Rochester Lindy Hop Reunion

(Rochester, 18–20 October 2019)

A thriving, resilient society is a patchwork of overlapping communities. Thriving comes from specialisation. Resilience comes from decentralisation.

Some communities are hierarchical. Others are flat. Some are competitive. Others are cooperative. Each one has a language. To flourish as an individual is to find a mix of communities—and solitude—that suits one best.

Dance and music are universal. So is silence. While the medium is not the message, the medium does define aesthetics, to which one is drawn at a visceral level.

Identity is the continuity of memories. Soundtracks glue memories together and, later, evoke them. Dance reveals the illusion of time. Past does not vanish. It all is one long conversation.

Some individuals are like music. They realise that, sometimes, in order to keep running, one must stay in place. They grow but do not age. They tie past, present, and future together. They tie people together. They facilitate the Conversation without ever attempting to dominate it.

Motley Hue

(NYC, 29–31 March 2019)

Humans speak a multitude of languages but are rarely fluent in any one of them. As a result, one may have to invoke multiple languages to get the intended message across. By contrast, committing to but one language helps live a story with just enough ambiguity to engage its narrators, as long as for each narrator the story remains interesting. One should then refrain from rewriting the story by volunteering a translation ex-post.

The affirming sadness of New York.

Snowbound Blues

(Rochester, 2--4 March, 2016)

Competition extinguishes the supply of mediocrity and, with it, through habituation, the demand for mediocrity. Competition depresses the pay. Only the driven and the passionate remain---those musicians who live music and enjoy being alive.

Blues is alive; there is little point in being anything else. The scale seduces. The downbeat uplifts. The rhythm swings. Repetition reassures. The melody is free. The dancers look ahead, invent, for the dance is but a concept waiting to be operationalised.

Mission Fusion Extravaganza

(Foster City, 10--14 March 2016)

Freedom is trust. Trust requires intelligence and the expectation of intelligence. Effective intelligence is scarce if only because wealth is scarce and unequally distributed. Trust requires some commonality of experience or values. The exercise of trust requires the willingness to bear risks. This willingness is facilitated by wealth and also by the culture of restlessness, which promotes novelty seeking.

That freedom leads to joy and that joy (or at least its pursuit) is a worthy goal are relatively new (Enlightenment) ideas, not universally accepted.

Motley Hue

(NYC, 13--15 March 2015)

A new dance is being born. A new dance would typically coalesce new sounds, rhythms, moves, and hitherto rejected social practices. By contrast, fusion fails to advocate a set of moves, or at any rate refuses to endorse a standardised vocabulary. Instead, fusion promotes an overarching principle, an imperative: Anything---blues, latin, lindy hop, waltz, tango, contact improvisation, zouk, ballet---goes. Any narrative that feels good and is enhanced by music goes. Any music goes, too.

The inclusiveness of the fusion imperative need not be self-defeating. Most successful scientific endeavours and art forms are defined similarly: "X is whatever those who do X do." Economics and jazz are like that, without compromising their identities.

The fusion imperative emphasises musicality (well served by slower tempos), improvisation (which may call on any dance style), close connexion (e.g., in close embrace, to a clear beat), and subtle communication (through weight changes, weight sharing, and role reversals). The emphasis on communication and the espousal of the ambiguity of music and movement beget (occasionally Punchdrunk-level) art, which one can enjoy both within and without.

The comprehensiveness of dance styles allows for a variety of stories to be told. So one can be sincere with every partner, to every song, for half a song, for however many songs it takes to tell the story. The music coordinates, but does not subordinate.

Intensity is eternity.

Club Villa Malcolm in Córdoba

Stilettos are indispensable for gliding backwards---reluctantly, pointedly, delicately. Long flowing hair does not belong; it suggests gravitation. The function, communication, dictates shape.

Common to both dance and architecture is the principle that what looks better feels better. Dancing is an inherently urban activity. A choreographed ballet is an exercise in urban planning. A social dance is an evolving medieval city. Awareness of, and merging with, others is an urban pursuit.

One experiences oneself through others, who motivate one to be, to change---or to have the others replaced. The gratification from enlisting (with) others merges the selfish and the selfless. It is an evolved stimulus for social learning.