song Progression: Why Don’t You Do Right
One of the things I like to do to pass the time is something I call “Song Progression”. What I do is find as many versions of one song that catches my eye and then play them in chronological order...
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Learning to Teach Swing Dance 101
One story I have frequently encountered in the last year of my swing dance travels is individuals being thrown into the situation of teaching swing dance lessons and having to learn how to teach… while...
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ILHC 2011 LED Talk: Dorry Segev on Building a Scene
A few weeks back at ILHC they had as an alternative to traditional workshop classes featured at most swing dance events. These were LED talks, short lectures that were entertaining and educational...
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Teaching Tool: Using Routines As Class Material
Recently I have been finding that using famous routines on youtube is a great way to teach my students Lindy Hop technique and vocabulary, in addition to inspiring them about the dance. Several...
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Teaching Tool: Giving Students A Vocabulary
Often when I am teaching swing dance classes I want to assess how my students are doing or give them tools to assess each other/ themselves. One thing I learned quickly is if I asked the class, “Does...
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Teaching Tool: Failure to Provide Insight
The number one request (besides aerials) that most swing dance instructors get from newer to intermediate dancers are flashy moves, flashy moves, and… flashy moves. I’ll admit for awhile as a swing...
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Improving Atmosphere by Organizing Room Space
As mentioned in a previous post Dorry Segev said a quote that I believe anyone who is getting into the position of running an event or weekly dance should hear which was, “A beginners worst fear is...
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Teaching with a Pianist: Intro to Swing at the Spotted Cat
A few weeks ago I read reading Glenn Crytzer’s blog post about being bombarded with music in which one of the things he mentions is a challenge for instructors to hire a pianist to play for their...
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Creating Life Long Dancers and/or Better Dancers
I was at a Denny’s last night, when a fellow dancer mentioned a point that brought up the idea of dance venues fostering a culture of creating life long dancers (or dancers that will for a long period...
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Necessity as a Teacher
Floorcraft, a word that teachers often drop in their intro level lessons and dancers all around the world wish many dancers practiced. As a teacher you can explain to leads the “look before you leap”...
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Keep it Casual or Bring the Fire? Teaching A Higher Level Class
ILHC describes it as, You have been dancing long enough with a sufficient level and quality of dancing that you are actually hoping every class will be devoted to taking your swing-out, tearing it...
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Musicality Teaching Experiment
About a week and a half ago Rebecca Brightly on her weekly newsletter “The Pulse” wrote about musicality. One idea she touched in particular is listening to a song a couple of times (only listening to...
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How To Put On A Swing Dance Contest
While I am not a top-tier traveling international instructor, I would say I have done my fair share of competitions in my last few years of dancing. One thing I have noticed is the diversity of the...
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Enjoying Live Music: A Guide for Swing Dancers
I originally wrote this article in 2010 for Atomic Ballroom out in Southern California. Recently I have modified it to be appropriate for my blog. The Privilege of Live Music Bands provide a great...
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Dealing In Absolutes
Welcome to Lindy Hop When I was a newer dancer who frequently was in different dance scenes such as Irvine, California to Oberlin, Ohio, my biggest difficulty was probably dealing with instructors who...
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Marketing Segmentation for Swing Dancing
One of the biggest mistakes I read about, hear about, or personally witness is swing dance events and venues attempting to target the entire market of possible customers who would attend their business...
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Events & Scenes That Have Great Market Segementation
In my last post Market Segmentation for Swing Dancing I promised I would write a future post going into a few venues and events that I think are good examples of businesses that have properly segmented...
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Handling Drama In Your Swing Dance Community
I used to say with a smile one of the advantages I had being constantly between California and Pennsylvania is the second I started to get involved in any local swing dancing drama I would be boarding...
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Teaching Dance In Five Minutes Or Less
Yesterday I was taking a teacher training class ran at Blues Union by Amanda Gruhl and Shawn Hershey in Boston where I faced an interesting challenge. I had do something I have only done once before,...
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