Young couples of all skill levels escape from high-pressure lifestyles at the Jam Cellar
Red Solo cups lined the piano-turned-table on a Tuesday night. Loud music echoed through the house’s nooks and crannies. The place crawled with young people standing in dresses, skirts, polos.
It wasn’t quite the typical house party. The cups — labeled with names in Sharpie — were filled with water. The loud music was 1920s-style jazz, full of smooth horns. People moved to the Lindy Hop and the Charleston, guided by a decades-old form of expression.
And they swing-danced.
Their feet stepped in the same intricate patterns of six-counts or eight-counts, triple-steps bustling together, kicking in the kind of precise synchronization that comes from months of classes. They danced in mostly male-and-female pairs, in tandem, a sort of magnetic movement of fiery soul.
The Jam Cellar is tucked into Northwest Washington, nestled across from Meridian Hill Park and a few blocks from the U Street Metro stop. For seven years, the Josephine Butler Parks Center, a large building that houses the Jam Cellar, has been the home base for Washington swing dancers, a community of people keeping an age-old style of dance alive.
Outside, the building is a golden yellow. Inside, it has a cute lobby and an old-house charm, several rooms-turned-ballrooms, red carpets, banisters and flights of stairs.
The routine is simple. At 8 p.m. every Tuesday, a beginner class groups all the swing virgins together to learn the basic steps and the flow of the music. The lesson on that Tuesday in mid-April was packed as unexpectedly warm evening air blew into the room. One of the two instructors reminded the awkward dancers in the room that tension was the magic of swing.
Then, about an hour later, an open dance segment began in the second-floor dance room, soon becoming a smorgasbord of dance partners of every skill level.
Swing is an extended game of follow-the-leader. The leader (usually the man) does the bulk of steering and quick thinking to determine the next move, depending on the beat and mood of the current song. The follower puts complete faith in the leader and trusts the leader will nonverbally control the movements with a slight pressure on the back.
Quick steps. Fast turns. Sways and dips. It’s trust and leadership magnified to the highest stage of vulnerability: the dance floor.
“It’s not easy, what we do,” said Curtis Breitenlohner, one of the owners of the Jam Cellar. He spoke in a smaller meeting room as jazz music thudded from the main dance floor.
The Jam Cellar is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its founding in a cellar in Vienna, Va., after which it relocated to its 15th Street location in 2006. Breitenlohner was friends with the Jam Cellar’s sound manager for years. Now, he runs it.
He called his experience life-changing, a way for community members to express themselves that just isn’t done anymore. About 90 people — mostly graduate students in their late 20s — attend the Tuesday night dances, he said.
Jeff Booth co-owns the Jam Cellar with Breitenlohner and Bobby White. Once a year, Booth teaches the entirety of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” routine in a six-week series — because no one can learn the whole video in two hours, he said.
Swing dance is more of a social street dance than a structured, restrictive form, Booth said. That’s why it boasts such a wide appeal — it’s freeing.
* * *
Baby, baby, it looks like it’s gonna hail
Baby, baby, it looks like it’s gonna hail
You better come inside
Let me teach you how to jive and wail
It was 1998, and a new Gap commercial featured the 1956 Louis Prima song “Jump, Jive an’ Wail” to promote khakis. Young people sported the pants, all smiles in ’90s haircuts and shirts. And they danced swing. They hoisted each other up and over, doing flips, kicking their legs in perfect synchronization.
It triggered Rachel Neugarten’s desire to swing-dance.
“Swing was in,” said the Columbia Heights resident, relaxing outside on the building’s terrace during her third visit to the Jam Cellar. She said the commercial started the resurgence of swing in the late 20th century, though the dance form was decades old.
“Anything from the jazz age is still kind of hip,” she said, citing the atmosphere that has never gone out of style.
She called it the “awkward-white-people dance” because of its accessibility over styles of tango and salsa dancing. And maybe she was right — the majority of dancers that April night were white.
Sam Fahlberg of Logan Circle said the Jam Cellar is a refreshing gem in a Washington culture that values drinking over dancing. He loves the spontaneity of swing and the ability to live in the moment.
Fahlberg agreed that the “fascination by hipster culture” and the shift toward the love of the antique are becoming more dominant in society.
As dancers head back to reality around 11:30, sweaty from the night of ditching worries for twists and spins and a classier way of life, they sport satisfied grins. For many, it’s an escape from a long week inside the Beltway, a long week of no expression, a long week of too much 2013 and not enough 1923.
So next Tuesday, they will swing-dance.
diversionsdbk@gmail.com
