The Blues Project: Sweden & Denmark

What is the Blues Project?

Luke and Ruby Dancing in ManchesterThe Blues Project is the brainchild of Lucas Weismann and has been brought to life with the invaluable help of Håkan Larsson.  It is a series of (3) month-long series of classes in three cities that are near each other, but not so near as to be competition for each other.

This will make it possible to have multiple workshops in the region with each city being able to “host”its neighbor and share what is special about their dance scene without having to worry about negative impact on their events.  

Each series of classes will start with a weekend workshop in one of the cities:  Malmö, Helsingborg and Copenhagen.  This will be where we introduce the foundations of the material we’ll be working on in classes.  These workshops will feature teaching partners from around the world to help bring different perspectives to the classes and new techniques to practice.

This gives you roughly 9 months of instruction in 3 months, as well as reinforcement on what you learn in the weekend workshop so that you retain more and put more of it into your dancing.

Each class will follow roughly the same pattern so that students who are struggling, dedicated or just crazy about dance can come to the lesson in any city

Social Dance is the reason we do blues.  It’s feeling good and dancing to great music.  That’s why every 2-hour class is followed by a 2-hour social dance afterward..

Sometimes what you need is one-on-one instruction from someone who is looking at what you need in order to improve.  That’s why every student who signs up for 1-month of classes AND the weekend workshop gets a 1-hour private lesson FREE of charge for them and a partner.  These are the best way to improve your dance quickly and have a good time doing it too.

 

What is Blues Dancing?

Luke Weismann and Elza ZanzibarBlues Dancing is a family of African-American partnered and solo dances that developed in the 20th century in the United States.  They are a related to swing dancing in much the same way that Blues music is related to Swing Music.  There is even some overlap.

Like Swing, Blues has experienced a resurgence, no, a renaissance in the 21st century and is growing in popularity worldwide.  The connected feeling of improvised partner dance, fitting the pulse of the music and the focus on variation of themes instead of complicated figures makes this a dance you’ll be able to perform socially on your first night out!

 

Why Are You Doing Things This Way?

I was lucky enough to be involved in helping to build the Denver Blues Scene from 2009-2013.  In that time we grew from 6 people who liked the dance to several hundred people.  People who dance with each other, have house parties together and have created a community of really interesting and fun people that I am really happy to belong to.
While traveling as a dance instructor, people ask me how they can build their scene.  I got a few ideas and we’ve put them into action.  During my last visit to Europe I started to think about things and realized that European dance scenes are better situated for the kind of growth that we saw in Denver.  I realized that we succeeded back home for a few reasons:

  1. We have good neighbors: Fort Collins, Colorado Springs and Boulder an hour or less away from Denver.  This means that we have people who are local enough to support each other’s larger events without being too much competition for new events starting out.
  2. We were lucky enough to have local instruction with Rachael DeMers at regular weekly venues.
  3. We had organizers like Scott Mattson, CMDance and on hand to help us grow monthly and Annual events like Mile High Blues and Hot Night.
  4. There is a great regional culture of supporting each other’s events and seeing what each town has to offer.  For instance, Nadja Gross who runs Blossom Blues in Zurich made the trip to a workshop that Theis Egegerg threw in Copenhagen.  It’s not a long trip and it was great having her with us.

I want to bring that with me to new and existing scenes so that people can easily find the dancing that has made my last few years so much fun and so exciting.  I know that when you become a part of this community you will be amazed like I was.

How can I get Started?

It’s easy.  Get your tickets below based on which city you’re coming from!

Malmö, Helsingborg, Copenhagen.

Once you’ve done that, just show up for class!

What Videos Do You Have Up?

Good Question!  We have a lot of them up here: