While the roots of Swing dance, Lindy Hop, and other swing-era dances, in addition
to the music to which they are danced, have been fairly well researched and documented,
the history of dancing to Blues music has not received the same attention. The history
of Blues - the dance as well as the music - is tied to the history of jazz, and this legacy
merges with jazz dance as the music evolves, but it also maintains an identity of its own
throughout the history of African dance in America. The goal of The Blues Dance Project is to
document the personality of Blues dance, its forms, its context, and its development within
the continuum of African-American vernacular dances.
Over the last decade, a resurgence of interest in Blues dancing has been quietly evolving. It has been established in parallel to the resurgence of interest in Lindy Hop and has been directly and profoundly influenced by that. As social Blues dance has gained momentum and interest across the United States and the world, more and more students of the dance are asking about its history.
The Lindy Hop scene has always had a strong contingent of dancers who stress the importance of staying true to (or at least being familiar with) the original forms of the dance and their reasons for wishing to do so are sound. To be able to fully express yourself through an art form, knowing the background, philosophy, culture, and history of the form are essential. The Blues Dance Project aims to supply the same kind background information and cultural context to the Blues dance form as we have for Lindy Hop.
Blues dance in many ways is the red-headed stepchild of jazz dance. It is many of the steps, movements, and emotions that were too "raw" to be widely adopted in performance or public dance. For this reason, documentation is not as plentiful or easily located as it is for other jazz dance forms.
The Blues Dance Project is the search for this documentation; and the goal is to create a repository of video and film clips, stories, interviews, books, articles, and any other related materials that will help answer the historical questions about dancing to Blues music: "What was Blues dance?" "What is Blues dance?" and "What is it becoming?".
