The Dance Primer

Meet Naomi Uyama is a great dancer based out of the Washington DC area. I tracked her down because of the wonderful things she has to say on her own blog. Naomi is obviously more than just a dancer. She’s a really nice person, with an inspirational vision for what Lindy Hopping and social dancing are and can become. Here’s the first part of our interview:

Amberlynn: When did you first get into dance, and what was it that really hooked you?

Naomi: I, like ever other little girl in the universe, took a ballet class and then felt dopey and inflexible and didn’t think that I could dance. I found Lindy Hop when I was sixteen by accident. My friend Nina Gilkenson and I were running these little high school shows with high school bands. One of them was a rockabilly band. So we got all dressed up and flailed around, but we didn’t know what we were doing.

I owned a copy of Swing Kids ’cause I thought it was the greatest movie ever, but I didn’t think that people would ever still do that. [Swing Dance, that is.] I just thought, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’ the same way I thought it would be cool to be a medieval princess; that is was something that didn’t exist any more.

So we were flailing around, and the guys in the band asked if we were doing Lindy Hop. And we said we didn’t know what they were talking about. They said, “Oh, we’ve been taking classes at this place and we’re going out to this ballroom on Saturday. Would you like to come?” So we went, and we were really excited because they were super cute, and they were twins. So we went to the dance and saw people Lindy Hopping in this huge really beautiful ballroom, called the Glen Echo. It was just right outside DC, it’s from around the 1930’s and it was really well preserved. There was a live band, and we saw our first jam. That’s when I got totally hooked, and I forgot the guys were even there. So, I would say that it was the first jam that I saw. There was one couple in particular. They were young, and they were wearing awesome clothes, and they went out and did an aerial and I was blown away.

I remember we couldn’t stop talking about it the next day at school. Nina and I kept demonstrating what they did with our backpacks. (It was an around the back, or some people call it the Kip or the Baby or the Frog.)

So that’s how I discovered dancing and I just thought, ‘this is the coolest thing ever, I have to do this.’

A: So ballet was hard for you. But when you started swing dancing, was it hard for you to pick it up or has it always been easy?

N: It was pretty easy, but you also have to remember that 10 years ago [when I started] the general level was pretty low. So to get good wasn’t as much of an uphill journey. If you were at a level much lower than what is common today you were pretty awesome for the scene back then. So, it was easy. But when I watch old clips I’m like “oh, we really sucked.” It felt a lot more natural to me than classically trained dances that I had attempted.‘Cause I was never very flexible, I didn’t have turnout or very high arch or these things that are valued in these other forms of dance. But when I started doing Lindy Hop I realized, oh, I’m actually pretty good at this. So that was nice.

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Don’t miss the rest of the interview! Read parts II, III, and IV

To contact Naomi to book her for teaching or performance gigs, you may contact her via email at japx2 at yahoo. Sorry, I would just make it an easy clicking link, but I don’t want her to get attacked by spam bots.