How Frankie Manning"s incredible dancing skills made him famous twice, 50 years apart

Frankie Manning Tribute Video

In 1935, a dancer named Frankie Manning won a dance competition with a daring feat: He flipped his partner over his back and onto her feet, the Lindy Hop "air step" that would make Manning, honored in today"s Google Doodle, arguably the most famous swing dancer of all time.

Manning, who died in 2009, would be 102 today. Like a good performance, his career included both a first act and a later revival, bookending a 30-year job and a quiet life at the post office. He started dancing in his teens, and he was still dancing at his 85th birthday party, when he danced with 85 different partners.

But the fact that Manning"s career needed a revival at all a revival driven mostly by white swing dancers in the mid-1980s also shows how white Americans embraced black dance steps without always uplifting the people who created them.

Manning, like swing dancing, got his start in Harlem

To understand just how good Manning was at swing dancing, all you have to do is watch him in the 1941 comedy Hellzapoppin". It"s incredible:

Manning was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and moved to New York in 1917 at age 3 with his mother, part of the vast wave of black Americans moving out of the South in hopes of better opportunities.

What they often found was discriminatory high rents. Rent was exorbitant for black New Yorkers in the 1920s: A study by the New York Urban League in 1927 found that rent for black New Yorkers had doubled since 1919 while increasing only 10 percent for white residents. Black residents had to pay far more than white residents for virtually identical apartments.

In order to make rent, Harlem residents would throw "rent parties" opening their apartments for live music and dancing, with a cover charge. Manning would attend with his mother, and even as a kid he"d go home and practice in his room, trying to imitate the moves.

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When he was 15, Manning started dancing at the Savoy, the only integrated ballroom in New York City. The Savoy was where the Lindy Hop began, a style of swing dance developed in the late 1920s by black performers; it was apparently named after Charles Lindbergh, who"d just completed his solo flight across the Atlantic, and honored him by featuring solo dancing.

Manning became famous for his enthralling, acrobatic work, particularly the aerial moves he incorporated. After he gained fame at the Savoy, he went on a world tour and was featured in Life magazine in 1941.

Life noted that the specific dance Manning was photographed performing, the Congeroo, could probably be "tamed down for fairly polite society." White Americans liked dances and music created by black people much more than they liked black people themselves.

Dance scenes, such as the one above from Hellzapoppin", often had no relation to the plot, Lisa Wade, a professor of sociology at Occidental College wrote in 2009 for the Society Pages: "This was so that the movie studios could edit out the scene when the movie was going to be shown to those white audiences that were hostile to seeing any positive representation of black people at all."

And when white Americans started doing the Lindy Hop in the 1930s and "40s, renaming it the jitterbug, they erased the black performers who created it. A 1944 instructional movie on doing the jitterbug features a white couple and emphasizes that the dance borrows moves from ballet, waltzes, 18th-century ballroom dance, and "Javanese" dancing but it doesn"t mention the Savoy.

In the 1980s, Americans rediscovered swing dancing

After World War II, swing dancing fell out of favor the dancers and musicians were drafted, the war led to a tax on entertainment in the US, and rock music was supplanting jazz. Manning gave up dancing and went to work at the post office. As Elizabeth Gilbert (yes, of Eat Pray Love) wrote in GQ in 1998:

He never told his new friends about his old career. He even had a friend who used to say, "Frankie, Im going to take you out one of these nights and teach you how to dance." Frankie would just smile, never mentioning that hed once danced a command performance for the king ofEngland.

Then in 1984, a handful of dancers were trying to revive the swing dances of the 1930s. As Gilbert writes, they tracked Manning down, and from there, following his 70th birthday, he enjoyed a career revival.

Manning traveled the world teaching the Lindy Hop. He was interviewed in Ken Burns"s documentary on jazz. And he did choreography for the Broadway show Black and Blue, winning a Tony for it in 1989.

Black dancers created the Lindy Hop, but white performers were the ones who drove the revival of swing in the "80s. Gilbert writes that Manning didn"t like to engage with questions of race, saying that he"d met "good people and bad people of every color." But the racial contradictions of the jitterbug era could still reemerge, as Wade (herself a dancer) wrote:

These contemporary dancers look to old movie clips of famous black dancers as inspiration. These movies portrayed black people in ways that white people were comfortable with: blacks were musical, entertaining, athletic (even animalistic), outrageous (even wild), not-so-smart, happy-go-lucky, etc.

So what we see in the old clips that contemporary lindy hoppers idolize is not a pure manifestation of lindy hop, but a manifestation of the dance infused by racism. While lindy hoppers today look at those old clips with nothing short of reverence, they are mostly naive to the fact that the dancing they are emulating was a product made to confirm white peoples beliefs about black people.

There"s also the question of how Manning fell into obscurity in the first place, no matter how heartwarming the revival of his career was. White dancers of his era managed to stay active in the performing arts even after their dances went out of style. Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly went into television. But Manning worked at the post office. Gilbert wrote:

When I asked Steven MitchellFrankies young, black dancing discipleif he believed Frankies career had been limited by race, Steven looked at me as if I were some new breed of idiot. "Are you kidding?" he said. "Frankie Manning should be a household name. He should be revered. He was every bit as important to American dance as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. But he was black. He went as far as he could go, but it wasnt far enough. Whatever small fame he has today, its not enough. It will never make up for what waslost."

Manning, though, relished his revival. On his 80th birthday, he danced with 80 different partners. Every year, he"d add one new partner for every year he"d lived. And although he couldn"t leap during the Lindy Hop anymore, he was dancing in public and seemingly having the time of his life until just before his death.

