‘Swing into Spring’ celebration offers free classes April 3-12
By Maggie Ginsberg
Watching LaTasha Barnes perform is difficult to put into words, and that’s OK. The tenured Arizona State University professor and multi-Bessie-award-winner’s work is meant to be experienced in community, her joy breathlessly embodied by everyone who witnesses it. As the horns moan or the deejay fires a popping beat, Barnes invites us to accompany her on a twisting, sliding, kicking, stepping, waacking journey through decades of Black American social dance forms, from 1920s Lindy Hop and authentic jazz to modern forms like Hip-Hop and House. Her work is meant to be fun and accessible, but also illuminating and empowering.
“It’s not about the dance. The dance is the trick, the carrot,” says Barnes. “It’s the lure to get you in, to have an experience, to access yourself in a different way, to come to understand yourself and your community in a different way, and to understand how we can contribute and sustain each other.”
Barnes is hoping to lure you to her Swing into Spring celebration, a statewide residency coordinated by the UW-Madison Division of the Arts, with support from the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Foundation, to be held across 10 days and six Wisconsin communities from April 3-12. Free collaborations, workshops and master classes will unfold in Madison, Milwaukee, Viroqua, Green Bay, Wausau and Eau Claire, culminating in a four-hour event on April 12 at the Goodman Community Center.
There, Barnes and collaborator Le’Andre Douglas, accompanied by live music, DJ, and professional dancers, will lead a public dance class, followed by a reception. It’s open to all ages and levels — the idea is simply to let go. “The entire point is to gain some new tools to play, to access yourself,” says Barnes. “Find new ways to hold the joy your body wants to feel without harming or hindering it.”
The point is also to educate yourself — or deconstruct, or unlearn, as Barnes puts it — on the true origins of swing dancing. Maybe you picture Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed unwittingly Charleston-ing their way backwards into the pool beneath the high school gym floor in It’s a Wonderful Life, but social dances like the Lindy Hop actually originated in Harlem in the early 1900s before the Roaring 20s took hold. They are deeply rooted in Black culture, they just haven’t always been recognized as such — and Barnes has been out to change that on every level for a long, long time.
For Barnes, Black American social dance forms and music were celebrated in her Virginia household, and inextricably woven throughout her upbringing — as was a military tradition. But her pop culture exposure to Black dancers didn’t align with her lived experience, and so the formal collegiate path for dance didn’t appeal. Instead, she enlisted in the Army at 18 and very quickly found community and core connection through the NCO Club. “There was always someone, in anybody’s company or regimen, that did salsa, or Hip Hop, or came from Chicago and could do stepping and had a relationship with House dance,” Barnes says. “Literally it was gathering around music.”
When Barnes was six credits shy of an electrical engineering degree, she pivoted to business because she thought it would ultimately be more useful in supporting the arts. As an Army-trained satellite communicators operator, she ended up serving in a communications role under two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But, in 2004, she was hit by a car — and dance, specifically Hip-Hop and popping, played a critical role in her recovery.
In staggeringly short order, Barnes rose swiftly through the dance ranks, earning awards at the international level for House, authentic jazz, Lindy Hop and more. She turned her scholarly mind to commanding respect for street and club culture and styles in the academic space, self-designing an interdisciplinary master’s degree in Ethnochoreology, Black Studies, and Performance Studies at Gallatin School in New York City.
“I didn’t fully understand the powerful place that I was carving out, but I knew that it was needed,” says Barnes, who calls herself a “tradition-bearer of an actively developing culture” and says she’s been “gifted with the ability to flow through the continuum of Black and Black-adjacent dance forms,” including samba, salsa, Lindy Hop, Texas Tommy, Two-Step, waacking, New Jack Swing and more. “I was a part of the resurgence generation in the late 2000s, this effort to bring waacking back into the forefront of dance,” says Barnes. “I was so enthralled by it, and so liberated by it, that I just wanted to share as many times and as powerfully as I could.”
One of the most notable results of this was her creation of The Jazz Continuum, a dance and live music production informed by Barnes’ applied research that debuted at the Guggenheim in 2021 and toured through Fall 2024, and was a critic’s pick by The New York Times.
Today Barnes may be an internationally acclaimed dance artist and scholar, an electrical engineer, a disabled U.S. veteran and the second-ever professor in the country to be tenured in Hip Hop — but in many ways she’s very much a child. Her Instagram followers already know that one of her signature moves when she arrives in a new town is cartwheeling, somersaulting or otherwise hurling herself onto the hotel bed to “land” in a place of joy. “I’m five,” she says, laughing. “I’m actually five years old.”
It’s that sense of play that will fuel Barnes when she lands in Wisconsin for the Swing into Spring celebration — a move she’ll no doubt document on Instagram. That’s what she hopes you’ll take away, too.
“At its best experience, swing is relaxed,” Barnes says. “You will not survive any of this movement if you don’t know how to relax. So come learn how to relax and play.”
Learn more about Swing into Spring across Wisconsin at go.wisc.edu/swingintospring.