Last Dance
by Aviram Bar-Akiva
The first time I met the Holy Lindy Land group was at an open air party in the streets of Tel-Aviv. It was a warm and humid summer night and they held a dance jam in Dizingoff square during the summer solstice parties of 2016. It was during of my early photowalks, the first year I started shooting street photographs. The Holy Lindy Land dance group take themselves seriously and their focus is Swing.
Swing is a group dance developed from Jazz music in the 1920s. The Lindy hop is the most popular style of Swing originated in Harlem, New-York, in the 1930s. Their fluid dance moves and stylish outfits immediately caught my eye and a nostalgic feeling of a different era overtook me.
So it was more than a pleasant surprised when I got a call from Ron, one of the group managers, with a tip about coming to their dance jam one Friday night. “It is a special night for us” he told me, “we are saying our farewells”.
They gathered for dance jams regularly on Friday nights, but this time it was different. They grouped together to say their farewells, last Holy Lindy Glam-Jam of 2016, last Jam in their favorite dancehall of “Bikurei Haitim”. It was built somewhere in 1960s in a central spot in Tel-Aviv, and still held its charm.
The authorities had given them notice, and according to the city planners the old dancehall must be taken down. The following year they were going to build an elementary school on the same site. On Sunday the bulldozers were going to take the building down.
However, on this, their last Friday there, they put such thoughts aside and danced the night away.
