One of the anomalous things about being an assigned female at birth lead is the number of lead-first follows that I dance with. In part this happens because folk who typically lead approach me to dance, and when I state that I'm leading that night, they often cheerfully say something like "well, I have to learn some time." We'll talk about that again another day, friends, but today I want to give some quick tips that will make life so much easier for lead first follows. These

Cross-training is well-established as a way to improve your dancing. Skills acquired in one dance often complement those acquired in your first. Folks who start out lindy hopping bring those skills with them to blues dancing and most of the time this helps them advance quickly through beginning and intermediate blues courses. However, some key features of lindy hop can be counter-productive to "looking like a blues dancer". A brief aside: when it comes to social blues dancing

I started this post in the beginning of April, just after spending the weekend at Heartland Swing Festival in Des Moines, Iowa, competing with my friends. While the above video is from Steel City Blues' Solo Riffin' contest this year, it still demonstrates something that I think has become a major theme in how I view competition anymore. Riffin' as a concept is about throwing down with your friends, and trying to bring the best out of them by pulling out all the stops yourse

It's no secret: I love competing. For me, it is an opportunity to push myself harder, and to push my friends harder, and to push all of us to push the artform of blues. It's an opportunity to be inspired and to inspire and show each other how we understand the blues. In terms of how we compete, and what leads to someone winning, there are two parts to competing: technical prowess, and gettin' nasty. These two things can pull at each other and create a tension for judges. Tech

One of the best pieces of feedback I ever got was to dance my feelings honestly. If I was feeling nervous, I could use those feelings, rather than trying to ignore them. If I was happy and pumped, those feelings should be inside of my dancing as well. It was part of what most people would probably call a very strange private lesson, because we did very little dancing, and so much talking, but Sara Cherny fundamentally changed my dancing with those words. In a way, she gave me