— from an interview from a recent issue of Dance Notes.
 
Buddy Schwimmer… Swinging Through Life

Swing is truly the American dance and who better to teach it than Buddy Schimmer. Buddy has brought his innovative brand of swing to countries such as Germany and England, and has trained some of the world's finest dancers, including Donnie Burns and Gaynor Fairweather. He instructs dancers of all ages and even his own children are very successful Latin competitors. Buddy is always enthusiastic and energetic which is very evident in all his dance classes. He believes dancing is fun and so teaching should be fun. Never shy about expressing his opinions. Buddy was completely forthcoming in sharing his thoughts on competitive dancesport with Dance Notes.

How did you start dancing?

When I was a kid, my parents used to swing dance. They were the best swing dancers I ever saw. They would take us out and watch them dance all the time. I was probably eight or nine years old. I had five brothers and sisters and we all danced, but I was the worst of the bunch. None of them dance now, but I do. I can't stop. My mother and my sister tried to teach me to dance. They finally said, "We give up, you can't dance." And they gave up. So I went in my bedroom and looked in my window... when the lights were on in the room and it was dark outside, I could see my reflection in the window. So that was my mirror. I looked in the mirror and taught myself how to dance in a year. And I've been dancing ever since.

Why do you think you had so much drive to do it?

Because everybody else could do it and they said I couldn't! If someone tells me I can't do something, I'll do my darndest to do it. I used to be in karate, and people said, "You can't fight certain people," I'd always do it.

Was your family surprised?

When I started dancing they were all proud of me.

Were they professionals, or did they just dance?

No, my dad said being a professional would take the fun out of it. He won the Harvest Moon Ball four times. My dad never lost a contest in his life. He was from New York and my mom was from Chicago.

And they just danced swing?

That's what my dad and mom did, yes. I was raised doing swing. And I went from swing into dancing freestyle. They call it hip hop now. We used to dance in contests at clubs. I made my living for about three years just dancing in contests in nightclubs. Didn't do anything else during the daytime, just entered contests at night.

And you would win money?

Oh, yeh. All solo, all by myself. I did a little swing on the side for fun. I always liked swing. My sister and I danced in American Graffiti. I have a picture of us doing that. Then I started to do a thing called nightclub two-step, which is a dance that I invented. It actually came off a dance called the Surfer Stomp. But now I teach it all over the world and people love it. I go to Europe and teach about four or five times a year. I'm in Japan, all over the United States and Canada, wherever they send me.

Is that why you became famous?

No. It was mostly the swing. A lot of ballroom dancers think I'm a swing dancer. A lot of swingers think I'm a ballroom dancer. It just cracks me up. I'm a street dancer. I never took lessons. I used to watch people and emulate them. And ask questions. I was a good question-asker. I'd always butt in the conversation when people were talking about dance, to find out what the heck was going on. Why one person did it one way and one person did it another way. That still cracks me up. Everyone thinks they're right. Everyone says, "This is the way you do it, this is the way you do it," or "I'm a champion over here." I'm laughing my head off at this. Most of them didn't make sense. Because I had to teach myself, I had to do what was logical. I didn't do things just because someone told me. If it didn't make sense, then I didn't do it, unless they told me why. A lot of people do something just because someone said to do it that way, as opposed to what makes sense.

And all the names of my patterns tell me what I'm doing, whereas I hear names from people like "octopus" and "London Bridges" and " Sailor shuffle!" Doesn't make sense to me. Doesn't tell me what it is. Whenever you use different terminology like that, you have to know the terminology. Just say what it is! If it's a hook triple, that's a sailor shuffle! I always get bugged about teaching. I'm not the best teacher in the world, but I certainly have a lot of students I'm responsible for. When I see some of this choreography... the dancers are told to do something that makes them look stupid. Ladies are told to open their legs to be sexy or whatever. It's not sexy. There are better ways of looking like a sensual woman out there. The women shouldn't look like a man. And the men shouldn't look like women. We get a bad reputation in dance because they think all of us guys are on the feminine side. I don't care if somebody is. I have a lot of friends that are gay. But even they will not dance that way! But I do know that it is personal opinion.

