From Local to Global: Reflections on Dance Dissemination and Migration within Polska and Lindy Hop Communities

Dances do not travel—but dancers do. Professional individuals, like soldiers, merchants, fishermen, seasonal workers, artisans, students, and diplomats, travelling around the world and meeting colleagues and other persons, results in cultural contacts and exchanges not only connected to their professions but also, for instance, music and dance. In Europe, dancing has been and still is an important activity for socializing. Throughout preindustrial European society, dancing was a good opportunity for young people to meet and find a partner, for example at dances at crossroads as well as festivities, from weddings to midsummer parties where dancing often was a central activity. Moreover, people did not merely participate in dance events close to their home, but travelers entered new places where they had a chance to participate in dance events and join/partake in previously unknown dances as well as in dances they already knew. Such social gatherings have created and still create a flow of dances crossing all kinds of borders throughout the world—and we can see and talk about it as if the dances themselves travelled without the human body (Shay 2008; Nilsson 2008). In this article, I look at the polska and Lindy Hop as forms being disseminated throughout the world by means of dancing people. The reflections are based on written sources, video films, and other archive material, including the Internet, and on my own knowledge about dances and experiences of dancing.

Because of this double displacement of both dances and dancers, migration as a concept is tricky. In the book Migrations of Gestures, Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (2008) define migration as the “historical displacement of humans, gesturing populations from one geographic location to another” (xvi). Following Noland, I will use the concept of migration for the displacement of people. However, migration also occurs when cultural expressions like dance movements are displaced and merged into new cultural contexts. Undoubtedly, in order to travel, dances require human beings or some sort of media, thus ideas, forms, images, and descriptions of dances are also spread through new and old technologies. In that sense, I argue that dances do not travel but dancing does. In other words, in order for dancing to travel, the dances must be transferred, one way or another, into the bodies of new people who are dancing and who create innovative ways of using the disseminated dance forms.

In this article, I discuss the difference between the migration of dancers and the dissemination of dances, using two examples from Sweden. I also want to point out some profound changes that have happened since the nineteenth century in the Western world, which in a way constitute a new dancing reality. Today, local communities that are dancing are paralleled by dancing communities, where dancing a specific dance form becomes the focus rather than the gathering of the local community as such. This connects to how Judith Hamera defines dancing communities as “constituted by doing dance: making it, seeing it, talking, writing and fantasizing about it” (2011, 2). By contrast, in a community that dances, the dancing people embed the dancing activity in a broader context of socializing, and any dance event is thus meant to facilitate this kind of coming together. To draw on the British dance scholar Theresa Buckland’s words, we can see that in the beginning of the twentieth century

dancing was fast becoming the primary motivation for the event rather than the adjunct of an existing social institution. This transition from dancer’s earlier epiphenomenal character to a central raison d’être marks the dance practices of a modern urban society. Here was a dancing community rather than a community that dances; and this phenomenon was to become further distinguished among some dancing communities in the early twentieth century by an increasing focus upon one specific dance form.

(2011, 43)

Buckland writes specifically about England and the upper classes, but she also captures a much greater and wider change during the twentieth century. I suggest that today, in the twenty-first century, dancing communities have replaced communities that...