Re: The dance called WCS (was Re: Is Ballroom Dancing a dying Art?)

Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 09:26:29 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.arts.dance
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<Ronald H. Nicholson>; "Jr." <email-address-deleted> wrote in message
news:bdvqgv$l0k$email-address-deleted...
> Skippy Blair, one of the people who popularized the designation WCS for
> the slotted form of swing, has said that the first written reference to
> the term "West Coast Swing" which she found was in an old (pre-1950?)
> Arthur Murray training manual.
I very strongly doubt that. If you can, please append a credible source to
your outlandish and thus far only speculative statement.
> I any case, almost all WCS today has probably changed and is now a
> variant of whatever thy danced at the time that training manual was
> written. At WCS events, it's clearly changed to fit whats currently
> popular in music.
Although the popular look of mainstream (aka social) West Coast Swing has
evolved over the years, the technical details of the dance remain almost
completely unchanged from a detailed technique document that I saw from
1962. The ballroom dance community (as it exists today) did not add WCS to
their syllabii until many years later. Although the average WCS-dancing
ballroom dancer is still at a very early stage of development, there are
many top WCS circuit dancers who are also heavily involved with the ballroom
dance community. Any ballroom dancer who is interested in increasing their
knowledge of WCS and bringing their swing to the next level is always
welcome in the swing community. We shouldn't pretend that the two
communities are struggling for the rights of ownership of the dance. West
Coast Swing is one dance, not five -- we are all just at differing stages of
technical development in WCS.