Say What??? We’re Starting a Swing Dance Flash Mob Team!
The flash mob we want will have less Michael Jackson Poses and more Swing Outs. 🙂
Oh, hi, hey there! I wanted to share something really exciting with you. Many people over the years have mentioned that it would be super fun to do a Swing Dance Flash Mob in Austin, but the idea has been really intangible, somewhat ethereal, shrouded in mystery , almost metaphysical… There were unanswerable questions, like… How do we start a flash mob??? What do we need to do to make it happen? Would anyone even show up for practices?
Luckily, I’m here to help answer these questions! My name is Dominique, and I’m one of the Austin Swing Syndicate’s brand new At-Large board members. My favorite pet-project possibility during elections was a desire to help start a Swing Dance Flash Mob Team in Austin, or at least get the ball rolling until our members will be able to keep it afloat on their own! And so we’re going to be making it happen, starting on Thursday April 11th! At the Fed! From 8:45-9:45 in the Art Gallery!
Now, when I say “we”, I quite literally mean “you” and “me”. I can’t be a mob on my own, and I’m going to need your help. You, yes you, are a wonderful dancer. Whether you only know a swing out, or even just a basic east coast swing slow-slow-quick-quick, then you know how to swing dance, and you can help contribute to this project. This is an all-inclusive dance team, and we need numbers to make it work!
Have you ever seen the video of the Swing Dance Flash Mob that the Denver swing dancers did??? It’s amazing! Watch it now!
It starts off with three couples dancing, they’re pretty great dancers, and then there are 6 couples, and then there are 12, and it keeps building until the whole room is dancing! It’ll be kinda like that, but we get to make it up as we go along! We will all contribute to the choreography, we’ll vote on a song that we like the best, and we’ll all get to have input on how we choose to make it look. This isn’t a class, so if you want to learn new dance moves to expand your dance vocabulary, there are some amazing schools in town (check out Four on the Floor & The Lindy Project) where you can sign up for classes. We will be enthusiastically exploring performance concepts though, so it’ll still be an interesting venue for learning things that aren’t always covered in classes!
Oh, by the way, though I’m not the boss, I’ll be sharing what I know about performance freely, although it isn’t a ton. There’s always more to learn, and I hope that we can all contribute to making this awesome! I hope to see you there! Bring a song that you love (if you want to, but you don’t have to), we’ll dance to it, and we’ll take a vote on what songs work for what we’re trying to accomplish. Be ready to explore social dancing with performance in mind, it’s a really fun way to explore how the music moves us, and how to make that work in a performance framework!
I’m really excited to have this opportunity to work with more dancers in Austin–YOU!— and I can’t wait to see what we can come up with! I hope to see you there!