I also think that dancing should be fun. And most people, they're very dry. I have to have fun when I'm teaching too. If I'm having a good time, hopefully the students are having a good time. But if I'm going to sit there and go, "Your left fingernail points to the north, while your arm points in." That's boring! It's boring to anybody! I can get to the same place without being boring. I hope. Some people say, "Well, he's just a clown." I've heard that before. I clown around a lot. But, I figure if I've got 100 people in that class, 10 of them are going to go on a little bit, 90 of them are not going to go on. That's the way the ratio usually works in dance. But the 10 people who go on are going to have a good time and learn something. The people who don't go on, they're going to have a good time anyway. So why scare them away by being boring? I am a firm believer that a person who cares about how somebody else moves is a better teacher than someone who's trying to teach technique only. You can be the most technical person in the world and still be a robot out there. For instance, you can almost always tell when you see a dancer from a franchise studio out there because if that's the only place they've been and they haven't seen anything outside that, they all look the same. It's like a postage stamp. Why? I've trained a lot of those dancers and the first thing I do is do something different for them, and they say, "Well, that's not the way it's done." That's not the way it may be done at your studio, but there's a hundred other studios that teach different ways. And I ask myself, "Why are there so many independent studios out there?" Most of them came from Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire. And they got tired of the way it was done. So, even though Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire are good entrepreneurs, sometimes they don't give the personal thing very well. I teach a lot of Murray people today, but that's because they're trying to reach out and do more. The average studio doesn't. They're trained one way and they teach that way. You have to get away from what you see all the time and say, "Can I do this a different way?" Thinking outside the box, in other words. You can still get to work without having to go the same route all the time. Some of these people have lost the route they go to work. They can't get to work anymore. They think, "Oh, can't go on that side street there... sorry, doesn't work!" There's another way to get there. And it may look better on you.

How did you learn all this since you've never taken lessons?

Because I was the worst dancer in the world. I figured a lot of this stuff out by teaching myself. By saying, "Why don't I look like this person?" And if I didn't like the way it felt, or looked on my body, then I would try and change it so it was more me. And there was more me! Any two students you have are not exactly the same. Why does one person beat the other person, when they're doing the same exact step? One's got something extra the other one hasn't got. So, short little guy that I am. I used to dance against these guys who were tall and thin and looked like dancers. Short and fat does not look like a dancer. But I beat them every time, because I didn't do what they did. I would do some outlandish things so the judges would look at me and not them. A while back Ron Montez and Donnie Burns were judging a comp in San Diego, they're friends of mine now and I've taught them many times. I remember that I was warming up with my amateur partner. Donnie came walking by and I heard him laugh and say to Ron, "What's that short fat guy think he's going to do out there?" And Ron said, "Just wait, just wait!" Donnie told me afterwards, "I couldn't judge anybody. I was too god-smacked watching you dance." And not that I'm a great dancer, it's because I did things they weren't ready for. But Donnie is a person who appreciates "out of the box." A lot of the coaches don't. They say, "This is the way it was taught in the Latin technique book, so that's the way it must be done." If things were all one way, we'd only have one church in this world. I believe that everybody has a different outlook on things. You may all try to get to the same end, as churches or dancers, but it's how you get there.

How did you get involved in the ballroom world?

