Back before the meme of “flashmobs” starting sweeping the US, swing dancers had a practice we called “lindy bombing.” Which was to show up at a place that wasn’t a regular swing dance venue and start dancing. It might be swinging to muzak playing in a shopping mall, or to hip-hop music in a nightclub, or to a jug band busking on the street. It’s a really fun change from your “normal” swing event, and always gets wacky reactions from the passersby.
Some New York City lindy hoppers and musicians have been using Facebook and Twitter to try and resuscitate the practice, following around our favorite swing bands doing impromptu gigs on the subway, public parks and plazas. The problem being, if you weren’t already Facebook friends or Twitter following the “right” people, you didn’t find out about these lindy bombs.
I started thinking about how we could better organize this so that anyone could more easily find out about and participate in these impromptu swing gatherings. Here’s the solution I came up with.
After a bit of research and asking for people’s input, I decided to trying setting up a Facebook Fan Page called “Lindy Bomb NYC“. Then I set up a new Twitter account called “LindybombNYC“. Finally I linked the two accounts. The result is that status updates to the Fan Page go out as News Updates to anyone who is a Facebook fan, and gets tweeted out to the followers of the LindybombNYC account. And hopefully, fun dancing results!
Ideally I’d like this thing to sort of run itself, with musicians and dancers sharing information about possible places to dance around the city. So with a couple of hour’s notice you can dash off to catch some jazz pianist playing during your lunch hour at Madison Square Park or a jump blues trio in a cafe in Williamsburg.
We’ll see how it goes.
In the future, I would love it if Yehoodi could support these kinds of impromptu gatherings. We would love to build in Facebook and Twitter integration into our development plans. But we’ve got a ways to go, I think.