When I was first learning Lindy Hop back in the late 90s, a seed was planted in my brain. I was taking a workshop taught by Paulette Brockington in Detroit, MI.  After we did a side pass turn she said, "Ok if you got it to work on that side, why don't you try it on the other side?"  

Through out my years of dancing and teaching, this idea would come back to me… and so I ran with it!

The Break-Down

What this method does is break down parts of Lindy moves in order to see the 4 basic underlying factors:
(1) The Time in the Swing-Out
(2) The Side we pass our partner on
(3) The Rotation of a Turn 
(4) Who gets to Turn

The time in the swing-out

In Lindy Hop the basic step is called a Swing-Out.  It's an 8-count pattern.  We “step-step” on the 1-2 and 5-6, and do a syncopated “triple-step” on the 3&4 and 7&8.

The Side we pass down

Partners start standing apart (open position), pass each other while coming together (trading places around the 3-count) until the catch (in closed position, on the 4-count, facing 180° from starting position), before again passing each other to return to their starting location (which ends on the 8-count). It's most common/traditional for dancers to pass each other with their partner on their right side each pass.  

But why only do things on the right?  If a follow can come in on the right, then why not the left?  And if a follow can exit on the right, then why not the left?  The Swing-out, Rejection and Reverse Swing-out were names that I learned associated with the various Right & Left combinations, the 'Acception' may just be a silly name to be the opposite of the Rejection (cuz who wants to get rejected all the time?!).  

Need to see this in action? Check out this video!

(More videos to demonstrate the ideas below are in the works, but please keep in mind that my wife and I just had a baby and are now back in work so they’ll be coming out really slowly)

The Direction of a Turn

If you're in a class and you get your basic step down, you'll likely be looking to do some turns too.  Everyone loves turns!   So the big question is "how many ways are there to turn?"

I love asking this and watching the gears turn inside students brains.  The easy answer is 2.  "This way and That way," haha!  People call them all different names "clockwise & counter clockwise," "right & left," "screw up & screw down," and perhaps more commonly known as "inside & outside."  

Most teachers will teach the two turns at the end of the Swing-out (with a Right side exit), but being the investigator I am, I had to ask, "if you can do them at the end of the last half (of the Swing-out), then why not at the end of the first half too?"

When you're at the beginning of your Lindy learning, you could practice these 8 moves (4 Swing-outs with Right & Left Entrances/Exits + 4 Swing-Outs with Right-Side Entrance & Exit Turns) for months and months and still feel like that you need more time.  But why waste the brain space with 8 things, when really there are only 3 things to remember:  

(1) The 8-count Swing-Out can be broken down into 2 halves
(2) Follows have 2 sides to enter/exit on
(3) Follows Turns can rotation in two directions

If we only consider these 3 variables, then we can see that they can be combined into 36 possible variations.

Who gets to Turn

This still feels kind of basic, doesn't it?  But how many beginner and intermediate Lindy Hop classes have only Follows doing the turning, and what fun is that?  Well I guess it’s lots of fun when you’re a Follow! But of course Leads like to have fun too!

So now we have 4 components: 

(1) Two halves of a Swing-Out
(2) Two sides to enter/exit on
(3) Two ways to turn  
(4) Two people to turn

Combining those can create 100 variations!  

So what does this all look like in real (dancing) life??

Here’s a workshop recap video from when I taught in Manchester (UK) in 2012. This wonderful follow was kind enough to demo with me. For many years I taught by myself, so I always grab people from the class to do demos. This video demonstrates the RR Swing-Outs & LL Swing-Outs; with Both Entry Turns for Both Dancers. It’s not super polished, but it gets the idea across. ;)

After Thoughts:

This is certainly a lead-centric move-oriented portion of the Break-down.  This is just one way it can break down Lindy Hop.  The technique for these moves (especially with regards to timing) isn't as straight forward as the charts would make it seem.  Also keep in mind that doing a bunch of moves doesn't necessarily mean you're dancing, or dancing in an interesting way.  I know I know! This is a methodology for practicing, learning, analyzing and teaching. It’s really a way of understanding the tools of Lindy Hop. It’s teaching you what colors of paint you have, not how to paint. The art is always yours to make.

Here's some context:  

As I mentioned at the top of the page, I was learning Lindy Hop from a teacher named Paulette Brockington (also known for organizing the American Lindy Hop Championship) taught us a Right Side Pass Turn and then said, "Ok if you got it to work on that side, why don't you try it on the other side?"  

In my early years of East Coast Swing and Lindy Hop that idea would pop in and out of my head while I danced and taught. It was a fun experimental way to try new things. In the late-2000s I went on a personal sabbatical where I didn’t have regular access to a dance community. Part of me really enjoyed my self-directed geeking out (aka researching), and part of me was scared that I might be away from a dancing community long enough to get really rusty and forget much of what I could dance and teach. So I created a dance notebook, which I hoped would help me to figure out a way to organize and remember what I knew.  I started to see commonalities in moves and saw that moves could be broken up into pieces, and that it only took a little practice to put them back together to do them in different ways. It helped to demystify Lindy Hop and make things easier to understand.  

The boils down to this: It’s easier to remember 4 things than 100 things!

The charts above are just the tip of the iceberg for the many ways I have broken down the Swing-Out.  I’m just not much for formally writing about it. There is still much more that I've taught in classes and workshops, and also much more to uncover.  I've also created a paralleled Break-down for following, styling, connection, and all manner of topics, some that are dance-specific and others that are universal (to the dances I know about) to partner dancing.  There's just so many aspects and I feel like they all deserve a break-down!  Over time my notebook has grown into a thick tome, and most of it is still in my short hand and rough sketches.  I still don’t know if what I'm making is a teaching guide, a student guide, or all of the above.  Hopefully sometime in the not too distant future I'll get my Follow’s Break-down up here too.

I first introduced it to a class in Cleveland around 2008. When I told them I thought I could teach them 100 moves in a 4 week series I recall a lot of skeptical laughs and comments. By the end of that 4 weeks I had nothing but converts and cheers. Certainly not everybody had every combination perfectly, but they learned all the skills they needed and were able to understand the formula. And that’s why they cheered. They learned a very unconventional method that helped them to demystify a complex dance. After years of fading in and out of the Seattle Lindy scene, I taught again at NW Dance's Seabeck Dance Camp in 2016 and I taught from the 36-variations chart. In 2017 I was invited to teach again and a number of people asked me if they could see the chart again, and I told them I'd do one better and put it up on my website.  So here it is!  

The Bottom Line:

The Lindy basic can be really challenging just to get, and can take years to feel comfortable regardless of your preferred role. Even people who learn it with a little more ease, often times will have concerns about not knowing enough moves, tricks and styling to not seem boring to their partner.  I personally had a tough time learning Lindy Hop, and it’s for that very reason I now find a passion of teaching it in ways that make it easier to understand. Hopefully these charts/ideas can help people to understand the interconnectedness of things, and ease the pressure knowing enough.  There are many more variables that can be added to the equation, but no matter how many you add, it’ll always be easier to remember the variables than all of the combinations that they create.