Boston Swing Labs is a weekly West Coast Swing social dance event that echoes the qualities of the art form at every layer of the weekly experience. The dance evolves in response to the community; it's rooted in freedom, curiosity, and connection, and the priorities and aesthetic change over time. I co-founded and directed this night to demonstrate a new approach to sharing the evolution of these qualities with the local community. We crafted a considered weekly experience, aligning the atmosphere, classes, and community engagement to our values, inspiring creativity and connection in the local scene.

West coast swing is a modern swing dance that evolves as it meets new music, dance genres, and generations. After participating in the community for several years and seeing the evolution of the art form, we saw space in the local community for new voices to share how the dance was moving. Art survives through sharing the practice with new community members, and for a liquid art form rooted in evolution, introducing new perspectives, voices, and experiences is part of that transfer.

Boston has a strong scene: multiple nights of dancing, committed community leaders, and decades of established weekly nights. These nights successfully laid the foundation. Our goal was to inspire the evolution locally by modeling the experience of connection, creativity, and curiosity that surfaces by holding both commitment and risk. Dance is a physical conversation. It requires discipline to learn the form and communicate coherently, and it requires play to say anything interesting. The local community had a stable base, but there was room for a night to explore the edges.

As newer community leaders, we had experienced the challenge with finding a platform to get started, and we knew several talented members of the community were feeling the same struggle. We wanted our night to feature these dancers who showed up weekly, were dedicated to the dance, and had both strong technical grounding and creative impulse. These dancers were shaping the local scene on the floor, and we wanted to create space for them to shape the scene in classrooms and at the dj booth.

Connection, curiosity, and community in service of an evolving art form was our positioning. Encouraging connection to each other through a considered weekly experience opened space for the play required in an evolving art form. Fostering curiosity by featuring new voices and those with specific talents seeded the community with inspiration for new things to explore. Community was the why. We loved the art form, we loved the community, and we wanted to show the best of each.

Creative spaces need a good energy but forcing good vibes is an impossible task. Dance is creative, conversational, and connective, qualities that show up when invited, not demanded. Energy starts with intention, and our intention was for the space to feel alive and breathe the way the dance does.

Venue selection and space design was the single biggest lever to pull to set the tone and differentiate our night. In Boston, West Coast Swing nights were primarily run out of function halls and fraternal lodges, spaces designed for function and versatility more than atmosphere. Our night was a different experience, and we moved through a series of 3 different venues that reflected our intention.

The first was an up-and-coming creative space built for photo shoots and unique events. The space was functional and strange, and it was exactly what we needed. There was a galaxy wall, a tropical corner, graffiti, a chalkboard section, strange objects as chairs, a cloud room, etc. Our night opened with this venue and it was weird enough to immediately establish that our night's focus was on creativity and new experiences.

As up-and-coming spaces sometimes do, this one closed a few months into our lease. Thankfully, it closed as the weather was warming up. Summer nights in Boston are hot and muggy, especially in rooms with 100 people dancing, so we moved to the docks on the Charles river. A completely different venue, also serving our intention. The space was outside, in the heart of Boston, on the Charles River. There was space, a surprisingly danceable floor, and a breeze. A dance grounded in freedom was given some breathing room in the hottest months of the year. The lights of the city reflected on the Charles, people walking by, the ease of coming and going maintained our culture in atmosphere without a controlled space.

As the weather turned, we moved inside and found ourselves in a yoga studio in the North End. A studio with multiple rooms, beautiful floors, space to connect created an atmosphere of presence to foster the growing community connections foundational to our night. If our first venue was strange and our second was open, this space was warm.

Through all venues, we used our own lighting and sound to round out the experience in the direction of our intention for the night. We held classes, dancing, many theme nights, and our lighting and sound design worked in tandem with the schedule. Our space breathed throughout the year, from week to week, and throughout the night, all in response to what the moment asked for.

West Coast Swing is a social dance, which means the community is made up of people with years of experience, casual dancers, people who started that night, people who took a 10 year break, and everyone in between. Classes always face the same challenge: people with tenure often stop finding value in the material critical for new people to encounter. Our class design looked to two directions to solve this: what we could give the students and what the community could offer as teachers.

For the students, we ran a beginner track and an experienced track. The beginner requirements were straightforward: someone who showed up with little-to-no experience should learn the basic patterns, skills and etiquette that would let them navigate a new environment with relative ease. The experienced track needed to offer enough academic rigor to sustain the interest of dedicated dancers and provide the novelty that casual participants tend to crave. We built a two lesson progression where the first lesson focused on technique, with a consistent teacher and monthly class subscriptions to encourage regular attendance. Our second class fed the novelty: we brought in varying members from the community who taught, expressed interest teaching, or had a unique skill set to teach fun classes focused on peripheral skills not typically offered elsewhere in the city.

This second class, which we called our Community Class, was bi-directional in intent. We wanted to give students a class experience they wouldn't find anywhere else, and we wanted to give dedicated, talented, and inspiring people a platform to teach. Instead of teaching patterns or progressive technique, this class was a single capped experience where people could learn posture through barre, the dance roots through Lindy Hop, body care through PT, solo dance choreography, etc. This class was to feed inspiration: asking members of the community to share what they were good at, and asking the students to engage in a new experience. Through all classes, for both teachers and students, we focused on connection, curiosity, and community to work toward our goal of sharing the evolution of the dance with the local scene.

This night ran for a year and a half before my co-founder and I each moved out of Boston and closed the event. We wanted to show the community our perspective and share a thoughtfully crafted experience that spoke to our values and echoed the qualities of the dance. West Coast Swing is responsive, it's social, and it's ephemeral, and so was our night.