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LindyHoofin
A dance blend of tap and lindy hop
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| LindytHoofin' in Action: My wife, Midori Asakura, and I captured mid-hoof at the 92nd St. Y |
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Lindy Hop, Tap, LindyHoofin and Blues
My wife and I teach dance, primarily lindy hop, at Sandra Cameron Dance Center. Lindy Hop is a distinctly American dance developed in Harlem in the late 1920s and danced worldwide through the mid 1950s. In the mid 1980s, people began to rediscover the dance in small pockets throughout the world. They enjoyed the chance to work up a sweat creatively, because lindy hop is danced to tempos as high as 240 beats per minute. They also discovered a rich vocabulary of dance steps created by individuals who shared it with community and passed it down from dancer to dancer. It's the 1930s version of open source code. What they also found was a dance that welcomed its dancers to express themselves within the dance by adding their own ideas for dance steps. We walked in their footsteps in the mid 1990s, finding trails to the sources already blazed. And, like those fifty years before us, we have added a pinch of our own flavoring to the long history of this improvisational dance. Before Midori was a lindy hopper, she was a tap dancer (she studied with the late Chuck Green, who was known as the "Godfather of Tap"). When we began dancing together as partners, she agreed to teach me tap. Quite accidentally, we began experimenting with tap syncopations in our lindy hop, and "LindyHoofin," as we call it was born. It's a blend of both dances that we've been performing for two years. Sometimes it is hard to believe that I found true love in dance. For me, this love affair was close to twenty years in the making. If you'd like to know more about how it happened, then read on.
Gotta Dance
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