3. Swing

The most popular pairing of all for a blues short dance has been, probably unsurprisingly, swing. A few teams, like Americans Madeline Heritage and Nathaniel Fast, have opted to tackle a full blues program; a few others, as discussed last week, are daring the hip-hop option. But swing provides, frankly, the easiest opportunity for a team to showcase their ability to handle multiple tempos and swift mood shifts -- and may also simply be more fun to train daily.

Swing dance saw a popular resurgence in the late '90s, in a story with which many are already familiar involving things like Gap commercials, the Brian Setzer Orchestra, and indie films featuring Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. Today the major styles primarily competed are West Coast Swing, East Coast Swing, and Lindy Hop.

The formalized East Coast Swing and frequently improvisational West Coast Swing bear very little affinity to the swing of ice dance, which generally roots itself in a Big Band-era style. The traditional Lindy Hop is its closet floor companion; The Lindy Circle offers a nice overview of Lindy Hop's origin, as well as swing's development from that original style. Wikipedia, too, provides a cursory but useful guide to Lindy Hop and swing moves. And while many vintage swing videos are available, this montage gives a pretty good glimpse of a variety of moves (albeit missing the component of original accompanying music):


Swing in ice dance was last seen in a big way in the 2008-09 season, with an original dance that called for rhythms and dances of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. One especially spirited senior OD came from Sinead and John Kerr, whose rhythms, interestingly, were officially classified quite specifically as West Coast Swing and Lindy Hop:


For the juniors, who faced the same OD requirement, Maia and Alex Shibutani put out a fun Big Band program:


The advantage that these prior teams had, of course, was the absence of a requisite pattern and mandated rhythm; while they still choose to showcase a variety of rhythms, they're at greater liberty to experiment with movement (within, of course, the ordinary restraints). On the other hand, such restriction as faced by today's teams makes the accomplishment of the more successful SDs all the more impressive. Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron of France, champions at JGP Courchevel, have one of the stronger swing SDs this season, using The Brian Setzer Orchestra's "The Dirty Boogie" for that segment. Note the nice aerial movement from Papadakis, as well as some fairly authentic liftwork: