Thanks for the dances!
My first dance class was in 1985 at the Oxford Rock'n'Roll society, learning “real” triple-step Rock'n'Roll, though I eventually concentrated on Modern Ballroom and Latin (including jive). I started dancing Ceroc in 1988 at Michel Gay's Bristol class — this class eventually became Bristol Leroc after Ceroc became Ceroc®83.
After a four-year break, I started jiving again in 1998 at Jive Junction84 near Reading — and whilst I could remember basic moves, I couldn't remember all of my old favourite ones85. So the main design goal was to record moves (steps) so that I wouldn't have to rely on my fallible memory — and ideally to make the content accessible both on-line and as a printed document. The concept was to produce a guide to Modern Jive for Modern Jivers, like [Beyond The Cascade — Step-By-Step Guides To 88 Classic 3-Ball Juggling Tricks] and [Charlie Dancey's Encyclopædia Of Ball Juggling] are for jugglers.
Now, documenting moves has become less important than trying to document some of the subtleties of leading and following.
This documentation process is also motivated by experimenting both with writing, and with new technologies to deal with a moderately large amount of data. Initially moves were written up in LaTeX and then converted to an on-line format using LaTeX2HTML -- but this didn't prove particularly successful. Similarly, documenting everything in HTML worked well as on on-line format but didn't look good when printed. Using Java classes to encapsulate inheritance of moves, is a best forgotten experiment. Finally, after dealing with XML documents at work, I moved the whole of the project to a main XML document, together with a variety of stylesheets that extract and present the information relevant to that particular format86. From a technical perspective, my interest is in making the information available in a wide variety of standards compliant formats; hopefully, in as accessibly as possible87.
The AfterFive site is named after the Rock'n'Roll song “Jive After Five” written by Carl Perkins88, which includes the lyric “after five, I jive”.
It is an entirely happy coincidence that AfterFive is also the name of a cocktail (mix one measure each of: peppermint schnapps, kahlua and Bailey's Irish cream).
83The graphic on the title page was my (unsuccessful) entry for the first Bristol Leroc logo.
84Thanks to Nicole for her patience, while I tried to remember more than just a First Move that “first” dance — and all the other ladies that danced with me when I was restarting.Nicole and Paul ran South Side Swing — teaching Lindy Hop classes and promoting swing events in the south of England.
85I would be extremely grateful if anyone could tell me how the “Under the Bed” goes etc.
86The current format keeps each step as a separate element, and then treats each move as a list of those steps. Moves can reference parts of the list of steps from other moves (recursively), e.g. starts like first 3 steps of a First Move. At present, vector illustrations are drawn in Xfig, although I hope to eventually render them directly into SVG from the base XML document.
87Watch this space (in the mid-term) for a “talking book” version.
88“Jive After Five” was Carl Perkins' debut record on Columbia (together with “Pink Pedal Pushers” — slightly less well known than his other footwear related song “Blue Suede Shoes” popularised by Elvis).Jive After Five, 2:20, Carl Perkins, written by Carl Perkins, Unichappell Music Inc. (BMI), recorded and released in 1958.