speaking swing with an accent

I refuse to apologise for puns.

As Belfast continues to blossom, and more and more new people come to classes and socials each month, it's always worthwhile asking a newbie for a dance or two.

For me, having a chat after (or during!) a dance is also largely unavoidable, and one of the things I usually end up asking is whether these newfound recruits have done any dancing before, often with my inquisitiveness driven by how rapidly the new dancers seem to pick things up.

Whether they are entirely new to dancing or have come from another style makes their nascent prowess no less impressive, but in the case of the latter, there are usually little giveaways as to their dancing background.

Salsa dancers have their hip sway, ballroom dancers are upright, ballet dancers are always on their toes, Irish dancers are upright and on their toes and have their arms straightened by their sides, and street/breakdancers have exaggerated rock-steps.

And I am sure that there must nuances of other dance styles that would seep into how someone swing dances (I don't know how to recognise them yet!) but nearly every time I ask if my hunch is correct it is misinterpreted as criticism. That couldn't be further from the truth.

I think of it in the same manner as having a chat with someone whose accent suggests they aren't speaking in their mother tongue - it's out of a genuine fascination that I'm curious to hear where they grew up, rather than any form of antipathy. And just as a slightly different cadence in someone's speech adds a little extra colour to their words, the unique colourful timbre of an individual's dancing adds to the myriad hues of a dancefloor.

In fact, speaking with an 'exotic' inflection doesn't even have to mean having origins in a different country - Northern Ireland has enough heterogeneity in its accents that you can tell when someone is from further than 20 miles away; and then it's considered polite to express amazement at how far they've travelled.

On top of that, accents not only reflect a dancer's background but can also reflect the background and culture of an entire community, country or continent, and the more I travel or watch videos online the more I start to recognise different aesthetics within our global swing family.

As a related historical note, two flavours of Lindy hop were considered to have developed in the USA in the late 1930s and early 1940s and were labelled as 'Savoy'-style and 'Hollywood'-style, as per their origins.

'Savoy'-style was so named for the Savoy Ballroom - the vaunted Harlem home of 'Shorty' George Snowden, Frankie Manning, Norma Miller and others, whilst 'Hollywood'-style became synonymous with Dean Collins: an erstwhile Savoy dancer who left New York in 1936 for the silver screens of Southern California and took his own brand of Lindy hop with him. (And depending on who you talk to, Collins is also considered the progenitor of west coast swing.)

The perceived differences between 'Savoy' and 'Hollywood'-style (and why the use of such labels has been abandoned by contemporary Lindy hop) have been thoroughly considered in an excellent article by Bobby White, but whilst these particular labels no longer hold water, I do not think I'm alone in recognising nuanced differences in the vernacular of current European, Asian and American dancers with regards to technique, styling and even demeanour.

What I', trying to emphasise, and especially to the new dancers, is that none of these differences has more merit than another: variety exists, and the global swing dancing community is all the healthier for it. So whether it's between or within scenes, on an international level or on an individual one, in all circumstances these differences celebrate the motley provenance of what is your own style.

We all speak the same swing language, we just do so with different accents.