‘Round about the 1940’s popular artist Slim Gaillard coined a popular hipster argot called “Vout”. This “language” was documented by a promotional leaflet from Atomic Records. You can hear much of Slim’s dialect in his music. I know you are familiar with his music… it’s played frequently at swing dances and is a major influence of one of the swing scene’s favorite local artists, Kid Dutch. Be sure to drop by and check the dictionary out. I expect everyone to be speaking in a whole new way at the next dance!

The fall series classes are just around the corner. Sunday afternoons starting October 12th… by popular demand… back-to-back classes in Balboa and Collegiate Shag! A wise man once said, “Balboa is heaven on hardwood! And Shag is more fun than you can shake a stick at!” We’ve been getting a lot of requests for these classes and decided to cap off our 2008 class schedule with them. Both classes will start from the beginning by covering the basics of each dance. They will then progress into moves and style unique to each of the dances. The details are online and registration is now open for both classes. Be sure to reserve your spot soon!

Thank you for all of your support!

The results are in and we were voted the 2008 “Best Dance Studio in the Orlando area” on the WESH A-List! We couldn’t have done it without you!

We really appreciate all the wonderful comments!

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!