Swing/Lindy Hop: Frankie Manning
"People say to me, ‘How long you been dancing?' I say, ‘All my life.'"
By Tracey Minkin
Friday, February 29, 2008
Photo by Brad DeCecco
What's Your Disaster Plan?
No matter where you live, there's always the possibility of a natural disaster. You could spend days without electricity. You could be isolated and have no way to leave your home, or you might need to leave in a hurry.
North Beach Poet
George Tsongas lives to write and writes to live. It's a simple formula
for a feisty, full-blooded 80-year-old poet, and it works.
If you could slow Frankie Manning down, you might want to put him in the Smithsonian Institution. He is that kind of American treasure. But Frankie Manning is moving all the time—at 93, still smooth, still showing younger folks how to make their partner feel like the only person in the room, and still playing on the bouncing rhythms of the Lindy Hop as he has been—for eighty years.
Indeed, Manning has lived a life defined by dance. After watching his parents do the Charleston at parties in his native Harlem during the 1920s, Manning caught the next wave, a swinging new dance called the Lindy Hop. "I gained that enthusiasm and it never left me," he says. Manning became a lead dancer at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s, appeared on stages worldwide with such jazz greats as Count Basie and Duke Ellington, and choreographed and appeared in dance sequences in films.
When the swing era gave way to nascent rock and roll, Manning took a job in the post office, and spent 30 years awaiting the Renaissance. By the mid-1980s, a whole new wave of dancers was looking to swing, and Manning swung right back with them. With a 1989 Tony Award for choreography in Black and Blue, and appearances in Spike Lee's Malcolm X and Ken Burns' documentary Jazz, Manning continues to travel and teach 35 weeks a year. Last spring, he published, with co-writer Cynthia Millman, his autobiography, Frankie Manning, Ambassador of Lindy Hop.
"People say to me, ‘How long you been dancing?'" Manning explains. "I say, ‘All my life.' But in the early years, in my 20s, I used to dance so much, I enjoyed it so much, I thought I would never live past 35!" Now nearly 60 years later, Frankie is still alive—and dancing.
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