That's funny, because I knew nothing about the ballroom world. I'd done a little basic social dance. A ballroom teacher saw me dancing one time at Disneyland with my sister. We cleared the floor... everybody backed off to watch us dance. This teacher says, "If you come to my studio and show me what the heck you do, I'll show you how to break things down and teach them." Well, that was the start of how I started teaching and going around ballroom people. They taught swing, but it was nothing like what we did. Nothing like what street dancers did. Most of the competition dancers are doing an offshoot of what street dance is. They start with a street dance like salsa or cha cha or whatever and then they try and make it competitive. But they go so far from what it is that they lose the feeling of the dance. They get so involved in the technique of that little finger; they forget the body has to move also, especially the international style. I teach international and American style. I favor American style because I think it has more real feeling, whereas the international style has more technique. But technique without being a dance, what is it? Technique walking down the street doesn't make you a dancer. But I met these people because this teacher took me to a ballroom competition. I watched all these Latin dancers out there, and I said to her, "I can do that in a week." She said, "These people have practiced for years!" I said, "They're wasting their time!" I believe that the things they were doing were contrived and almost phony and it bothered me. I don't mean to pick on them and a lot of them are good friends, and now I have a lot more respect for them. I know more about them. But at that time, a person coming from the street looks at it and goes, "What is that?" Just like my friends from South America go out and watch international people doing tango, they say, "That's not tango! That's stupid! They look like clowns!" But I realize now that the technical, or the dance they've created for competitive dancing, is different than it is in the street. But what we need to do is have the best of both there. You need the feeling and the fun and the ability to play with the rhythms here in the ballroom world, but you also need the technique and the movement and the lead. If you don't have those together, you don't have a good dancer.

You got involved with the ballroom world with a ballroom studio, but how did you get with Donnie Burns and all the world class dancers?

Through Ron Montez. I taught him for a couple years and he brought Tony Meredith and Melanie LaPatin to me.

How did Ron find you?

He saw me at competitions. I used to go and dance in the cabaret and do solos by myself. And win every time, because they'd never seen that stuff. They stayed in their little world. And there are so many worlds of dance. The first time I met Donnie was in San Diego when he was judging. He asked Ron to set up an appointment for me to teach him. He wanted to know what the heck I was doing out there. So I went and taught him about three hours at the studio. He was doing a segue to a Michael Jackson song and he wanted me to help choreograph it. After the lesson Ron said, "How'd they do?" I said, "Well, he's stiff and she's gangly, but other than that they're okay." Ron says, "They're the world champions." I said, "Fine. He's still stiff and she's still gangly." I didn't pull punches. I told them like it was. If you want to know what's wrong, ask me. If you don't want to know, don't ask me. Wrong in my eyes might be different than the next person's eyes. But you can get 100 teachers to teach you a rumba walk. You've got people like Ron, who'll do a much better job of that than I will. But if you have a routine and you say, "How can I make this better than the person next to me?" Just ask me and I'll tell you that.

I remember the first time I saw Donnie dance in Blackpool. He said, "Give me a move for jive, because it's my weakest dance right now." So I gave him a stupid move my dad gave me a long time ago. It was just a thing where the guy ducks down and slides up the girl's body. I was on one side of the ballroom and Donnie was on the other side of the room when he did that move. And that whole side of the room exploded in applause and cheers, and I was cracking up. I said, "That's my dad's stupid move!" But these people were just so stuck in what was in the book. They never got out of the book. There's so much to do in dance, you shouldn't be blinded by "this is the only way it has to be done."

You've taught so many of the top Latin dancers in the world. What did they think when they first met you?

The first time I taught in Europe...I went over to Germany because Michael Hull heard about me. They were German champs at the time. I walked in the studio. He gave me his hand and his mouth dropped. He had hired me sight-unseen because he'd heard about me from other people. But after the first hour, he hired me to come back again two weeks later. What's funny is I just gave him something from West Coast Swing to put in his cha cha. They asked, "My god, this is great! What is it?" I go, "It's swing. I just put it in your cha cha rhythm." It's just stupid things like that. It's easy. I have 500 syncopations and over 2000 swing patterns written down in a book.

Do you remember them all or do you have to look them up?

I have to look them up! When I go dancing, I probably dance 15 patterns. That's it.

You have these all in a book?

