A Revival in Full Swing.

THE SIGNATURE DANCE OF THE 1930S IS BACK IN STYLE.

A lovely thing has happened at the end of the twentieth century: There has been a serious, studied revival of the lindy hop (a k a the jitterbug)--the dominant social dance of our century here and abroad for some thirty years until the 1960s, when partner dancing yielded to the tribal style of the twist. The lindy never "died," of course; it could still be found here and there, in nightclubs, American Legion halls, and Las Vegas casinos and on "The Late Show" whenever 1930s musicals were being shown. It was even being "curated" by organizations such as the New York Swing Dance Society, organized in 1984, which included such veterans as Frankie Manning [see page 53] and the late Al Minns. In California, the torch was being carried by Jonathan Bixby and Sylvia Sykes, students of Minns and Dean Collins. Minns's influence extended to Sweden, where he had worked with the Rhythm Hot Shots (a Scandinavian group, despite the name). At the same time in England, the Jiving Lindy Hoppers--like the Hot Shots--were studying videocassettes of Hollywood musicals, including Manning's choreography for the 1941 movie Universal made of Olsen & Johnson's 1938 knock-about Broadway revue, Hellzapoppin.

The revival got fully, officially underway after California punk bands, tired of the grunge look and turning to an earlier era's style of clothing, began grooving on the clever lyrics and melodies of the jump-blues style of swing music. Bands like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, and Lee Press-On and the Nails were recycling the popular music of the swing era--certainly some of the greatest dance music of all time.

The appeal of swing lies in its huge, raucous vocabulary and in the power of its syntax. Dancing to, say, Ella Fitzgerald's recording of "Mack the Knife," you can incorporate, when you feel the music calls for it, the bop, the funky chicken, the twist, watusi, mess-around, boogaloo, Q.T., Suzy Q, and tandem Charleston; all kinds of shags and shimmies; and applejack, Shorty George, spank the baby, popeye, camel walk, dead man's walk, and fall off the log.

It's difficult to believe, now that self-expression in popular dance has degenerated into thrashing and moshing (the dance equivalent of autism), that there could have been a popular dance that everybody knew how to do, that had a built-in system for spontaneous choreography that was as sophisticated as it got. But there was, and it's the reason so many young computer programmers get off work and head for dance class. Lindy hop lets two adept dancers have a conversation with the music that's almost as idiomatic as the song itself. In the case of a song by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, or Duke Ellington, that's working near the level of genius.

We owe the dance to the cultural ferment in Harlem in the 1920s, when it was filling up with the grandchildren of slaves who had moved up from the south but still had patches of poor European immigrants. The lindy was born at the Savoy Ballroom on 140th and Lenox Avenue and got its name at a charity ball in 1927, soon after Charles Lindbergh had hopped the Atlantic. A reporter asked George "Shorty" Snowden, the king of the Savoy, what that breakaway step he was improvising was called. "The lindy hop," Snowden replied.

The Savoy was a magnificent place. An entire block long, it could hold several thousand dancers. But it was only one of a number of huge ballrooms in Harlem. Tens of thousands of dancers hoped to graduate to the Savoy, the top of the heap. All the ballrooms had contests, with cash prizes or a chance to dance at the Cotton Club or the Apollo with Ellington or Ethel Waters. In the days before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in sports, playing jazz music or excelling at jazz dancing was the African American's first great way to fame.

"Movie stars came to the Savoy--Greta Garbo was there all the time--to see us dance" says Manning, who invented the air step and dethroned his idol, Shorty George, as king of the Savoy in 1935. Ironically, the step was a variation of Shorty's signature exit: being carded off kicking on the back of his partner, "Big Bea." Manning decided he would start to carry off his partner, then suddenly flip her over his head. They tried it, the house went wild, and Manning went on to choreograph and direct the pro troupe put together by the Savoy's bouncer, "Whitey" White, when first the 1939 New York World's Fair and then Hollywood called.

From the day it opened, the Savoy was integrated--probably the only public institution in America where both white and black people entered through the front door on an equal basis to dance together. "All we cared about was can you dance?" says Norma Miller, who was dragged into the Savoy at the age of fourteen by a star dancer who saw her dancing outside on the sidewalk and wanted to prove that he could win contests with any partner, even a kid off the street--and they won. Miller became a regular; by the time she was twenty, she had danced before King George and Queen Mary of England. Manning had a white partner for a while. There were no prejudices at all; dancers could weigh 300 pounds, be white, or have only one leg--it didn't matter at the Savoy, if they could dance. Shorty George made his career out of being low to the ground and finding ridiculous steps that got him even lower.

The lindy hop benefited from fusing the beats of the hugely popular Charleston and the collegiate shag; having two different basic rhythms allowed dancers to syncopate, as the musicians were doing. The dance marries the syncopations of African polyrhythms to the figures and geometry of European partner dancing, just as swing music fuses polyrhythms with the eight-bar structure of European popular music. In a moderately complicated Basie song, you'll have eight-bar melodies played against twelve-bar blues structures, with call-and-response dialogues (riffs) breaking out between the sax and trumpet sections, and the rhythm section passing around four-bar phrases.

