My growing appreciation for swing dances

I have a growing appreciation for swing dances because they allow you to dance to music of different styles, and more importantly, they allow you to dance to music with different tempos.

A quick internet search will show there are more than 10 types of swing dances, but I will only talk about West Coast Swing, Lindy Hop, and Balboa.

West Coast Swing allows you to dance to contemporary pop and country music, and the fastest tempo that gets quoted for West Coast Swing is about 120 beats per minute (BPM). I have been told that West Coast Swing competitions usually feature songs at around 100 BPM.

Lindy Hop was the original swing dance and it allows you to dance to big-band music. Lindy Hop is danced regularly to fast-paced music, as much as 160 BPM.

Balboa allows you to dance to very fast music, like in the videos below. The dancers are dancing to, I don’t know, 200 BPM music? It is really fast music.