Jeanne-Clare Storace, Swing dancing teacher

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Resident of Brunswick East, Swing dancing teacher at Swing Patrol Seddon

My name is Jeanne-Clare Storace and I have been co-teaching Swing dancing classes for Swing Patrol Seddon since March 2016.

People often ask me about my name: how to pronounce it, or if I have a French background. I don’t have any French heritage as far as I know, but I am named after two amazing women and the combination of the names sounds French. ‘Jeanne’ (rhymes with ‘fun’ where the ‘j’ sounds like the ‘s’ in ‘measure’) was my dad’s aunt and godmother who passed away before I was born. She was Maltese-Egyptian, and grew up in Alexandria before migrating to Melbourne with her family after World War II. ‘Clare’ is my aunt, who I still see regularly, and she was the midwife at my birth.

I grew up in Brunswick West and Thornbury as the only child of parents who divorced when I was two years old. I’ve never thought of myself as coming from a ‘broken home’ as my mum and my dad ensured that both my homes were happy environments filled with love, laughter and dancing.

Despite being an only child, I have a large extended family and I’m very grateful to have lots of aunts, uncles and cousins. I can’t ever remember learning how to dance, as moving to music has always been a big part of life with my family. To this day, spontaneous dance sessions often happen I visit my mum.

I started ballet classes when I was four years old at the Heidelberg and District Ballet School, followed by jazz ballet and tap dancing from seven. I stopped doing dance classes during high school but ventured into the world of partner dancing at 18 when I started salsa lessons. A year later in 2008, I began swing dancing after some friends of mine encouraged me to take classes with them through the Melbourne University Dancesport Club.

In 2013 I started playing video games for a living, working as a Quality Assurance Tester with Tantalus Media where I got to work on the Wii-U port of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which was released in March last year. In January 2016, I started working as a Quality Analyst at Firemonkeys, a studio of Electronic Arts (EA) on the Sims FreePlay team. It’s wonderful working in an environment with people who are super passionate about games and creating new and engaging content for the players.

2013 was also a year where I had the time, money and energy to dedicate to swing dancing. The main focus of classes is to get people social dancing, but one of the things I missed about my Heidelberg and District Ballet School days was the performance aspect of dancing. At the time, Swing Patrol offered two performance troupes: Brat Pack, the development troupe, and Harlem Shout, the advanced troupe. You’d often see these groups performing at public events, like White Night or the summer dancing series at Federation Square.

I auditioned and got into Brat Pack in 2014 and absolutely loved the experience. One of my favourite gigs was being the half-time entertainment for a roller derby tournament, where we dressed up as Star Wars characters for Star Wars Day (May the 4th be with you).

Brat Pack disbanded in 2015 so I spent that year focusing on other aspects of swing dancing. I started learning how to lead, which was traditionally the man’s role. One of the things I love about the swing dancing community is the openness and acceptance of people doing whatever role in the dance partnership they want to regardless of gender. In classes, teachers use non-gendered language to describe the roles: lead and follow, as opposed to man and woman.

Swing Dancing, the popular form of dance between the 1920s to the 1940s is an umbrella term, kind of like ‘Ballroom’, that encompasses many different styles: Charleston, Lindy Hop, Balboa for example. In 2015 I started learning the Shag dancing style. This has nothing to do with what Austin Powers refers to when he says ‘shag’. I immediately fell in love with this style and I think it’s one of the happiest dances in the world. At the start of this year I joined a group of passionate shag dancers called Double Rhythm Riot. We focus on improving our shag dancing and choreograph routines for events.

In 2016, I auditioned and got in into Harlem Shout, the advanced Lindy Hop troupe and at about the same time, I was approached by the awesome Garrad Flint to co-teach at a venue in the inner-west. We had a choice between Monday nights in an industrial part of Yarraville, or a Thursday night in the ‘up-and-coming’ part of Seddon. We decided on Seddon for a number of reasons, but one of my favourite things about this choice is that we can say things like “Seddonsational.”

2016 was also a year where Swing Dancing featured at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. I was fortunate enough to perform in Damian Callinan’s show called ‘Swing Man’ as a robot droid named Jenclavieve programmed to help him learn how to swing dance. I shared this role with a wonderful swing dancer and human, Genevieve Wallis, hence the name ‘Jenclavieve.’ I’m excited to say that ‘Swing Man’ is set to tour nationally in 2018 and I’m looking forward to taking the show on the road and discovering new places along the way.

Since March 2016, we have been teaching Swing Dancing classes every Thursday night at the Seddon Uniting Church on Gamon Street. All of our classes operate on a walk-in basis: you don’t need to pre-book or come in at the start of a block, and even though we predominately partner dance, you don’t need to bring a partner with you.

Every year in October, Swing Patrol puts on the annual Performance Ball, where all of the swing dancing venues across Melbourne learn a routine and showcase their skills to the wider community. Last year, Swing Patrol Seddon’s first Performance Ball, we celebrated the Western Bulldogs’ AFL win by wearing red, white and blue and marching on to their victory song before the routine started. We were lucky enough to have opportunities to perform this routine at events like the Yarraville and Seddon festivals earlier this year, which were a lot of fun. I definitely hope we get to do this again next year with the new routine that we will be teaching to our students in mid-to-late August.

It’s been such a wonderful experience teaching Swing dancing in Seddon for the last year and a half: sharing something I’m really passionate about with others, and seeing our students develop their skills, make new friends and generally have a great time. I really hope that our venue continues to grow in the future, as I’d love for more people to experience the joy in this dance.

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