Every possibility of a syncopation is on one page, over 500 syncopations… single, double, triple rhythm. Extended double is doing four things, instead of two. Extended triple is doing 5, such as your out, out, in cross step. All dance is made up of a single, a double and a triple, no matter what dance it is. Cha cha is double step, triple step, double step, triple step. Swing is triple step, triple step, double step. And so, what I do is, I take all these things like kicks, touches, hips, slides, shoulders, all that stuff-and fill in the blank spots with one of the timings and you've got a new syncopation. They'll always fit in the dance that you're doing, which is fun. Mathematically, it's correct. Whenever you do a triple, that's an odd number of steps. I can always replace a triple with a single. You can't replace a double with a single or a triple, because it's not even. Evens or odds have to be that way. That's the only thing that you have to know. Other than that, I can take any dance with the one page in my book, go to Europe for two months, work with the same people on the same dance and never get off that one page! Everyone else thinks they have to have a whole new pattern. You don't! And it's that simple to me. This is not technique. This is just making rhythm and patterns up. If you're coaching 30 couples, you don't want them all to be exactly the same, do you? And yet, people do. I've seen kids out on the floor dancing a waltz. All four or five couples are doing exactly the same moves and they all turn at the same time, like a postage stamp. Yes, they should all know a basic step. But if they're all doing the exact same thing, it's like you don't need a teacher there. Just put on a record. Like they used to have those tap dancing records that tell you "shuffle ball change, ball change, ball change." Doesn't matter who you are, all you have to do is what that record says. I don't like that.

How many types of swing are there?

There are 18 forms of swing. East coast, west coast, boogie, which is German, Carolina shag, Tulsa whip, the old bop and hand dancing. Hand dancing's from D.C., by the way. In the east coast swing style, you have lindy, jitterbug, jive, rock and roll, New York style lindy, balboa, St. Louis shag. So these are all different styles in the dances and they're done in different places. In Texas, they do mostly push style, which is kind of like a west coast swing, but with more wraps. And I have a list that shows every style, what basic is for it, and what denotes that style versus another style. A good teacher knows differences, not similarities of something. When a teacher transposes things and says, "It's just like this," it's usually wrong. They should say, "This is the style that we use for this. Otherwise you have people out there who look like ballroom dancers doing swing. You can tell the difference. If I put a salsa dancer out there trying to do waltz, he'd look pretty damn funny at first. Every dance has its own basic style, but within that style you can still play. And that's the part I like. I like being able to play without breaking the mold of the dance. Once you've broken the mold, you've lost it. Especially in the high competitive level, a lot of the dancers have broken away to where it's more choreography than it is dance. At Blackpool, after the dance is over I would love to see everyone change partners. What a joke that would be! They won't be able to function. These people are supposed to be great dancers, but most of them can't social dance at all! They can't lead and follow anything other than their routine, and that bothers me. I can teach a monkey to do a routine. But you can't teach it to have the freedom to do other things. That's something that has to come within you and yourself.

What do you think of the American smooth division?

Just like America, American style dancing has a lot more freedom than international style. International style is... like you're a prisoner, you have that thing around your ankle, so if you step too far out of the way, you'll get shocked. I think if everyone did basics well… I'm talking about American or international, then they should be allowed to play with it. As long as the balance of the dancing shows that it is a great basic.

I think that American style is better-not prettier-but better because it has more versatility. We don't have to have our belly buttons glued together all night long. We can actually do something. That's why country western dancing is great, even though it's so bad as far as technique is concerned. But the country western dancers have so many moves. They know a thousand more moves than an American style dancer does, and two thousand more than an international dancer does.

What turns a lot of the younger people off, by the way, is that they think, "Well, I don't want to dance that way because my parents dance that way." One of the ways to get those kids in there is to give them something that's fun to do, then they'll come in and they'll start learning it. But if you don't get them there some way, you lose them. American style has the ability to play and be free.

You seem to have such passion for teaching. What keeps you so passionate? What drives you?

All my kids. Not my kids personally, but all the kids I teach. I'm instilling in them something that I can see them have passion about. In fact this one kid got kicked out of school for drugs and the parents came to me saying, "What are we going to do?" This boy's brother had been taking lessons from me. I said, "Let me talk to him." After five minutes with me, he's dancing, he's won contests, he's on the honor roll, and it's all from dancing. It won't happen with everybody that way, and maybe it's not me who can instill it in somebody. One teacher out of six may make you really want to learn. That's a gift that those teachers have. And it may not be the same teacher for everybody, so when you get somebody who can do that for you, it can change your whole life.

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