Boston Swing Central and Community Boating are proud to present Swingin’ on the Charles!   A night of dancing under the stars on the banks of the river Charles.  This is another summer classic you won’t want to miss.  We’ll take over the docks at sunset, provide a lesson for newcomers and then we’ll dance until 11pm.

Community Boating has also donated a Door Prize of a free 60-day Sailing Membership which includes classes, boat usage and guest privileges.  We will raffle this off at around 10:30pm and you mus be present to win.

Lesson: 7:30pm to 8:30pm with Brian & Kellian (No Partner Necessary)

Dancing: 8:30pm to 11pm (rain or shine)

Admission: $10 General Admission, $8 for Students and Seniors

Proceeds will benefit Community Boating’s Dock Repair and Junior Sailing Programs, and Boston Swing Central’s Lindy Hop Preservation Program.

Community Boating  is located

on the Esplanade (between the Hatch Shell and the Longfellow Bridge)

#21 David Mugar Way,

Boston 02114

MBTA Red Line: Get off at Charles / MGH Station. Turn left as you exit the station, and cross the road towards CVS. Turn right and cross Charles Street, heading towards the river.  You will see stairs in front of you  to a footbridge over Storrow Drive.  Walk over the bridge; at the end, go down the stairs on your left.  Walk along the path along the river toward the Hatch Shell, and Community Boating will be about 200 feet ahead, on the right.

Where to park – Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary parking lot (see map at left).  Please bring parking ticket to the dance for validation,  at a reduced rate of $5.

Detailed Directions:  www.community-boating.org/directions.html

A fragrance-reduced environment helps create a safe and healthy social dance environment for everyone! We respectfully request that all patrons at Boston Swing Central refrain from using fragranced products before entering and while in the building as some of these products can cause adverse health effects for our dancers with fragrance sensitivities and allergies. While we recommend good hygiene and deodorant use, please take care to avoid highly fragranced personal care products such as cologne, perfume, aftershave lotions, scented lotions, and/or scented hair products. Our chemically-sensitive dancers thank you!

For those with peanut allergies, we do not regularly serve food except for our complimentary mints. We provide an assortment of candy during our Halloween and Valentine’s dances – some candy might have peanuts in them. We also might have peanut butter as a snack option at a late night exchange dance (Dirty Water, which is once a year).  Some patrons may bring a granola bar that has peanuts in it, and this could be in their bag.  If you are highly sensitive to peanuts please let us know and use caution.

For the rest of us, please be considerate of your fellow dancers and do not bring peanuts or peanut products for a snack.

No, we do NOT serve alcohol and most dancers prefer to drink water to avoid dehydration.

You should be 18 years of age or older to attend Boston Swing Central.

Hello,

Here is the Paypal button with all the options for the Dirty Water Lindy & Blues Exchange Staff registration. Please be sure to register as well, as we will be generating door lists from a script and the recorded registration will help us with head counts, etc. Also if you can host anyone or are hosting someone please sign up for housing….we’re looking forward to a great exchange.

We’ve given you a discount in the weekend registration price that barely covers the band fees for the weekend, we’ve also given you a discount on the T-Shirt price if you want one of them. Unfortunately, the Fenway Park tour, and the bus fees for the apple picking are the same as anyone else, as we are just charging the face value for them.

Step 1: Payment (make Paypal payment here)

Step 2: Go here and register.

Step 3: Go here and put your name in for housing.

Thanks!

Attending a Boston Swing Central dance you might often hear us champion Frankie Manning or invoke his name in some context. You might also here the names of Norma Miller and Dawn Hampton. These three are all dancers from the original swing era. And in the case of Norma & Frankie, they are both original Lindy Hoppers from the 1930s Harlem Ballrooms.

Frankie Manning was was a dancer, choreographer, performer and innovator of the Lindy Hop. He was a member of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers a perfomance troupe which appeared in several movies and in Life Magazine. After his storied career as a professional swing dancer, Frankie disappeared from the public eye and went to work at the Post Office where he worked for years. Very few if any of his co-workers knew he was a dancer, let alone an amazing one who had invented airsteps (or aerials).

In 1986, Steven Mitchell & Erin Stevens found Frankie, brought him out of retirement to teach them the Lindy Hop. Since his discovery, Frankie spent the remainder of his life teaching, performing and promoting the Lindy Hop becoming the dance’s Grand Ambassador, and it’s spiritual leader. Frankie died in 2009 right before his 95th birthday. Many of us learned from him or were inspired by his talks. We keep his memory alive by spreading the joy of swing dancing and in particular the Lindy Hop, the Shim Sham and his favorite music, Count Basie’s “Shiny Stockings”.

If Frankie was the King, Norma Miller is the definitely the Queen. She too was one of the Founding Lindy Hoppers who has spent a great deal of her time inspiring, teaching our current generation of swing dancers.

Dawn Hampton is a little younger and was from the next generation of swing dancers. She was also a jazz musician and a cousin of famous xylophone player, Lionel Hampton. She often appeared at dance camps where she performed and spoke eloquently about the love of the dance.  If you have some time, find her on YouTube and listen to her words or watch her dance, she will lift you up with her presence, truly an inspiration to us all!

