Seven Pairs Of Teenagers Light Up The Dance Floor And Win First Place

Sep 09, 2021 by apost team

A 1950s beach party is not the only place to enjoy the Carolina Shag. This group of kids, aged 12 to 17 at the time of this video, are known as The Junior Shag Dance Team, and they perform all over the world. 

During the 2019 U.S. Open Swing Dance Competition held in Burbank, California, their abundant talent and appreciation for the old-style swing dance is something to behold. 

Brennar Goree founded the group in 2008, and since then, they have won several competitions. The kids were U.S. Open Formation Team Champions five times and U.S.A. Grand National Team Champions seven times. Just recently, they picked up a new honor and are now Australian Open Formation Team Champions, as noted on their website.

The Carolina Shag is a type of swing dance along the lines of the West Coast Swing, Rock-n-Roll, Lindy Hop, Jitterbug, Jive, Imperial Swing, Houston Whip, Hollywood Swing, Hand Dancing, East Coast Swing and Dallas Push.

Couples perform with one hand clasped to the other's hand, but they are required to remain at arm's length. The six-count, eight-step dance pattern also has turns, kicks, pivots and side-by-sides, along with many other moves that make this dance great.

You can enjoy the Carolina Shag even if you are not on the East Coast. In studios all over the country, people are teaching students to do the Carolina Shag. After you watch the video of these talented teens, you may be inspired to enter a studio near you so that you can do it too.

Viewers on YouTube, where the video has hundreds of thousands of views, certainly enjoyed the performance these young shag dancers put on.

“Love it ~ no vulgarity; no twerking; no wardrobe malfunctions.....just talented, entertaining dancers.  Good work,” one YouTuber commented.

“Very impressive. Lots of practice. They were spot on with there moves. I would love too see them in person,” Gary Culbert added.

But where does the Carolina Shag come from, and what is its history?

According to the Encyclopedia of North Carolina, the answer isn’t so clear. Some scholars say that the dance can be traced all the way back to Africa, while others claim that the settlers of the Carolina colony gave rise to the dance in the 18th century. However, it’s important to note that throughout the dance’s early history, it was going through constant evolution and was never called the “Carolina Shag.” And it wasn’t until the late 19th and 20th centuries that the shag became popular when “slow grind jazz dances” from the Carolinas made their way to the northeast. As these dances spread around the U.S., they gradually changed — and that’s how the Charleston and jitterbug dances came to be. These two dances eventually further evolved into the modern shag.

The modern shag really came into its own during the 1940s and ‘50s when Billy Jeffers — who was known as a “fast dancer,” not a “shagger” — became associated with this emerging style of dance. The golden age of shag was during this period when beach clubs would attract teenagers to dance to fast music on indoor and outdoor dance floors.

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“Probably the most famous of all of these dance clubs was the Pad in Myrtle Beach, S.C. In its prime, the shag became more than just a dance; it was a social phenomenon, with teenagers from all over the Carolinas drawn to its image of daring and excitement,” Laura Young Baxley writes for the Encyclopedia of North Carolina.

Paradoxically, it wasn’t until after this golden age that people started to call the dance “the shag” during the early 1960s, as rock music began to supplant shag music. With that said, shag dance saw somewhat of a resurgence in the 1970s thanks to a competitive dance circuit. And as of the early 2000s, the Society of Stranders and the Association of Carolina Shag Clubs had thousands of members.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 has put much of the Carolina Shag world on hold — at least for the time being. In an announcement posted to their website, the U.S. Open Swing Dance Competition announced that the event is postponed until November 2022.

“The Board of Directors voted unanimously to postpone The Open until November 2022 for the safety of the community. We arrived at this decision by taking into consideration feedback from surveys and community sources, LA County mask mandate reintroduction, and the Delta variant,” the statement read.

However, the organization will hold a virtual event in 2021 “to bring the community together and have some fun until we can all be together in 2022.”

In any case, we look forward to seeing what the talented Junior Shag Dance Team will do in the coming year.

What do you think of their dance moves? Have you ever danced the Carolina Shag before? Let us know — and be sure to pass this incredible performance on to others.