Well - as a purist, I believe that MJ is most certainly not a swing dance. Nor is modern WCS.
It's a tricky area though, yes. Pete Loggins, who is something of an expert on swing dance history, will tell you about the old-timers' view that 'the music defines the dance'. They maintained this to the extent (and this is a real life example he gave) that a group of people dancing pure Charleston moves to swing music would have told you they weren't dancing Charleston - they were dancing swing. Partly because the Charleston rhythms are quite different, so the dance had taken on that aspect, and had a different feel from standard Charleston.
The way I see it, Lindy is in many ways a toolkit for dancing to many different kinds of swing music - it gives you the footwork, the structure and the dance techniques to make the most of swing music. If I'm dancing Lindy to a non-swing track, it isn't really Lindy anymore (even though I'll often claim it is) - it's generally changed in feel and footwork enough that that swing feel is gone, and replaced by the style of the current music.
Nowadays, when I dance 'MJ', it's not really MJ, and it's not exactly Lindy - I'll use a Lindy lead, Lindy improvisations, and some Lindy moves - but in essence it's just a hybrid of styles warped to fit the music as best I can.
One needs to bear in mind that the swing dance / music partnership is unusual. Not only did the swing dances evolve to suit the music, but the music evolved to suit the dancers - so they are far more entwined each other than in the case of many dance styles. The only other major example that I know of where this happened is AT.
Bookmarks