Your guide to Vancouver's west coast swing community

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Welcome to VanSwingThing. We hope you find our website informative, and helpful, as we care a lot about sharing our dance with you. Please visit us often as, like the dance, we're constantly evolving.

West Coast Swing is a modern partner dance that, as you might have guessed, evolved on the west coast of North America. It grew out of another dance called Lindy Hop which was danced to the big band sound predominant in the early part of the 20th century. Unlike Lindy Hop, basic West Coast Swing is a very smooth style of dance that is characterized by the leader staying in the centre and the follower traveling up and down a slot on the dance floor. This dance is one of the most versatile and flexible dances that you could learn as it is done to many forms of music including pop, blues, hip-hop, and jazz to name a few. The dance is based on a connection technique where the partners are either in compression, or leveraged away from each other. This gives the dance it's distinctive elastic look. West Coast Swing is often referred to as the dancer's dance as this connection allows a communication between both partners enabling them to express their creativity and build on it together.

On these pages, you will find information about our dance, and help to get you started if you'd like to learn it. We will help you find people to dance with here in the Vancouver area, and inform you about places to go dance. If you don't know your way around Vancouver, you'll find maps on the Local Dances page to help you get there. Enjoy!

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