Swing, jazz and blues - Dance to the music

It was nice to get the dancing season started at Uplands nation yesterday. Uplands nation is a beautiful location and I had many great dances.

International readers may wonder: what is a student nation? A student nation is a kind of student society that dates back to the 1600s in Sweden. Uppsala is the oldest university town in Sweden and the university was founded in 1477. There are 13 student nations in town.

You don't need to be a student to go to the dance, just go there and have fun. That was the case with one girl I danced with, she had never danced any swing dance (or maybe not danced at all) before. It certainly was challenging to try lead stuff, but wasn't not a big deal, all we wanted was to have a good time and we did. I hope she enjoyed the evening and that she'll come back. The lesson is: don't worry too much about your skills when you go social dancing, just focus on having a good time, then the rest will fall into place.

If you want to become a better dancer you need to both be social dancing and take classes and practise but each activity requires different mind sets. If you're social dancing, you should be thinking: "fun, fun, fun". If you taking classes, it's "think, look and listen" and at a practise it's "experiment, try again and refine".

The photo is taken by me and may not be published elsewhere without my permission. Contact me if you want to license it.

Next Tuesday it's my turn in the dj booth spinning swing songs, what would you like to hear? Tell me your favorite songs, artists or styles.