Re: Fixing hustle - Limirting the Damage

A previous poster suggested that those interested in seeing "sling 
hustle" should attend or have attended more big dance events. 

If I may offer a minority view here, big events are not where the action 
is at, dance-evolution-wise.

When a couples dance form first gets created, it is driven by the music 
of the day. Dancers find moves that work to the music they hear. As the 
music changes, so the dancers must too, to keep up with it. There are no 
conventions for that dance form, just yet.

Then the dance becomes popular and leads to big conventions. Ideas 
get exchanged, new patterns get popularized, and the dance grows. 

But then also, in a big convention, everybody is expected to do things 
in a similar enough way that they can all get along and dance, teach, 
and learn together. Music tempos get set. Syllabi get created.  Counts 
get specified.  People travel hundreds or thousands of miles to attend 
these conventions.  Everybody learns to do the same dance no matter 
where they go.

The dance stabilizes into a well-defined form.

With the dance stabilized, dancers can no longer dance to the music of 
the day. It's now the DJ that must conform to the dancer's wishes.  The 
dance drives the music.  Dancers begin to complain about the music. 
Wrong tempo, wrong style, wrong mood, etc. Dancers can no longer just go 
somewhere -- they check first to make sure they will find the type of 
music to which they have learnt to do their dance.

Some might say that stagnation begins.[1]  Though that's a harsh word 
and doesn't always apply to every dance.  Maybe we can say that the 
downhill slope begins.

I think salsa, hustle, and West Coast Swing might have reached that 
point.  The desired tempos and music styles are pretty narrowly defined 
for each of these dances. And the conventions are pretty big.  Quite 
likely, this is as good as they will ever get.

But this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

As new music comes along, we will see new couples dances to replace 
today's dances.  And the cycle will begin all over again.

With enough effort one might be able to hear trends in music, figure out 
which new types of beats are coming, and make rough guesses as to what 
the new couples dances will look like. In today's popular music I 
occasionally hear new variations of rhythms for which I don't see any 
new couples dances yet.

------
Notes
[1] Paso Doble is an extreme example of this. It has stagnated so much 
that in most of the world, most of the time, people only ever dance it 
to one specific piece of music, that was written over eighty years ago, 
and to no other. Paso Doble DJs can travel light.
-- 
Rahul
http://rahul.rahul.net/