Camp Jitterbug is THE most important Lindy Hop event in the Western Hemisphere right now. The killer instructor line up; great live and DJ'd music, uber high level contests, and the one of a kind Jump Session Show. I’ve never been actually, but it’s significance is such that it cannot and should not be ignored. This roundup almost a month late, but fortunately a lot of people have been talking it up. It feels like the Lindy Sphere-o-blogs is becoming more and more active. Check out Mary Freitag’s experiences on her blog Art and Dancing, a Canadian perspective on Hamfats.ca, and Mikey Pedroza’s ongoing series of reactions on his blog.
Jump Session Videos
Not very many things surprise me these days in relation to Lindy Hop, but I’m more than a little shocked to see Jump Session videos online now. Many of them by the event promoter, Tonya Morris. It’s surprising because the Jump Session Show was the last major hold out of must see Lindy Hop performances that wasn’t previously available for free online. Between Tonya, Shesha Marvin, and The Killer Dillers’ YouTube pages, it looks like the whole show will be online soon.
I’ve been putting off a full event overview for awhile, but this gives me some motivation to get it done. I didn’t go, but there’s a ton buzz from the Lindy blogosphere about the event. I’ll try to put something together for next week. In the meantime I’ll leave you this weekend with a couple videos from the show.
A Year of Wandering and Pondering
. . . more or less. I started this blog because I wanted something interesting to read. Seriously, there’s probably no one else out there that reads my blog more than I do. Trust me, I see the statistics. That's right, I'm one of those self centered jerks that writes just so I can see what I wrote. Besides, being a terrible editor, this is the only way I catch my mistakes, of which there can be many in any given post.
Until a year ago I was one of those people who always talked about having a blog, but never got around to starting one until Frankie95. I posted a 30+ page overview/rant of the whole experience on Facebook and before I was done, I decided that writing on a semi-regular basis wasn’t as impossible as I thought it would be.
Weekend Video Highlights: Sylvia Sykes Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
As you can see, Sylvia has been all kinds of awesome for a long time. She still has it too, which is how she still gets to teach and perform with the best out there. Life is rough sometimes.
Weekly Video Highlights: The Eye of the Beholder
It's been awhile. It's not for lack of videos. In fact I feel a little bad because a lot of good stuff has come out in the past couple of months. I've just been a little busy between my real job work and my pretend job helping with The Big Big Benefit in July and ILHC in August. In fact, expect an ILHC update this week right here on this very blog. Really. I haven't done a Random Links post in awhile too, but I did want to highlight this post by Madeline of the blog "Behind The Madness." I hope to talk about it in depth in a future post, but I just want to say that I agree wholeheartedly.
Swingtime Abridged
Woefully behind on the blog between the upcoming Big Big Benefit for Laurie Gilkenson and ILHC. Which is a good hing I have a bunch of old writings stockpiled for this sort of occasion. I'll have some stuff up about Camp Jitterbug, updates on ILHC, and try to dig into my backlog of cool videos as soon as I can. The Atomic Ballroom blog put up a nice top 10 list of ballroom dance sequences in vintage films. It lists quite a few Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire sequences including two from the film Swingtime. Although I am disappointed that they didn’t include the finale to that film, “Never Gonna Dance,” which I consider their best performance, period. Anyway, it reminded me of this post I originally put up as a note on my Facebook profile a couple of years ago.
Video Highlights: Stockholm Tap Festival 2010
building on last week's Manzari Brothers videos, here are some nice videos from the 2010 Stockholm Tap Festival. Videos courtesy of lindyhopporto.
First up is tap bad ass, Jason Samuels Smith.
Finally, A very loose Big Apple performed to live music. Dancers include Isabella Gregorio, Vincenzo Fesi, Mikaela Hellsten, Oskar Markusson, Frida Borg, Rikard Ekstrand, Hanna Zetterman, and Mattias Lundmark.
Weekly Video Highlights: The Manzari Brothers
A little something different this week as I'm trying to find time to sort all the awesome Lindy videos from the past couple of months. The Washington Post recently did a wonderful spotlight on up and coming DC tap talent, John and Leo Manzari.
The two brothers are both in high school but are currently in a local production of Sophisticated Ladies, a musical based on the music of another DC native, Duke Ellington. The show is headlined by Maurice Hines, the brother of the late great tapper Gregory Hines. Here is is talking about discovering the two brothers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhxi4JrTiwY
And a couple more videos of the guys dancing. Here's John by himself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KepwUib39to
Battle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QepHEMGUzvY
Visionary Project Interview with Norma Miller
With all this talk about Frankie, I don't want to overlook one of his surviving peers from the old days, Norma Miller. Fortunately, I randomly found the recently uploaded clips of her doing an interview with the Visionary Project. Here Norma gives some interesting background on Hellzapoppin’. It's a very sobering reminder that those days weren't just about dancing.
Weekly Video Highlights: The Ninjammerz Invade Asia
The Ninjammerz hit up Japan and Korea last month brought lots of new material with them, and were greeted with an equal amount of creativity. Thanks to these YouTube users for posting these videos