Candlelight Dinner Performance nAbout 20 minutes drive from us is one of the largest schools for missionary kids in Europe called Black Forest Academy. Every year the school (BFA) hosts an evangelistic outreach to the German community. This year they asked Jennifer and I to do a swing dancing number where a couple meets, falls in love, and then out of love all within the length of one song. We thought that it might look odd if we did that since Jennifer is eight months pregnant so we recruited a German couple from our swing classes, Wolfgang and Tina to do the number though B-House still did most of the choreography for it. Wolfgang and Tina did a great job! Just below is a clip of the dance (B-House comes in near the end). Hope you like it! To see a slideshow of the event click HERE
Swingin' in Mauchen! Sinçe there's so swing dancing in our tiny village of 300, we decided to start it. We had our first swing class series in September with about 15 regular participants and a dance with about 30 people. We're in the middle of our second swing course and will be having another dance in early Dec. 2005. We have about 12 people in this class but more girls than guys. It's been a lot of fun and a great way to get to know people.
PICS & NOTES FROM HEIDELBURG! While in Heidelberg where we got go enjoy one of their swing venues. They had a small live band that played mostly Rockabilly music (sounded like the Big 6 - "We the Boys will rock ya'") but it was danceable. It was a decent sized crowd at a very clean place but there weren't many dancers there and most of them were women. There was one particular guy, Marcus, though sick, showed there were some great Lindy Hoppers in Heidelburg too. We ran into a few American military swing dancers there too! There are a few pictures below but they were taken late in the evening. Our next stop is Basel, Switz. and Frankfurt, Germany!
MUNICH! We were impressed with the level of dancing there (we saw savoy lindy and a slower collegiate shag than we're used to). Some of the people were interested in our Hollywood lindy (which they called "Dean Collins") which was very new to them. Also they're jam sessions were different in that whoever started in it never left the whole song (not as fun or exciting). It was very nice but still very different from the states.
At our Proclaim's recent annual conference we both gave a brief demonstration to our missions community of our Lindy Hopping (which most had seen us do before) and a very dance called "Shag." We received many great invitation to go to different countries and teach swing and perform as a tool for evangelism! We'll be looking for some fellow Christian swing dancers to go on some evangelistic tours with us. Please let us know if you'd like to join us! (Please note that most of our evangelism doesn't relate to swing but there's such a big interest that we use it when we can).
One thing that we love to do together is go swing dancing. We do a type of swing called Lindy Hopping, Shag, Balboa, and Jitterbug (East Coast). We're always looking to learn more and get better. We also need to get some costumes for our trip with Proclaim (like some 40's looking clothes, maybe some World War II looking uniform, etc.). If you have any connections on getting some dance clothes for our trips, please let us know. Thanks!
If you live in southern Cal and want to go swing dancing click the following link for this week's swing dancing list. It has most of the places each day.
Swing Dancing
