Review: Lindy Focus VII

I love Lindy Focus. Every fall I look for their announcements and anticipate a wonderful time with dear friends and acquaintances from all over the South East (and increasingly from beyond). I love the dances, the classes, the music, and the organizers.

This was my 5th year attending, and for the first unfortunate time, this was the first year that did not exceed my experience of the previous year. I still thoroughly enjoyed myself; I had fantastic dances, “sat” in on some fascinating classes, and danced to fabulous music. I missed the awesome distinctively southern atmosphere of past years though.

The biggest contributing factor, I think, was the teacher lineup. For the first time Lindy Focus became a “Rockstar” event. The teachers read like a who’s who of the hottest names in Lindy Hop right now. This is a big departure from all previous years when South East regional instructors dominated the lineup with a few from outside the region. That resulted in a big difference at the dances as the Rockstars were (typically) noticeably absent from the dances most of the week and when they were present most were quite exclusive with their dancing (except for the New Year’s dance).

There were some notable exceptions. I was very impressed with Ursula Lederberger whom I watched dance with students nonstop the whole week, and Evita Arce, Bill Borgita, Laura Glaess, Mike Roberts, David Madison, and Andrew Sutton were all generous and gracious with their time.

Something that I had always loved about Lindy Focus being a regional event was that the barrier between students and instructors was minimal by nature of the regional-ness (to coin my own adjective) of the instructors. I was sad that was missing from year. (A brief aside, this is also one of my favorite aspects of Swingout New Hampshire, that the instructors are present and social with the students all week)

I only took a few classes, some were excellent, one I was quite disappointed by. The excellent ones were the two performance classes taught by Nathan and Evita. The class was made of a diverse mixture of levels, and was taught beautifully. I have never before seen a performance class of such caliber. Nathan and Evita are masters of craft of teaching choreography. They created a group routine that masterfully showed off the group, diminished the weakness of the dancing of some members (without resorting to “hiding” them), and allowed the attention to be drawn to the stonger dancers without “showcasing” them). In every sense it was a group performance rather than a group performing individual choreography.

The other choreography class I took was the Tranky Doo taught by Aba Browning and Bobby White. This was a tough class for them to teach, it was the end of the long week and was a 90 minute class. As the time wound down the energy wallowed. It was far from an ideal setting for teaching, especially individual choreography. With that in mind, the class wasn’t bad. It started very strong and they were able to pull it all together in the end, and they never “lost” the class, but it was a struggle.

I also jumped in a the class that Marty and Kelly taught the 4b group (the advanced performance dancers). I had high expectations for this class and it just didn’t live up to what I hoped for. It wasn’t a bad class, it just wasn’t really good. The explanations were vague, it felt hodgepodge with little conviction, or passion, more like a toss off class that they didn’t really care about and put together at the last minute.

The last class I literally sat in on, it was an elective taught by Gina Helfrich and Evin Galang (little known fact, Evin and – at the time Noel, now Noah – were my very first ever teachers). I wish I had been there for the full class, they were teaching some stuff I haven’t seen taught in along while and I think is sadly missing from current Lindy Hop repertoire.

The final weakness of Lindy Focus VII I’ll mention was the bands. None of the bands were bad, all of them were excellent on their own. The problem I had is that they were all cut from the same cloth (except for Crysta Bell and the Jons). Everything was small band, bouncy music, that only barely feels like Lindy Hop. If it weren’t for the DJs (who were extraordinarily picked and planned by Rob Moreland) there wouldn’t have been any big bands – no Basie, no Ellington, no Ella, no anything remotely like that. But the DJ’s delivered, and kept the floor dancing far more than you nearly ever see when the band goes on break.

So what were the things I loved about Lindy Focus VII?

• The DJ’s
• Nathan and Evita’s class
• The New Year’s Eve Show (Nathan and Evita, Mike and Laura, the one man dance, the girls routine, Andrew and Karen’s routine)
• The Boilermaker Jazz Band
• Mark Kapner, Sarah Munsell, Megan Adair performance
• Tremendous competitions
• Michael and Jaya

The vision continues to evolve for Lindy Focus. Michael and Jaya should be proud of their product, it is an excellently run event that delivers everything they promise. The differences I had with this year’s version are merely preferences and I’m excited to see what they will try next year. I’ll be there again most likely, and I hope to dance with you there.