The Savoy 's dance floor, as Panama Francis – drummer with the Lucky Millender Orchestra during some of the Savoy 's most hectic years - used to point out, was sacred. Special reverence was paid to it although it is ironical that his daughter Naomi, as a very small girl, is probably the only person who can claim to have peed on it (as well as being spanked for doing that! Reputedly by Count Basie himself no less!)
No smoking was allowed on the floor and offenders were abruptly ejected after one warning. Each night cleaners scraped off offending pieces of gum, scrubbed the whole floor, and had it polished ready for Charlie Buchanan's meticulous morning inspection. This was not cleanliness for its own sake. Period pictures show the intensity of the dust, especially on the men's clothes that resulted from the polish being ground down each night. The floor had to be kept in excellent condition. Being one storey up periodical checks ensured it didn't collapse and send the dancers crashing through to the floor below. Exaggerated claims about the floor being replaced every three years however should not to be believed.
More talented dancers, commanding between them an immense range of dance forms, graced its surface than probably any other dance floor in the world. Harlem 's unique versions of downtown ballroom dances proliferated, alongside the “correct” versions, and many others from around the world. Alongside the huge range of dances on display during the regular evenings, other dances were performed in exhibitions and cabarets during the special evenings organised by the different clubs and fraternities that booked the Savoy . Thus the Lindy Hop was not predestined to be the, Savoy dance.
When the Lindy Hop did first make its way onto the ballroom floor, it rapidly began to “colonise” the Savoy like an unwelcome weed in the garden, as far as the management were concerned. They saw it initially as the harbinger of mass unruly behaviour that the Savoy had done its best to prevent from day one. However everything turned out differently from such expectations. Harnessing the dance's exceptionally varied potential, its already underway development into three major different forms – social, competitive, and performance – were turned into distinct forms of “entertainment”, and for the most part kept quite separate. None of these developments were planned by the Savoy's management, but rather consisted of attempts to keep the dance under control, but in so doing created the means for its even more rapid and widespread development across the USA and eventually around the world.
The three main modes of the dance at the Savoy were:
“ Social ”
in which couples dance for their own and everyone else's enjoyment at the same time. Choreographed routines were seldom used, as every couple danced considerately in a way that took account of everyone dancing around them. Thus the bouncers would ‘correct' anyone whose dancing they considered posed a danger to anyone else.
“ Competition ”
where individual couples are out to “win” and thus dancing in “opposition” to everyone else on the floor. They use as much space as they can whilst dancing primarily to impress the judges or the audience if it is being decided by their applause, as it was during the Sunday night “opportunity contests” that were switched to Saturday nights in 1936. Various “exhibitionist” steps are thus used in this mode which in a “social” situation would be considered “dangerous.”
“ Performance ”
In which one or more couples dance to entertain an audience so that it could well be “competitive” in the sense that they were vying for the applause of the audience with other performers, yet “social” in their attempt to enable the audience to “get happy!” In this sub-section the site will look at the three main generations of “Savoy Lindy Hoppers” who frequented the ballroom and who came to be a major asset for attracting downtown and out-of-town visitors to the ballroom.
Many of these "Savoy Lindy Hoppers" competed in the main annual competition - the Harvest Moon Ball, but not all. There was a fair amounts of cross-over between these three groups but there were also those who preferred performing to competing and visa versa or stuck entirely to “social dancing.” On the other hand the development of the “the Circle” (or “Jam circle” as it is now known) crossed “competition” with “performance.”
“in the circle”
It was most definitely competitive in the sense of one couple trying to out-dance another, but distinctly performance in that the actual short-lived opportunity to indulge in otherwise prohibited full-out styles of the dance, were taken full advantage of.
Although the bouncers enforced these “divisions,” most of the dancers understood the need for and respected them anyway, and thus didn't need to “being told”.
|
