DJ Mark recently posted something that got me thinking. He wondered why almost all swing dancers in America end a song with a dip. He cited that you never see dips in vintage footage of swing dancing. He also claimed that ending songs with a dip seemed to be a uniquely American thing.

Initially, I tend to agree. Dips are used a ton nowadays and there are all different sorts of them. Some more fitting of swing and some styles that are borrowed from other dances that don’t seem to fit so well. However, my gut reaction was to say that dips were done back in the day. So it got me thinking about all the old swing dance footage I have seen in my years. While I don’t have time to sit and watch it all again, I tend to have a good memory… but no dips (at least memorable ones) were popping up on radar screen. So I started doing a quick scan of some old dance photos. Ah ha! I found a few dips… however, they were exceedingly rare to find but they were there. On closer inspection, many of these “dips” seemed to be part of some kind of trick move (such as a power dip or throw) and not as your usual song ending dip. While dip photos were rare, your standard run-of-the-mill dip photo was even more rare. Photographically, dips make nice pictures and they appear in lots of photos nowadays. One would assume that the same would have been true back in the swing era had dips been done as frequently as today. So with the lack of photo and video evidence, I can draw a very unscientific conclusion that dips were not done nearly as much back in the swing era as they are done today.

So given all this, are dips overdone nowadays? Are we as modern 21st century swing dancers preoccupied with the dip? If so, why?

Thanks to Mark for sparking some good thought! And if you have some photos or video of dips back in the day to combat my unscientific findings, please send them my way, I’d love to see them!