Learn more about the Black Lindy Hoppers Fund and Collective Voices For Change, organizations that were founded in 2020 to support and promote Black dancers while educating the international jazz dance community on the African American history of Lindy Hop and other Black social dances."It wasn't presented as a Black cultural art form."Ībove, LaTasha Barnes dances the Lindy Hop with fellow ASU professor Christi Jay Wells. "When I first re-encountered Lindy Hop, it was presented as this thing that white people do at weddings," Barnes says. As she developed her dance practice, she felt a growing need to understand the jazz roots of the street dances for which she was becoming well-known. To Barnes and her great-grandmother, it was just called "fast dancing."īy the time she was 31 years old, Barnes had become a world champion in House, a dance style that surfaced out of underground music clubs in Chicago and New York. Lindy Hop is a jazz dance that originated in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s and has since gained a following across the world, with large communities in Sweden and South Korea. She now realizes that afternoon with her great-grandmother was the first time she danced Lindy Hop. There was always music and dancing in her childhood. Barnes holds a family photo of her dancing with her father, Thomas Barnes.
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