If you want to know more about Manning, this 10-minute documentary from Swing Bud Films features him talking about his life in his own words, plus some amazing old footage:

How the robot dance took over the world

Source: http://www.vox.com/2016/5/26/11776066/frankie-mannings-102nd-birthday

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Who was Frankie Manning and what is the Lindy Hop?

Frankie Manning"s class, part 1

Manning then started a group called "Whitey"s Lindy Hoppers", with whom hetoured extensively and made several films. He also danced with Norma Miller, who became known as the Queen of Swing.

A resident ofCorona, Queens, Manning died inManhattanon April 27, 2009, aged 94.

What is the Lindy Hop?

If you"re into 20s and 30s dancing, you"ve probably heard of the Lindy Hop. It popularised the Swing era and was a fusion of many dances, including jazz, tap, breakaway and Charleston.

It was born in and important to the African-American communities in Harlem, but entered the mainstream in the 1930"s.

The dance can be wild and spontaneous, with frenzied kicks and body movements, or it can be cool and sophisticated, and it is usually partnered. It can be fascinating and interesting to watch.

Where did theLindy Hop get its name from?

Dance Marathons were popular as away of winning prize money during the Great Depression. It wasduring one of these that the Lindy apparently got its name.

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solofrom New York to Paris, and people were absorbed with his "Hop" across the Atlantic. He became a huge global superstar as a result.

The name was coined by one of Manning"s fellow dancers George "Shorty" Snowden.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/05/25/who-was-frankie-manning-and-what-is-the-lindy-hop/

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Siapa Frankie Manning?

Frankie Manning"s class, part 1

PARA pengguna Google akan dibuat terhibur dengan doodle yang ditampilkan Kamis 26 Mei 2016 ini. Berbeda dengan doodle yang tampil sehari sebelumnya, kali ini animasi sepasang penari berkulit hitam menari dengan sangat ceria dan atraktif. Tulisan yang tertera adalah "Frankie Manning"s 102nd birthday".

Lalu, siapa Frankie Manning?

Frankie Manning adalah penari berkebangsaan Amerika sekaligus instruktur juga koreografer. Frankie adalah penemu tarian lindy hop yang sangat terkenal pada era 1930 hingga 1940-an sebagai pengiring musik swing. Frankie meninggal pada tahun 2009 pada usia 95 tahun. Jika masih hidup, maka hari ini, Kamis 26 Mei 2016, adalah ulang tahun Frankie Manning yang ke-102.

Sepertinya Google sangat menghormati mendiang Frankie Manning sebagai sebuah semangat seperti tarian yang kerap ia mainkan. Lindy hop adalah tarian atau dansa Amerika yang berkembang di wilayah Harlem, New York pada era 1920 dan 1930-an. Saat itu, tarian ini sebenarnya merupakan pengiring musik jazz. Tarian lindy hop menyatukan banyak sekali tarian seperti jazz yang ekspresif, tap yang mengentak, breakaway, dan charleston hingga menjadi sebuah tarian baru. Kebanyakan orang kemudian menyebutnya dengan tarian jazz yang merupakan bagian dari tarian swing. Salah satu ciri dari tarian lindy hop adalah gerakannya yang cepat.

Di Indonesia, tarian swing memang tak terlalu populer. Tarian swing kalah populer dengan salsa atau tango yang kental dengan aroma Amerika Latin meski dibesarkan di Amerika Serikat. Namun, di benua Amerika maupun Eropa, lindy hop yang mengiringi musik swing sangat populer pada era 1930 dan 1940-an. Dalam beberapa tahun terakhir, tarian ini kembali digemari karena menggambarkan keceriaan dan semangat muda.

Kata hop dalam lindy hop banyak diartikan sebagai lompatan yang sering ditunjukkan dalam tarian ini. Lihat saja gerakan animasi dalam Google doodle yang tampak hari ini. Ada lompatan-lompatan kecil yang diperlihatkan. Namun, banyak kalangan menyebut bahwa hop di sini diartikan sebagai kenangan atas jasa Charles Lindbergh, orang pertama yang terbang melintasi Laut Atlantik pada tahun 1920-an. Hop di sini dimaksudkan sebagai lompatan melintasi Altantik.

Kembali ke Frankie Manning, jasanya sangat besar dalam mengembangkan lindy hop sebagai tarian swing. Ia juga dikenal sangat baik hati serta kharismatik. Seperti dikutip FrankieManning.com, Frankie merupakan penari terkemuka di Harlem, tepatnya di Savoy Ballroom, tempat inovasi tarian lindy hop yang revolusioner ini berkembang.

Saat menari, Frankie kerap diiringi oleh para peman jazz terkenal pada masanya seperti Ethel Waters, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, dan Cab Calloway. Setelah runtuhnya era swing, Frankie sempat bekerja di Kantor Pos selama 30 tahun hingga generasi tahun 1980-an kembali menggelorakan tarian swing. Saat itu, Frankie kembali melantai, mengajar, membuat koreografi, serta menjadikan tariannya mendunia. Frankie memenangi Tony Award pada tahun 1989 untuk koreografi terbaik di "Black and Blue" dan menjadi konsultan dalam film "Malcolm X" besutan sutradara Spike Lee pada tahun 1992.

Keceriaannya memainkan tarian lindy hop bahkan masih ditunjukkannya ketika ia telah berusia lanjut. Dokumentasi foto tahun 1999 (saat ia berusia 85 tahun) Frankie masih segar bugar sembari tertawa lebar saat event dansa swing diperlombakan di Arizona, Amerika Serikat.

Frankie memang sudah tiada, tapi tarian swingnya masih mengayun di hati para pemburu keceriaan dan kegembiraan.***

Source: http://www.pikiran-rakyat.com/hidup-gaya/2016/05/26/siapa-frankie-manning-370034

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