West Coast Swing (WCS) is a partner dance with roots in Lindy Hop. It is characterized by a distinctive elastic look that results from its basic extension-compression technique of partner connection, and is danced primarily in a slotted area on the dance floor. The dance allows for both partners to improvise steps while dancing together, putting West Coast Swing in a short list of dances that put a premium on improvisation.
Typically the follower walks into new patterns traveling forward on counts "1" and "2" of each basic pattern, rather than rocking back. The Anchor Step is a common ending pattern of many West Coast Swing figures.
Read more about West Coast Swing: History, Slot, Music, Styles, Basic Guidelines, Basic Figures or "Patterns", Global Spread
Famous quotes containing the words west, coast and/or swing:
“The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? Let a man travel on foot along the coast ... and tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and No-Man’s Land.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.
Nothing but a plain black boy.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)