From K-pop land comes K-Swing

Swing and Lindy Hop, dance forms invented decades ago by black Americans, are hits in South Korea

- Brain Seibert

NEW YORK - The smile was the lure. Mr. Nalla Kim, a South Korean computer programmer, noticed the joyful expressions in the social media post of a fellow programmer whom he had never seen smiling at work.

Curious, Mr. Kim asked his colleague what had made him so visibly happy. The answer: swing dancing.

Mr. Kim had never heard of the dance form, which was created by black Americans in the 1920s and 1930s. He discovered it when he was coming of age in Seoul in the early 2000s.

He got hooked. He started attending swing dance events in the United States and after a few years entered international competitions.

He traveled to dance, but he did not have to. In the past two decades, the swing dance scene in his home town has grown into the largest in the world.

For a vintage American cultural practice to spread overseas and thrive there more robustly than at home is a story at least as old as jazz. Not in every case, though, does the transplanted form evolve into a local variant. That is what has happened in South Korea.

In Seoul these days, there are around 10 clubs dedicated full time to swing and its core partnering form, Lindy Hop.

"In New York, where Lindy Hop was born, we have zero," said Mr. Caleb Teicher, a prominent American Lindy Hop and tap dancer.

Those Seoul clubs are filled with dancers of high skill. "I've heard it joked among the New York dancers who've gone there that a bad dancer in Korea is a great dancer in New York," he said.