You may have difficulty finding the downbeat, but there actually is a system to these syncopations; it resembles the development section of a Tchaikovsky symphony. A popular song played at a Saturday-night dance broadcast over the radio could be a rhythmic drama of a very high order. Intellectuals appreciated this; most people just grooved on it, but because the basis of the system was African, middlebrows didn't feel they needed to think about it. This dance music was like clean water and cheap gasoline--there in abundance, taken for granted by most, part of what made Americans more hopeful than Europeans during the 1930s. John Cage pointed out that ever since Beethoven, rhythm has had to play second fiddle to harmony in classical music theory--and indeed, dance music is often looked down on, even by jazz players of the post-swing era.

But African polyrhythm, like algebra and calculus, is one of the world's great mathematical inventions, and it survived in America despite all that the slaveowners did to keep slaves uneducated and unable to communicate. They didn't have to go to school to learn it. And if the masters forbade them to play the drums, they beat out the rhythms on their bodies, stamped it out with their shoes, snapped their fingers, pecked with their heads, and popped their shoulders. Dance was larger than any individual: it embodied freedom within a community--separate rhythms linked to a master beat kept the community alive.

During World War II, swing music sustained the morale of the Americans at home and overseas. Hitler hated its power so much that he sent German kids who loved it to the concentration camps, along with the Jews. (The 1993 movie Swing Kids is basically true--think of being sent to your death because you loved a dance!) Nor is it an accident that the great period of American pure dance choreography got its start when the whole populace could do a dance that allowed for subtle, complex communication between two dancers. Balanchine, who never hesitated to use any movement that appealed to him, worked variants of the lindy into, for example, The Four Temperaments and Agon; and even Merce Cunningham, who admired the Savoy dancers, according to David Vaughan, continues to show a similarly complex rhythmic invention.

The Charleston had swept white America in the aftermath of World War I, but since then African rhythms have underpinned all our popular dance music. When Benny Goodman took black swing arrangements on tour and hit the big time, white America wanted to learn the dance that went with the music. The top dancers at the Savoy became international stars, demonstrating the dance on world tours; however, the dance they showed was the competitive aerial dance, not the smooth, grounded social version danced in rather deep plie, with the knees turned in and out and the ankles popping--the way most people actually danced.

Progressive jazz sheared away from dance music after World War II, leaving the gutsier blues behind to give rise to rock and roll. Early rock, such as "Heartbreak Hotel," has a lot of rhythmic drama compared with neorock ("Pink Cadillac"), yet even that Presley classic lacks the polyphonic interplay of melody and rhythm that made a swinging song like "Just a Gigolo" so inspiring for dancers. When a club deejay plays it, I often see better choreography improvised on the dance floor in San Francisco than what's on the ballet stage or in most lofts around town. The absence of large, organizing rhythmic structure is the major fault of big-time choreography today. If it ain't got rhythm, what kind of dance can it be?

RELATED ARTICLE: FRANKIE MANNING

Eighty-five-year-old Frankie Manning is credited with inventing the most famous--or at least the most photographed--of all jitterbug steps, the one where the guy throws the girl over his shoulders. Manning is modest about the honor. He credits the tradition and Nays of the dance, "It kept us young. It kept us happy in hard times. It just makes you smile."

Born in Florida, he grew up in Harlem. where the sounds of the music coming out of the ballrooms encouraged him to imagine being in there dancing. His mother taught him to dance and took him with her it) rent parties but told him he'd never be a dancer. Then Whitey White noticed him and put him on the farm team, and his life became that of a Paris Opera Ballet petit rat, practicing for hours a day and observing and adapting other dancers' steps. He popularized a pantherine stance, dancing on the balls of his feet in deep plie, dropping his head and stretching out into a long, catlike line when he swung out.

Through the thirties he functioned as artistic director of Whitey's Lindy Hoppers and worked in Hollywood movies and the 1939 New York World's Fair. After service in World War II. he formed the Congaroos, a spectacularly gymnastic out fit. But jukeboxes were eroding the market for big bands and broke up jazz into specialty audiences, as rock and roll would do twenty-five years later. The 1950s audiences didn't need to blow off steam, as did those during the Great Depression and World War II and as those in the nineties now do.

Because Manning had always had some kind of job when he wasn't dancing full time, it was no surprise that he would eventually take and pass the civil service exam to work at the post office while continuing to dance socially. He was a postal worker in 1988, when California dancers Erin Stephens and Stephen Mitchell, pupils of Sylvia Sykes and Jonathan Bixby in Santa Barbara, sought him out to teach them the lindy. "We were on fire." they told him. "We had to learn that dance." Stephens and Mitchell became major forces in the lindy revival, which in turn boosted Manning's career as a choreographer. Among his triumphs were Broadway's Black and Blue (1989), for which he won a Tony, and the lindy scenes in Spike Lee's Macolm X (1992). Now hailed as a Living Legend and profiled on 20/20 and in GQ and People, with an HBO movie pending, he conducts workshops the world over. To male students he says. "Give her something to look at. smile, and treat her like a queen."

His eighty-fifth birthday last May was a movable feast, celebrated in New York City, San Francisco. Catalina. London, and Stockholm in rotation. Swing dancers came to San Francisco from Australia. Japan, Singapore, Sweden, England, and all the Western states to honor the King of the Savoy. Meanwhile, in California, New York, and Illinois gyms, the lindy is now being taught like a martial art or yoga.

Former Rhodes scholar Paul Parish lives in Berkeley, California, and contributes to Ballet Review and San Francisco magazine. This summer he was on the faculty of the 6th Festival of Contemporary Dance, hem in Poland.