They Teach Swing Dance, Just to Give People a Simple Kind of Happiness | Great Little Studios

Dance makes shy, guarded people easier in their own bodies, and more relaxed — as if it lets another side of them show.

Anyone in Shanghai who dances swing or tango knows Te Amo. The bar runs live jazz, without a break, at least four nights a week, and at its center is a mid-sized dance floor, decorated in retro style, big enough for 100 dancers. A ticket costs 60 yuan, which is rare in Shanghai. Venues like it around the country have been closing one after another under high rents; few hold out for long.

On the night of May 3, as on every Friday, Te Amo hosted a swing dance ball run by DowntownSwing Shanghai. A dozen or so couples filled the middle of the floor, dressed in American vintage, young and old alike, catching the shifting beat of the jazz behind them, feet moving too fast to follow, now and then breaking into a wide figure where one of the pair spun or kicked. When the next song started, the rule was that everyone swapped partners at random.

These steps aren't unfamiliar. They are 90 years old: in the 1930s swing dance rode jazz around the world and stayed popular for the next 20 years, and the classic dance-hall scene in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction still carries traces of it. In China, swing dance has only been growing for the past 10 years.

The organizers, Xiaoxing and Lucy, were excited that night. They had booked a swing master who teaches on a global touring circuit to give a public class. In half an hour, the Korean swing master Hyunjung would take the middle of the floor and walk everyone through the footwork of Solo Jazz. She dressed playfully and spoke lightly, a tone that is a feature of swing teaching. Soon eighty or ninety people ringed the floor, craning to see what top-level swing dancing actually looks like. People who don't often travel abroad to study mostly see it on YouTube.

Over the weekend that followed, May 4 and 5, about 30 of them would spend their days in the studio taking class, dancing and working through steps with Hyunjung, Xiaoxing and Lucy, then dress up in "Gatsby" party clothes at night to keep dancing and performing at the ball.

Guests from abroad don't come often. Xiaoxing and Lucy have to send booking emails six months to a year ahead, pay round-trip travel and board, and put down a sizeable course fee in advance. The next master class at this level won't come until the end of May, when the Barcelona swing partners Sonia and Hector teach four days straight; the two specialize in improvised steps and rhythm in the Lindy Hop and Solo Jazz styles.

All of it is put on by the DowntownSwing Shanghai swing dance group. Xiaoxing and Lucy, who founded it in 2017, have worked with Te Amo's owner for two years. They rent the room on Tuesday and Friday nights for balls and beginner taster classes, to bring newcomers into swing dance culture, and they also teach in a dance studio on weeknights, without a break all year.

What the two of them wanted was simple: to put the pleasure of dancing, and of a dance ball, within easier reach of more people.

"We joke sometimes that swing is easy to interact with, down to earth and not that sexy. It's a happy dance, good for friends who stay home a lot," Xiaoxing said. To some degree that follows from how much of the dance's history was built on entertainment.

It is a culture of making friends by dancing. The Savoy Ballroom, the landmark public dance hall of 1940s America, had the collective, festive feel of its era: a floor close to the size of a stadium, room for three or four thousand swing dancers at once, and a big band on each side of the hall playing the same jazz tune. By then Black and white dancers were no longer kept apart there. In the 1980s, more than 20 years after the dance had faded, a few young Swedes went to see Frank Manning, a 72-year-old swing dancer the era had forgotten, and worked with him; that is how the dance slowly came back, and how it became the loose, varied thing it is around the world today. South Korea now has Asia's most developed swing scene; China, Thailand, Singapore, Japan and others each have communities of their own.

DowntownSwing Shanghai is not the only one. One of China's earlier swing groups was founded in Beijing in 2003. Swing Beijing's organizer, Zeng Weiming, was among the first Chinese to learn swing from foreign dancers and bring ball culture home, and he is well respected in the scene. Around 2013, similar groups took root in cities across the country — Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Changsha, Wuhan, Chongqing, Ningbo, Fuzhou and elsewhere — small, confined to their own circles, run in spare hours by dancers with day jobs.

In 2016, Xiaoxing, then a beginner, spent three straight days on the Great Wall at a swing camp Zeng Weiming organized; the round-the-clock heat of those balls gave a novice an enormous push. By then he was already a heavy enthusiast who used business trips abroad to hunt down balls, finding the addresses on Facebook. He described the feeling as "dancing and laughing until the muscles in my face go stiff and won't loosen."

Next to that, DowntownSwing Shanghai, founded in 2017, is still a young group. It may not be as professional as Swing Beijing, but it carries less baggage: everything gets worked out by trial, and it has a rough energy.

