The Blues Collins Shim Sham

The Blues Collins Shim Sham

The swing dance world has a number of line dances/choreography, the most famous being the Shim Sham. The Shim Sham itself has a number of variations. A popular variation with Balboa dancers is the Dean Collins Shim Sham, created by (you guessed it) Dean Collins. This version differs from Frankie Manning's largely in aesthetic. The DC Shim Sham looks like a line dance a classic Balboa dancer would do. There are more foot fans, less movement in the hips, the body is treated more as a whole unit with no asymmetries.

For a performance in Chicago I learned Nick William's Dean Collins Shim Sham styling and interpretation. I felt like I could immediately connect with a partner in a close embrace Balboa connection and still do the footwork. I wondered what a more 'blues-y' version of this would look like. While learning this routine, there was a moment while we were practicing it slowly (about 135bpm) when sliding into the whole break I let my hip go, creating an angular line. I began to play with changing the lines and the grounding of the whole break. This inspired me to try to create an aesthetically blues version of this dance. This was in part and exercise to answer the question "At what point does this look like blues?". I reference this activity in my piece on movement cross-training.

I enlisted the help of some dancer friends and we hammered out a structure and refined months later. We had some initial challenges. The biggest one; the Shim Sham is a jazz dance with a different musical structure than a twelve bar blues. We set the dance to 'Come on Home' by Eddie Boyd. We ended up modifying our phrases to include another four bars so we were not splitting phrases with movement ideas. Another was the jazz steps happening on the 8. Some of the steps we kept, but for the Fishtails these happened on one. Aesthetically overall we considered grounding, angularity, asymmetries, Instead of stomp offs, for example, we did around the worlds (or four corners, I'm not sure of the nomenclature there). We Strut out to the end of the song. As a humorous homage, I dubbed it the Blues Collins Shim Sham.

I had a great deal of fun creating this. It was challenging at times, feeling like we were trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, but once we settled on the music there were serendipitous vocal queues in the song that just felt right. For example, 'one more time' when we are on our last whole break into the let twists. Or 'walk with me' when we get into the half-breaks (modified with a hip hitch and drag). I think it is a useful vehicle for improvisation grounded in a shared movement idea. Simple enough to learn, simple enough to variate, but continually interesting.

Pictured in the video left to right:
Tim O'Neil
Ross Blythe
Grace Jones-Taylor
Olivia Yu
Laney Barhaugh

Come On Home - Eddie Boyd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRy3XuLMDTg