Walk to Work - a Podcast about Dance and Music and Teaching and Body Mechanics and stuff
This blog has always been updated rather intermittently. I have about 5 posts in various stages of doneness, but I’m too finicky. I want the posts to be polished before putting them out there. So it invariably means paralysis as I have to summon the courage to edit and re-edit something that is never going to be perfect.
I’ve recently started listening to podcasts, starting with Drive to Work, a podcast about the design of the game Magic The Gathering(TM) by Mark Rosewater. I really liked several things about Mark’s podcast. He records it while driving to work, which would be downtime anyway. He embraces the lack of perfection by recording in one take and throwing it out if it’s really bad. He doesn’t feel it precludes him from addressing the same topic in other media (like blog posts), or from addressing the same topic multiple times from different angles.
So that persuaded me to record Walk to Work (I may cave in and call it Dance to Work or something that makes the title slightly meaningful). The main topic is dance (blues, lindy hop, folk dance, balboa, tango, etc.) and related topics such as music, teaching, learning, body mechanics, etc.
I record it on the walk between my place and work, which has about 15mn worth of paths away from traffic. It’s not my shortest route to work, but that’s fine. I publish an episode every thursday (18 weeks in a row so far). I record in one take on my phone, without caring too much about sound quality (unless it’s too windy). I deliberately don’t prepare too much. If it’s not perfect or I forgot to talk about something, it’s fine, I’ll address the same topic some other time. So far so good: I can keep up with the schedule, the imperfection is not making me overly anxious, and I’ve had good feedback from listeners.
Ultimately, this all stems from the influence of Seth Godin. Make art, show up and ship it!
Here is a list of episodes by topic. I may update this list from time to time. If anything I say inspires you (agrees with you, disagrees with you), get in touch!
Dance (culture/philosophy)
Dance and Race
Some notes and links to go with episode 33.
- Vicci and Adamo link to several articles and their translations into French, German, Spanish, Russian and Italian: Race and Cultural Appropriation, specifically linking to
- Ellie Koepplinger: https://elliekoepplinger.wordpress.com/2018/01/17/why-i-stopped-blues-dancing/
- Damon Stone: http://damonstone.dance/articles/appreciation-versus-appropriation/
- Grey Ruffin https://www.obsidiantea.com/single-post/2018/01/20/A-letter-to-the-White-Blues-Dance-Community
- Dierdre Molloy http://www.dthinktank.com/p/identity-appropriation.html
- Odysseus Bailer on what we can do: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TOTYNV8K1Qy4hS1RB0JiUAEqvlpZh3FVTi_d50pGsi0/edit
- They also have some recommended reading
- Toska Blues (Grey Ruffin and Vartan Khachaturov) has posts about
- Gender and blues dance roles and black culture
- Grey on gender and following
- Vartan on men and dancing
- Vartan asks what we can do
- Grey on the experience of being black in communities of predominantly white people dancing African American dances
- Gender and blues dance roles and black culture
- Grey also writes and maintains Obsidian Tea, including the following particularly relevant posts
- Being a guest not a tourist the source for my passion/turn-taking statements
- White people should learn to code switch
- What black spaces are like
- How black people do not relate to the love of the past
- How to bring context to dance scenes
- The importance of solo dancing
- The value of listening to all kinds of black music
- Some podcasts and video shows
- http://bluesdanceworld.com/2017/11/01/november-1st-2017-blues-dance-world-podcast-season-3-ep-07-blackness-in-blues/
- http://www.yehoodi.com/swingnation/2017/4/28/swingnation-83-black-inclusion-in-lindy-hop
- Books
- Black and white styles in conflict by Thomas Kochman
- Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
- So you want to talk about race by Ijeoma Oluo
- https://www.honeyblues.co.uk/library (Where you can borrow these books and many more)
- How long ’til black future month fiction by N. K. Jemisin
- Some posts about using our (white) voices and being good allies
- Don’t speak for black people
- How to be a good ally
- More on being a good ally where I borrowed/changed the stepping on toes analogy from
- Scott Woods writes very eloquently