Want to slow it down? Then check out Liz McGuire's venue Blue Bella located at Ciao Bella in La Mesa every 1st & 3rd Friday. Liz & her guest teachers will show you how to connect on the dance floor & give you the opportunity to dance to music other than the faster swing & jazz that you will find at a Lindy Hop venue. Some people may feel that blues dancing is dirrrrty, & sure...it can be if you make it that way. But blues was around before the creation of Lindy Hop.
 
*According to Albert Murray, blues idiom-dance movement has nothing to do with sensual abandonment. "Being always a matter of elegance [it] is necessarily a matter of getting oneself together." Practitioners of this style do not throw their bodies around; they do not cut completely loose. A loss of coolness and control places one squarely outside the tradition. In fact, the very nature of a vernacular dance culture ensures the survival of socially and culturally useful or valuable dances. Many of the steps specific to dances associated with popular blues songs of the 1920s were adapted for new musical structures in jazz, and new dance forms like the lindy hop. Early African American blues dances were very simple in their core movement and allowed for a wide variety of musical interpretation, embodying a black aesthetic approach to rhythm, movement and melody which permeated black music. They were often a simple one-step or two-step and though some movements may have been adapted and integrated into some mainstream popular dances, blues dancing as a distinct dance genre and social practice never became a specific focus for white America in the way that dances such as the Lindy Hop and Charleston have.

Learning blues will actually help your swing dancing. You'll learn connection, styling, musicality & more!! There are blues dances & events held all over the world. A lot of swing dance events have blues dances as part of their "after hours".

So come check it out, chill out & have some fun!! For more info please visit www.bluebellasd.com.