You can park anywhere that is blue or green marked by the colored images on this map.
If it’s yellow, you can park there if it’s not snowing. If it’s red, don’t park there ever, you might be towed or parked in.
(Don’t park along the building, where it says Enterprise-Only)
Best: park near the movie theater and walk over. It’s a 3-4 minute walk.
You can zoom in on this map for more detailed info.

Carsie Blanton is an amazing dancer, singer, songwriter from Philadelphia and now she has a hit song that we wanted to share with everyone…and you might not know a lot of these dancers, but they, too are awesome Chance Bushman of New Orleans dancing with Giselle Anquizola of Los Angeles and Peter Loggins of Los Angeles dancing with Amy Johnson of New Orleans…

Carsie will be singing with Gordon Webster at the Dirty Water Lindy & Blues Exchange in September 2012, make sure you get your weekend pass here.

Check out more from Carsie here.

You can donate to us via Paypal or use a credit card here:

We are a 501(c)3 non-profit.

As you’ll often hear from our community, Frankie Manning was one of the founding fathers of the Lindy Hop….he definitely inspired many of us. Sadly he passed away a few weeks before his 95th Birthday…which was about 3 years ago. Anyhow, we want to keep his spirit alive by letting people know how awesome he was…So we offer you some history lessons with a series of videos that we found. The first, is Frankie retelling his story about the first aerial…(there are many video interviews with Frankie, we hope you explore them and get to know Frankie & his dancing).

The second is from a documentary on the Savoy Ballroom, which is part of a series, there are more on YouTube if you want to explore more…(this one has a brief interview with Frankie).

This is the amazing choreography from Hellzapoppin that shows Frankie & Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers at their peak, tearing it up…Frankie can be seen at about 1:15 in overalls and he’s the guy getting kicked in the butt…always a comic, Frankie used to tell the story of how his butt hurt for a few days after they did so many rehearsals of this high energy routine…

And sort of related, we have some really interesting and primitive footage from a Savoy Ballroom pavillion/exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair which was held in New York. The footage was shot using a home movie camera of the time and unfortunately, they didn’t have sound. It’s still fascinating to watch. There are many social dancers and as is still common with a lot of dances there are more women than men, so there are a lot of gals dancing with gals…(and this is before a lot of the guys shipped out for WWII).

Flash mobs are everywhere, and Lindy Hop, swing dancing and the Shim Sham have gotten in on the craze…these videos show you just how International the dance is and how you can have a complex flash mob, a less formal flash mob using the instant choreography of the Shim Sham (our Lindy Hop national anthem dance), or have a simple routine (check out the Boston Lindy Bomb Squad below). The point is to get out there and expose new people to the dance…and judging from the number of hits on this Denver Lindy Hop Flash Mob at the Denver Airport, a great many people have seen this, so it looks like it was pretty successful…

The Lindy Bomb Squad detonate Red Line passengers with their swingouts…!

Some dancers from San Francisco made this with a few special cameos. Pardon the French, but this is really funny and so true…these are mostly things we’ve either heard or said while dancing…some are, of course, exaggerated, this we call “comedy”.

Wow, what can we say, it was Kind of a Big Deal, and it’s taken us a week to recover! But thank you to all who participated near and far. For those who don’t know what this weekend was, it was a crazy complicated event to run!

First we had three nights of Gordon Webster and his spectacular band! Including a rehearsal night with a Question & Answer session. We had band rehearsals where we needed to open up the Whistle Stop so the band could get in. We had a 7 ft, Steinway B, grand piano we had delivered which needed to be tuned, so more trips to the Whistle Stop…all because we wanted everything to be perfect for for our first live recording at Boston Swing Central. There were band members flying in, some coming in by train. There was a lot to do behind the scenes. There were hotels to arrange, all kinds of things to take care of.

And we had a Kickstarter Campaign which we ran to also help raise funds, we blew threw our expected budget of $18,000 for the project. Gordon had some additional travelling musicians he wanted on the project and we also had more gear we needed to rent than previously thought. Overall this project is on track for about $22,000 right now, still estimated as there is still a lot to get done, but you get the idea! It is expensive. So, BSC ended up giving Gordon all of our proceeds from the weekend dances towards this project as well as he really needed our help to get this album done. We’ll have more here as we make progress. We thank everyone for their support.

Alongside the Gordon Webster recording we also had Andy & Nina doing a workshop. Their classes got us to think about our dancing in ways we don’t normally think and on top of that, they were a lot of fun. We hope you got to attend some of them, the wait list was ridiculously long and we apologize, the Whistle Stop is limited in capacity and we wanted it to remain a good experience with a relatively small class size. We could’ve rented a larger venue, but it would’ve been in a gymnasium or something and would’ve added to the costs and convenience of the weekend. We’re sorry if people were frozen out, we might try to do somethings different next year, we’ll have to see what transpires, but Andy & Nina will most likely be back in 2014!

We also declared that a few dancers are Kind of a Big Deal! And they were! Our first Jack & Jill competitions run by head judge, Gina Helfrich. That was a lot of fun and I think Traffic Cop, Jen Stout and the Librarian, Alain Fragman were declared by us to be Kind of a Big Deal in the Advanced J&J. And to Walter at Tino’s aka Diana Shiroma and her randomly selected partner Eddie Li (who competed as Stage Manager). These two we declared Kind of a Big Deal for the Open J&J! Congrats to all the other participants and winners…in our hearts, you’re all Kind of a Big Deal!