20s charleston historical paradox

I’ve been putting together a list of all the 20s Charleston moves I know for a get together with some dance buddies this weekend.
The first problem was actually remembering names for things, to match my excellent stick figures. The second was breaking down ‘moves’ into their composite steps. The third – and most interesting – was deciding whether or not a move was ‘20s Charleston’ or something more modern.

There are two sides to the coin of historical reference in vernacular dance. While the culture hangs onto historical dances and dance steps and rediscovers them or reframes them to suit contemporary dance trends, ensuring continuing cultural relevance for certain steps, and maintaining a sense of the historical, it also confuses the issue of what is ‘old’ and what is ‘new’.

Dance steps are claimed and remade by new generations of dancers in a cross-generational dance culture, where older dancers bring older steps to new audiences in their own dancing. The continual back-and-forthing of this process makes it difficult at times to accurately ‘date’ or position a specific step within a specific time period.
In compiling my list, I began to wonder which steps were popular in the 20s, which were popular in the 30s and 40s (during lindy hop) and which were popular in earlier decades and re-presented by contemporary dance historians in a strange sort of reworking of the ‘natural’ cross-generational work of vernacular dance culture.

I also wondered which steps – if any – were actually contemporary dance steps of moves restyled to ‘look old’. And if there were any of these steps lurking in my clips or memory, was it really so dire should they infiltrate my 20s Charleston repertoire? After all, the most important duty for vernacular dance is that it remain culturally relevant, reflecting the social and cultural needs and interests of its community. Is it so wrong for me to include a little running man in my 20s Charleston? Or even more interesting, is running man actually an ‘old’ step made new by contemporary disco dancers?

I can’t say it bothers me terribly much. In fact, it’s kind of fun to think of dance as this tricky, devious medium, that won’t be pinned down by the taxonomies and lexicons of dance theorists.