Jiving Over Lemons

Down on La Rambla, the street that pulses through the heart of Barcelona, the tourists are sitting with cold beers in the 80-degree heat, or watching the performance artists, or buying postcards, or heading for the market or the beach. Up above them, on the fifth floor of a gym, I am being taught how to peck like a chicken.

‘Pecking is an art form,’ insists our tutor, Simon Selmon. ‘It’s a dance that originated at the Cotton Club in Harlem.’ Simon knows all about the Cotton Club, as he choreographed the West End musical, The Cotton Club, not to mention choreographing and appearing in movies such as Swing with Lisa Stansfield, and War Brides starring Anna Friel. He’s one of the best lindy hop dancers in Britain, the founder of the Swingdance UK and the author of Let’s Lindy, a beginner’s guide to dancing the lindy hop.

‘The lindy hop is a lot older than people think,’ he had told us at the start of our dancing holiday week, before we knew we would end up mimicking chickens. ‘It dates back to 1927 when Lindbergh was hopping across the Atlantic, and not just to the 1950s. It’s related to the jive, and the way I describe it is that lindy hop is like a big pie, and the jive is one slice of that pie. From the lindy other dances developed, like the jitterbug, which only became rock ‘n’ roll when the film Rock Around the Clock was released in 1954. I’ve met some of the original dancers from the film, and they said they didn’t know they were doing rock ‘n’ roll till after it came out. They thought they were jitterbugging.’

Jive, jitterbug or lindy, I haven’t done a step of any of them when we start our informal introductory lesson on the Saturday night. Soon we were stepping forward and back, forward and back, and side to side, side to side, picking up some simple footwork. ‘Don’t keep looking at your feet,’ Simon warns us. ‘You know where they are, at the ends of your legs where they’ve always been, so you don’t need to keep looking down at them.’

Simon says that on Monday morning he’ll be dividing the twenty or so people up into two groups, beginners and intermediate, for separate two-hour classes. ‘Are you a beginner,’ I ask the young woman standing next to me. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘I’ve only been learning the lindy for six months.’ I gulp. ‘What about you,’ she asks. ‘Er… I’ve never had a dance lesson in my life.’

I wasn’t alone, though, as the group was made up of three roughly equal sets of people: absolute beginners, like me; those who were keen dancers already but had never tried the lindy hop; and those who had been learning lindy for a while, and couldn’t resist the thought of a week in Barcelona, attending classes during the day, and sampling the Barcelona dance scene at night, with other keen dancers.

Our first look at a different side of Barcelona was on Sunday lunchtime. This was when I’d been told by knowledgeable friends that I must go to the Cathedral, to see people dressed up in traditional costume dancing the old Catalan round dance, the sardana. Just the thing for a dance holiday, you’d think, but our local guide Monica had other ideas. ‘You could go to the Cathedral,’ she told us, ‘but that’s just for tourists. Instead I recommend the Plaza Rius y Taulet in the Grácia district, where they have a jazz hour each Sunday lunchtime. This week they have two live bands and a performance by the local lindy hoppers.’

So off we trooped, the local lindy hoppers wowing the crowd with an energetic performance before jiving and lindy hopping in the street with some of the best of our group of dancers. We beginners could only stand by and watch with a mix of admiration and trepidation. Would we be doing this by the end of the week, twirling our partners round and bopping enthusiastically?

Monday came and we lined up in the Frontón Colón fitness centre on La Rambla, alongside the Wax Museum. I was dripping like a melting statue before we’d finished our warm-up routine, a little number called the Electric Slide. ‘Well you shuffle to the right,’ says Simon, ‘and you shuffle to the left. Step-back-two-three, a-step, a-back, a-step, a-back, a kick and you shuffle to the right….’ Except this time we’d turned through 90-degrees and were about to be introduced to the pecking routine for a bit of variety. ‘And you peck to the right and you peck to the left. Just move your head back and forward, keep the shoulders very still.’ Simon was such a charming and encouraging tutor, that had he asked us to lay an egg we’d have probably had a damn good try.

As we learned a few basic lindy steps, it was the unexpected exercise I was getting that surprised me. It didn’t surprise one of my fellow students, however. Diane Stott runs a transport café on the A12 near Chelmsford and was having her first holiday in three years. ‘I used to go to the gym,’ she told me ‘but it was too boring. I enjoyed the exercise but your mind just keeps doing these repetitive tasks. So I took up dancing instead and that’s much better. You get the same workout but you’re learning something too. Then there’s the social aspect of it. I go out dancing 3-4 times a week and a holiday like this is great for a woman on her own. I went out to a salsa club last night and didn’t get back till two in the morning, which is not something I would have done if I’d come to Barcelona by myself.’

For me, one of the hardest aspects of learning to lindy was having to become a leader. Not a leader of men but a leader of women. When you’ve done nothing more than bop around at the disco, everyone doing their own thing to the music, this came as a bit of a shock. Not only did I have to learn my own footwork but I had to let my partner know what I was doing as well, about half a beat in advance, so that she could respond. This was tricky, not least because I often had no idea what I was about to do myself. Sometimes my mind would go blank and I felt I could spend the rest of my days doing lindy turns in Barcelona, because I had absolutely no idea how to get out of one and into something else.

‘Gentlemen,’ warned Simon. ‘It is very likely that most of the ladies you dance with will not be psychic. They need little signals about what you intend to do, so they can follow. If you push forward with your left arm, they know to step back with their right foot.’ And in my case, I thought, know to step back very quickly, lest they get crushed with a size 12 shoe.

After both classes had done their two-hour morning sessions, it was time to meet up for what was usually at least a two-hour lunch. It turned out to be a very convivial bunch of people, although you were free to opt in and out of the planned activities as you wished. Some never attended a class, spent their days sunbathing and shopping, and only turned out at night. In the evenings were optional introductory sessions for other dances: salsa, merengue, tango and cha-cha. At a fiver for an hour, they proved popular, even if, like me, you discovered you had all the natural salsa ability of a dalek. We could all shuffle our way to the nearest tapas bar, however, and the more experienced dancers went on to clubs for a few hours more, crawling back, it seemed, just in time to get up for breakfast.

‘We’ve been to Barcelona several times before,’ said John Taylor, a company director from Amersham, who was out dancing every night with his wife Sheri, a reflexologist. ‘But we’ve never been to some of the clubs we’ve discovered on this trip.’

By Tuesday, according to Simon, we’d learned some of the harder steps. By Wednesday we were feeling confident, and then on Thursday several of us felt we were losing it all again, as what we had learned all started to unravel. But on Friday in a much more relaxed final lesson, Simon gives us our first chance to dance freestyle. The only condition, he says, is that we have to incorporate our latest routine somewhere before the end of the music. This is a jaunty charleston kicking routine – charleston being a small part of lindy hop too – followed by a twirl from the woman and a change of places. My partner and I lose the move completely, but undaunted, and with Simon down at the far end of the room, we say ‘what the hell’ and do a little jiving of our own invention. It feels good. ‘Hey,’ she says, smiling: ‘We’re dancing!’