KULTURE SHIFT

From the land of K-pop come the joys of K-swing

- BRIAN SEIBERT

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

Curious, Kim asked his usually serious colleague what had made him so visibly happy. The answer? Swing dancing.

Kim had never heard of the dance form — which is not surprising, considering that swing was created by black Americans in the 1920s and 30s, and Kim is a Korean man who discovered it when coming of age in Seoul, South Korea, in the early 2000s.

But Kim got hooked. He started attending swing dance events in the United States and after a few years entered international competitions. He travelled to dance, but he didn't have to. In the past two decades, the swing dance scene in his hometown 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's what has happened in 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 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," Teicher said.

What's more, in the jazz tradition that artists honour by developing their own voices and style, Korean dancers have worked out their own fresh approaches to the form. "When I go there to teach, I feel like I'm their student now," Teicher said.