Since 2019 the group's events have settled into a pattern. On any Friday night, about a third of the people there are signing up for a ball for the first time — mostly office workers who have never danced and are a little stiff about it. Most find their way in through the group's official account or an event listing on Douban, and sign up for the beginner taster class to meet people. The steady supply of newcomers comes down to two years of unbroken promotion by Xiaoxing and Lucy: matching young people's tastes as closely as they can, word of mouth passed from friend to friend, and Te Amo's good location.

The two also want to build a club culture of their own from nothing, to make DowntownSwing a small place in Shanghai you can push the door open and walk into. "We've found that a lot of people around us want something like this badly. If nobody organizes it, then the city simply doesn't offer that choice. Other people in Shanghai run balls too, but everyone starts from a different place and does it a different way, and we'd rather promote it in our own way," Xiaoxing said.

In May 2017, Xiaoxing, then an electronics and communications engineer, and Lucy, then an auditor, started the DowntownSwing swing dance group on an enthusiasm that hadn't burned out — two years after they first learned to dance swing themselves. They meant to teach the classes themselves and design a friendlier system that was easier to enter, and by the end of the year they were also planning Shanghai's first Lindy Hop festival of 2017 (Lindy Hop is the most popular style within swing dance). The weekly ball at Te Amo had already started, open to anyone, under the name Swing Kids Party.

Preparing lessons four or five months ahead kept the opening from feeling rushed. Before the first recruiting post went out on May 3, the two had spent months practicing as partners — the frame, the momentum and the connection of the steps: "how to do the signature Swing Out more smoothly, how to switch between advanced Leader and Follower techniques, how to use footwork to express the structure of the music." Working that out wasn't hard. Beijing had the well-developed Swing Beijing to learn from, and from abroad there was a large body of video to study over and over. The two also went often to camps in Thailand and Korea, signed up for master classes, and kept placing well.

Xiaoxing, two years into running the group, described that stretch this way: "I was so excited I couldn't sleep, night after night. I'd climb out of bed in the small hours and start dancing right there at home, earphones in, jazz playing, imagining a partner dancing with me. A very strange state. Then I'd get up in the morning and go to work." Three months into teaching, he still wasn't bored. "It keeps changing and evolving, it isn't simple repetition," he said, and on weekdays he was already looking forward to the weekend's classes.

Recruiting students was harder than they had pictured. At first Xiaoxing and Lucy went to the crowded shopping stretch on Wukang Road and busked with dancer friends to pull people in, a QR-code board propped up beside them. It was early evening, and a crowd formed fast, but most people looked from a distance and didn't dare come closer; in the end one or two signed up for classes. "Looking back, we were pretty bold — a programmer and an auditor, who did we think we were," Lucy said.

Over the year that followed in 2017, they improved the course by trial. The dance had to feel simple and natural, easy to pick up, not intimidating. They split it into four levels that advance slowly, with nine groups under them, six lessons each, covering the classic step combinations, with special attention to interaction for complete beginners.

For the balls they kept inventing theme parties with a dress code — "Retro Swing Night of Headscarves and Vests," "Tropical Thai Night," "Halloween Horror Night" — pitched at young people's taste. One after another, foreign guests came: the American pair Jon and Jenna, Korea's Nalla and Jessica, Sweden's Gustav and Laia, all invited to the balls by Xiaoxing and Lucy, to meet the students' wish for exchange and teaching. Event notices went out every day, sometimes on Douban and Meetup as well. Few people read them at first, but over a year DowntownSwing became known to more people who knew nothing about ball culture. Then friends brought friends, and more of them came.

Getting newcomers at the balls and in class to loosen up was the next hard part for Xiaoxing and Lucy. Swing Beijing's organizer Zeng Weiming raised the same thing in a radio interview: "Chinese people have trouble learning to dance because they have no party experience." He joked that, being from the Northeast, "the usual way to relax back home is sitting on the heated kang cracking sunflower seeds."

Lucy doesn't think it's that hard. In class, "the whole atmosphere has to be relaxed, it should feel a bit lively," she said. Her trick is to pick a student at random to demonstrate, then crack a joke while critiquing the steps so the mood stays light. More often than not, she sees dance make shy, guarded people easier in their own bodies, more relaxed — as if it lets another side of them show.

Protecting the old etiquette while leaving room for new ideas is DowntownSwing's other "standard," what swing culture calls "the rules." No correcting a partner's form at a ball, because a ball is there to be enjoyed; no revealing clothes, no stilettos, no gym wear; dancers are encouraged to ask people of different levels to dance, and keep the right to say no. "Anyone can come and dance, but we still want some threshold, a shared understanding among everyone that this culture is worth respecting. Maybe that's a bit selfish of us," Xiaoxing said.

