Partnered Swing Dancing (361-0-20)
Instructors
Billy Siegenfeld
847/491-3147
10 Arts Circle Drive
Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday, noon-2:00pm and by appointment
Meeting Info
Wirtz Center SOUTH: Tues, Thurs 1:00PM - 2:50PM
Overview of class
The movement we do in this class can be described as follows:
Two people join hands, look in each other's eyes, and rhythmically dance together to the sounds of the great African-American-originated art form called swing music.
We work at this kind of partnering by honoring a fundamental law of nature: Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."
That is, what is particular to the way we partner in this class is that we work at creating an equal-and-opposite partnership with each other. How? By first relaxedly grounding the body - via the holistic postural-motional-vocal principle called Standing Down Straight® - and then sharing both our body's physical weight and - thinking of the word "weight" metaphorically - our emotional weight with each other.
In each class, we practice sharing these two types of weight by becoming aware of 3 sensations:
--How gravity's force - when we give in to it - relaxes our body and mind DOWN into the floor and, therefore, frees our bones to bounce more loosely at their bony connections called joints (e.g., the neck, elbows, lower back, and knees).
--How the floor, in application of Newton's law, meets all our gravity-directed, falling-DOWN body-weight by equally and oppositely counter-thrusting UP into it.
--How scapular abduction (sliding one scapula bone then the other forward around your ribcage) then grabs all that energy the floor is sending up to you and directs it through your hands, eyes, and voice to your partner so that the two of you can then use all that equal-and-opposite, joints-loose connecting to swing-bounce together to the songs that great swing vocalists sing and great swing bands play.
This equal-and-opposite way of connecting can also explain one of its outcomes: feeling joy together. The kind of joy that can come of letting go of the tensions that drive overachieving and replacing them with singing and moving together to the infectiously hand-holding, body-bouncing, and community-making rhythms of swing.