To the Savoy Hop Cats, a night on the town isn’t a couple of beers on Mill Avenue, it’s an evening of waffles, milkshakes and the lindy hop.
Elizabeth and Nathaniel Smalley call themselves the Savoy Hop Cats, and use the name to spread their love of swing dancing across the Valley.
“There’s so much negative stuff that you could do with your time in the world today. [But] this is wholesome, thoroughly entertaining, great exercise, fun beyond belief, [and you] meet all kinds of great people,” Nathaniel Smalley says.
Elizabeth and Nathaniel arrive at most locations in their swing-dancing best, a swank black fedora perched on Nathaniel’s noodle and a not-so-revealing pair of fishnets on Elizabeth’s gams. The second a good song pops on the radio, no matter the genre, they will start to dance.
The Smalleys, now married for little more than a year, met four years ago at a swing dance at Club Red in Tempe. Elizabeth showed up stag to the dance — her first swing dance — no friends, no date and she didn’t know how to dance. But she quickly learned she wasn't alone.
“The first thing Nathaniel ever says to me was ‘Do you want to dance?” Elizabeth says. The two instantly connected and from then on, Nathaniel says, it was love at first swing.
“For the first month and a half, maybe two months, any time we got together we were dancing,” he adds.
In an age of Match.com and eHarmony.com, the two found each other in a physical, even classical setting, and Nathaniel says this form of socializing has come full circle. After their first dance, Nathaniel invited Elizabeth to another swing dance and surprised her by drawing her a map to the location on a napkin. She had GPS to find the next dance and didn't use the napkin – but the gesture stuck with her.
“There was a time 15, 10 years ago where meeting somebody online, a friend, or a boyfriend or anyone was kind of a novelty. Well, now we’re the novelty,” Elizabeth says. After a few months, Nathaniel proposed to Elizabeth, she said yes, and shortly thereafter, the Savoy Hop Cats were born.
Nathaniel says he got the idea for the name from the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, New York – the birthplace of the Lindy Hop.
“[In swing dance] you can go and let everything go. The Savoy Ballroom offered that to people in the '20s and the '30s and the '40s,” Nathaniel says.
He says 25 cents at the door would buy someone dancing all night with hundreds of people. The Savoy Hop Cats want to keep that culture alive and spread this passion for swing dancing to more college students, Nathaniel says.
Every Thursday they now host an evening of swing dancing, old movies, waffles and espresso called Café le Swing in a historic building across the street from Gammage Auditorium.
Nathaniel says he drew inspiration for starting this weekly event from the movie “Swing Kids” and from the therapeutic relief dancing brings him.
“When I went out and danced, I forgot about everything else that was going on in my life that was negative or that I didn’t want to have to think about any more for that day,” Nathaniel says.
He says the kids in “Swing Kids” experienced the same feeling when they left the pressures of Nazi Germany for a night of swing dancing. When they stepped through that door, their troubles seemed to melt away, he says, and college students should experience this same relief.
“College kids have a lot of crap to deal with,” Nathaniel says. “What better thing than to create an atmosphere … where they can come and just dump [it all] at the door, and go in and forget it all for two, three, four, five hours.”
Social work senior Elizabeth Ryberg has been swing dancing for five years and was attracted to Café le Swing's “old-style” atmosphere. She adds that she knows hundreds of people familiar with and interested in swing dance, many through ASU's SwingDevils club, and that Tempe definitely has a swing dancing community.
“It’s kind of a unique experience, swing dancing. It’s kind of an underground trend that’s starting to come back up,” Ryberg says. “Swing dancing was the unpopular and now [young people] are making it popular.”
Eliot Hillis, Ryberg’s friend and communications senior, says he had never gone out swing dancing in his life and that he anticipated learning how.
“As opposed to just going to a club, which I’ve been to and people just kind of move around and gyrate, this is something that I believe actually takes some skill and when you get good at it, it looks pretty cool,” Hillis says.
Café le Swing costs $8 at the door and the Smalleys say they have invested thousands of dollars in their own personal finances to lease the building and decorate it.
Elizabeth currently works as a business analyst from a home office and Nathaniel runs a handyman business. The Savoy Hop Cats see their events as less of a moneymaking venture and more of a way to spread swing dancing to everyone, Nathaniel says.
“This is so satisfying for us, to do what we do. It gives back to so many people what was given to us and that’s what it’s all about,” Nathaniel says.
The Savoy Hop Cats also host a swing dance every Monday in the Ghost Lounge at the historic Hotel San Carlos in downtown Phoenix.
After they begin the evening with a lesson to make sure every one can dance, men and women suddenly become fellas and dolls. A twirling array of skirts and twisting saddle shoes fills the room with the charm and sass of the '20s.
For those who want to learn more, the Smalleys offer private swing dancing lessons in their home studio starting at 50 dollars per lesson.
On Oct. 27 at Café le Swing the Savoy Hopcats will debut their official house band, the Savoy Swingdicate, lead by saxophonist and ASU Herberger Institute School of Music Jazz Studies alumni Jeremy Lappitt.
Lappitt met with the Smalleys to create a band that ended up including n guitarist from the ASU School of Jazz Faculty, a trumpeter in the Sun Devil Marching Band, a bass player from Scottsdale Community College’s Music Department and a drummer in numerous bands across the Valley to create a “swing band conceived by dancers, for dancers,” Smalley says.
“When you dance with somebody, it’s a conversation,” Elizabeth says, “And you get to communicate in a way you normally don’t.”Whether swinging at Home Depot, 5 and Diner or under the misters at the mall, for this couple, dancing is a form of communication.
By asking someone to turn or move a different way with the body, Elizabeth says people can learn more about each other and communicate through their body how the music makes them feel.
She says swing dancing stands out as a form of dancing because much of it is improvised, which allows for more freedom of expression.
“There is no syllabus for swing,” Elizabeth says.
Reach the reporter at hhuskins@asu.edu
