West Coast and the Girl in the White Pants

I recently discovered that the "serious" dancers of Tucson all do West Coast Swing. Social dancing (not dancesport) is the big deal and I found some of the city's best dancers at a swing club event down the street.

I felt slightly out of place when I arrived. West coast was a little beyond my understanding. The basic looked normal, but then the advanced dancing looked like a Latin-swing-rhythm-hip hop-modern dance hybrid (what the heck?? YouTube video here). I took the beginner lesson...and proceeded to disregard most of it after I got on the floor. It wasn't a problem.

The thing about social dancing for a follow is that she really needs to "listen" to the lead's cues and then respond to them, because she has no idea what's coming. You can tell the follows who do know those cues, because the dancing between her and her partner is like water.

While there were many good dancers there that night, I was drawn to watch one follow almost every time she walked on the floor. The others performed impressive turns and dips and glided around their partners. This one though...she was different. I identified her as the Girl in the White Pants. She was tall, thin, and elegant. It took me the entire dance to figure out what it was she had that the others didn't.

To me, the "normal" west coast dancers travel and bend in several directions at once (up, down, sideways, diagonal); their energy goes out like a star. The Girl in the White Pants, though, had simple movement and didn't bend much. So why was she so eye-catching? Because her energy was focused in one direction and she moved mainly across the floor. Watching the way she travelled was the equivalent to touching fine silk...nothing about her was abrupt. When I saw her dance, I kept asking, "Where will she go next and how will she do it??" Yet my mind worked in the past with the other dancers: they'd perform a move and I'd say, "That was neat!" But she kept me in suspense. At the end of the night, I decided that I wanted to move like that, whatever it was.

I talked to someone about her later and discovered that she was relatively new to West Coast; she danced mainly ballroom.