Is balboa a black dance?

[u/Ok_Cut_9668]

We have plenty of evidence for Lindy Hop, but not so much for balboa. There’s the beach clip and a bunch of videos from Bobby McGee, all featuring white dancers. Do we have evidence for if balboa was first danced/created by African Americans?

[u/riffraffmorgan]

Have you read Bobby White's "A Way Too Brief History of Balboa"?

[u/step-stepper]

I don't think that's a good way to describe it.

IMHO, it is a mistake to characterize either as a "Black dance" as if some sort of perpetual ownership exists and no one outside of that group ever mattered or will matter. People do not understand how cringey and awkward it sounds to many people outside of swing dance.

Lindy Hop has its roots very clearly in New York dancing culture and in Harlem social dancing specifically, although of course it grew to be a much larger phenomenon than that. It has deep roots specifically in African-American culture in New York, but also influences from broad U.S. social dance traditions of the time.

We know that some Black dancers did forms of Balboa, as Bobby White talks about here. Would be much harder to say that Balboa grew specifically out of social dance traditions specifically in Black spaces the same way Lindy Hop arguably did, but as with any dance tradition in the U.S., it would have intersected with it. All of the old timers' stories are about learning it at high school, in ballrooms, etc. from other dancers like them. There's no evidence that it was ever "invented" by any specific ethnicity of people.

https://swungover.wordpress.com/2019/01/17/swing-history-101-socal-swings-1935-1939-ish/

I imagine that many of the old timers who did Balboa would cringe at anyone saying "Balboa is a Black dance" although many of them would have respectful things to say about some of the individual Black dancers they knew.

I'm not sure if any of the Lindy Hop old timers would've liked people saying it about Lindy Hop either, and in fact a handful of the living old timers tend to chafe at any characterization that they weren't friends with and dancing with non-Black dancers in New York.

[u/Centorior → u/step-stepper]

Thank you for sharing the link! Great read. I also just took in that these were Black dances and never really looked deeply into it, partially due to sensitivity.

[u/step-stepper → u/Centorior]

Honestly, many organizations and a handful of self-described "historians" do a real disservice to how complex and varied these dance traditions are in the way they flatten the history of Lindy Hop for political reasons.

Here's an old post on this Reddit that describes the way swing dancing with a Lindy Hop flair took off in Harlem and spread throughout the U.S..

https://www.reddit.com/r/SwingDancing/comments/978rqy/profile_of_the_lindy_a_swing_through_history_with/

There are similar accounts of the social evolution of Lindy Hop outside of Harlem through the stories of the California old timers that Bobby White transcribed in this other history he wrote.

https://swungover.wordpress.com/2019/01/17/swing-history-101-lindy-comes-to-socal-1937-ish-1945/

[u/Separate-Quantity430]

No.

[u/Liqourice_stick]

So last year I came across a scene in the 1933 Japanese silent film “The Dragnet Girl”.

The film was set to a musical score, a project composed specifically for the film. Part of the composer’s process was reinterpreting the music for a “swing dance” scene that appears several times throughout the film. The dance scene appears to be an early hybrid of foxtrot coughs, so early Balboa.

This is a 1933 film— arguably suggesting that the dance style is somewhat “culturalized”. Which arguably puts the notion that Balboa “started” in California in the early 30s under contention.

That post was not taken well. And some of the responses here… well, I feel they demonstrate why.

So in accordance with the evidence in “The Dragnet Girl”— and the academic understanding that “black art” in this context alludes to “minority art” and specifically: “minority from a Western Lens”, then yes, there is is a foothold to suggest Balboa is a black art.

[u/swingindenver]

Yes. Some things to consider - African-American dances are fertile with high transmission rates - Dr. Thomas DeFrantz (sp?) in a CVFC talk. 

Many dancers in the Bobby McGee clips and others weren't coded white; many were ethnic minorities.

https://youtu.be/a9aFR3TT0KQ?si=exo3XequF5Yms9p-

[u/Liqourice_stick → u/swingindenver]

I think the response to your post demonstrates my particular frustrations with the American Swing Dance culture.

Thank you for sharing— I don’t think anyone who studies the arts, particularly American jazz, would be surprised by this expository statement.

[u/SpecialistAsleep6067]

An account with a single karma point and this post trying to stir shit.