Welcome to Jive Bug

About West Coast Swing

...smooth, slinky, stylish, funky, jazzy...

THE sophisticated dance, originally from California,

Huge in the US and now hitting the UK!

At Jive Bug we play a wide range of music to cater for different tastes, with some bluesy tunes to the top chart hits at various tempos. West Coast Swing, as taught and danced at Jivebug, is ideal for those social dancers who want to take their dancing skills to a higher level, incorporating fancy footwork and funky body movements such as rolls, waves and ripples.

When Lindy Hop was banned from many dance halls in the late ‘40s (too many injuries to self and others due to kicks and jumps), WCS began to flourish. WCS is a ‘slotted dance’, which means that the woman travels forward and back along an imaginary line on the floor, with the man moving on and off her line. Danced to slower music (ideally 100 – 130 bpm), the dance is highly improvisational. Whilst ballroom dancers tend to strive to achieve an ideal (everyone aims to look the same), WCS dancers are encouraged to use and invent new patterns, body positions, footwork, rhythm variations etc and to develop their own individual style. Though WCS was originally danced to smooth swing music, many of the best WCS dancers today evolved from the post disco era, giving the dance a more contemporary feel that is constantly developing and transforming.

We are not running any regular WCS classes at the moment, but check our Sunday workshops or see our links page for alternative venues.