ELHC Shenanigans

Some of you have probably noticed the acronym ELHC floating around the past few days and wondered what it stood for. Like a number of Lindy Hop events, it follows the same format other events like ALHC, ILHC, ULHS, etc., etc. But ELHC is not one lindy event. It stands for "Every Lindy Hopper Counts." ELHC is a propaganda video that surfaced at Lindy Focus in response to a daily late night video being shown by some of the Lindy Focus instructors. Let me explain the details...

Like most dance events, Lindy Focus had late nights. Late nights tend to start around 1 a.m. and can last until sunrise or a set time like 4 or 5 a.m. Some are heavy with blues, while others are Lindy Hop til you drop type dances. Lindy Focus had a large room dedicated to Lindy Hop and a small room for blues. To be honest, the blues room was just a place to go to set up your hookups for the night. (it's not really a secret anymore ya know)

So in order to encourage dancers to participate in late night, instructors Dave Madison and Andrew Sutton decided they would hold a count at the end of the night. They would count how many people were from which city and the next day they would announce it at the camp meeting. In the end, the city who had the most dancers at late night got recognition. Dave and Andrew also shot humorous videos each night that parodied the late nights and the things that go down past 5 a.m. The videos were a riot!

Long story short, DC had been killing it each night. We had a solid number of folks in for the event and were representing quite well in the comps and staying out all hours of the night. We also had the reputation for hosting the most parties in our rooms, which always seemed to be ours. So on the third night, we decided DC would take over the late night. We had about 12 people in the room around 5:30 a.m. At one point we were even doing the worm and dancing to Boy's 2 Men. Hey, there's not much more you can do at 6 a.m. to keep going. So at 6:10 a.m., Dave Madison strolls in and takes the count. DC rolled!

The next day we find out the Dave and Andrew came back in the room at 6:30 and said "now that the posers are gone, we're going to take a second count." At the camp meeting, DC was counted as having only 3 people in the room...two were in the DJ booth. As Stephen Grimes said... "not cool man!!!" He actually wasn't that serious, and we did laugh at the movie that was shown that parodied the people sleeping in the counter of the room just to get counted. But as true dancers at any dance event, we decided it was time to get even. So we began to circulate word of ELHC. Some thought it was an underground comp. Some wondered if a new event was happening this year in DC. But others knew it was a viral campaign to turn around and poke fun at our light night counting instructors.

So we got to work early that evening planning our video. We used various characters from the event and pulled off what I think was one of the funniest little ploys I've seen at a lindy event. The next night we showed it to Dave and Andrew and they agreed to show it as that nights "late night" video. The entire Lindy Focus crowd laughed in hysterics at the parody of Dave Madison and his raver pants. And using Davis on his knees as Andrew Sutton (who is decidedly shorter than Dave) was priceless, specially when they held hands. So what you see below is the video that made waves at Lindy Focus and could be the start of a tradition going forward.



Side note: We want to thank Dave Madison, Andrew Sutton and Andrew Thigpen for being such good sports and supporting us in showing the video at Lindy Focus. Seriously, it was all in good fun and I think we all had an absolute blast producing it.

Labels: Dancing, Jazz, Lindy Hop, Swing, Video

posted by DVS @ 9:36 PM