In July 2017, Xiaoxing went to Herrang, a small Swedish village near Stockholm, for the local five-week swing festival, 35 years old and known worldwide. Thousands of swing dancers and stars gathered in one place, and camps, balls, classes and jazz concerts all opened his eyes. "The whole village is a self-governing village of dancers."

Everyone — the front desk, the bathroom cleaners, the servers, the baristas, the people selling clothes — was a dancer. At night they came out to dance; in the daytime they took class, worked and went about ordinary life. Someone built a floating platform with a small table out on the lake and invited a partner to lunch on it. During the festival, the 99-year-old "Queen of Swing," Norma Miller, who had been dancing for seven or eight decades, came out to give a talk, still sharp and full of spirit, with encouragement for organizers from everywhere. Dance became the common language, and the way people looked after one another.

"A lot of things don't come out of nowhere. They build quietly from something very small, over decades, before they get to where they are today," Xiaoxing said, taking that kind of depth seriously. A few months after coming home, he and Lucy put on the first Shanghai Lindy Festival (Shanghai Lindy Festival 2017). Giving as their reason that "I was too busy, I had no time to prepare the festival, and I felt I was letting my boss down," both quit their jobs to build the group full time.

The festival ran three days straight. To hold costs down they used a dance studio, and tried to reproduce what the two of them had felt at swing camps abroad, following a strict check-in process, with master classes by reservation and limited places. The balls were the loose part: people dressed up, and more than 200 came over the course of it. It was the largest swing dance festival Shanghai had had. The second edition ran on schedule, and they wanted a live big band for the third, in 2019, but the cost was a problem.

By 2018 a contradiction had surfaced: after going full time as dance teachers, their workload had risen sharply while their steady income had clearly fallen. On weekday mornings, Xiaoxing and Lucy each worked at home writing copy, putting up posts, keeping the WeChat store running and answering questions about balls and classes as customer service; in the afternoon they met at the studio to talk things through, prepare lessons and practice; at 7 p.m. they started teaching, and on ball nights they got home at 1 a.m. Weekends were almost never off. Their income came mainly from tuition, and worked out to a few dozen yuan an hour each; count in the cost of inviting dancers from abroad, going to camps and booking venues, and the real figure was lower. The work itself had roughly doubled or tripled.

"Over a year, our income came down by a quarter from what we made at our jobs, and what was left of our savings went to swing events in Korea, Sweden and elsewhere. Luckily I'd worked for years and had some savings," Xiaoxing said. After quitting, he took up writing to record, study and think over his teaching, and wrote a piece called What It's Like to Be a Professional Swing Dance Teacher. He said, "Sometimes the pressure really is heavy, especially when people don't understand what you're doing, and you do regret it — but think back on it and you don't regret it after all." "Since I could switch careers to become a dance teacher, switching to become a writer isn't out of the question either," he joked in the piece.

The same bind holds Te Amo's owner, Kai. Rent in Shanghai is simply too expensive. By Kai's account, Te Amo needs at least 800 visits a month, at 60 yuan a ticket, to barely cover 80,000 yuan of monthly rent, with the rest of the costs carried by his side business helping students study abroad; in practice the bar sees 400 to 500. Kai can't say how much longer he can keep it going. "Since I love dancing myself, and I'm a tango dancer and organizer, I understand how much it matters to keep a good venue running. For now, doing that well matters more than anything," he said.

Lucy has stayed firm, maybe "because I'm still young; there's pressure, but not enough to worry too much about." She said, "DowntownSwing hasn't been going long, only two years, so we don't have that much experience to share yet. But on the whole we're optimistic. We haven't forgotten why we started, and everything will get better."

The trombonist Tiantian is a regular at DowntownSwing. He has noticed that in 2018 and 2019 more young people in Shanghai are interested in dance balls, though he can't say whether that has to do with the weekly, year-round beginner taster class here, or whether what surrounds city dwellers has changed and quietly shifted what they need from life.

Tiantian goes to swing balls two nights a week. They end late, and from there he joins the professional big band at JZ Club, a jazz bar four kilometers away, to play trumpet. He has kept this schedule for more than half a year.

The screenwriter Ranzi has caught the same change; she thinks people are more willing to accept dancing now. "Dancing is a bit like improvised jazz. It lets a stranger into your space, but it's a comfortable, uncomplicated way of being social." She mentioned one weekday when a group brought boxed lunches to Xiangyang Park on their break to swing dance, and a foreign tourist walking past joined in; nobody knew anyone, but they just danced, and the whole thing was light and easy.

Images courtesy of DowntownSwing. Cover image from WikiDanceSport.