What makes this dance recognizable? What is typical, distinctive or characteristic?
Funny jive dance -like improvisations, with jumps, kicks and freezes.
Examples
Mac the knife - Various performers (Robby Williams, Sinatra, Armstrong...)
Just a gigolo - Gunther Neefs
Pack up - Eliza Doolitlle
BPM:
When Charles Lindbergh in 1927 flew for the first solo non -stop across the Atlantic from New York to Paris, the newspapers headed: Lucky Lindy hops Atlantic. This would be how the name Lindy Hop was originated.
Video: as it may look ...
(We searched preferably brief and clear movies without much show, spectacle and competition.
Better suggestions are welcome.)
It is an African-American dance that originated in New York City in the late twenties and early thirties. It was an amalgamation of many different dances, but mainly based on jazz, tap dancing and charleston. The development of the Lindy Hop was accompanied by the development of jazz. For this reason, the term Swing was used both for this dance style as for the jazz style on which is danced. For example, it was in the great dance halls of Harlem, the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club danced to the music by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.
The blacks called their swing (dance) lindy hop. They were herein also mocking to the stiff dance mannerisms of whites.
When the whites took it over they called it the Jitterbug. Who was then the base of the Rock 'n' Roll and Boogie Woogie. Jitters stand for ' shivers' or 'nerves'. 'Bug' for a insect. I can well imagine something.
The big bands witch needed many band members became smaler and played more and more "rhythm and blues", later called by the whites 'rock & roll'.
The Lindy Hop combines solo and partner dancing. The dance includes both much improvisation as more formal elements, similar to the music which is danced. The basic swing out part contains a part of closed dance position, in which man and woman are dancing together (something that in African dances was usually not allowed) and a part of open dance position in which both dancers have room for improvisation.