Welcome students to the Academy for Switchcraft and Stealery!

My name is Mads Nordby, bachata role rotation enthusiast based in Amsterdam, and this is a tale about going to my very first West Coast Swing (WCS) festival, SwitchXperience Paris, and being absolutely blown away by the passion and immersion I experienced there. It made me have the same kind of feeling as a kid at an adventure camp, or going on a group trip with your besties. Just a thoroughly enjoyable ride.

It was also the spark that led to the creation of Bachata Beyond.

Design by CatDanceDesign

Now with the shameless self promotion out of the way 😜, I’ll start my tale quickly covering some WCS terminology:

Switching = Role rotation.

Stealing = Stealing one of the partners in another dancing couple. Like in a birthday bachata dance.

So as the name implies the SwitchXperience is a festival focused on switching (and stealing), so like a WCS version of Terra Livre if you will. But that’s not all. On top of that the festival is themed, set in a magical world taking inspiration from fantasy and other related genres. All the participants are students at the Academy for Switchcraft and Stealery, which is sorta like a more inclusive and whimsical dance-themed Hogwarts. The Academy is divided into the following three tribes:

During the event we competed in a tournament to see which tribe could earn the most points by the end of the weekend. You could earn points by going to workshops, staying until the end of the parties, joining and placing in the event competition, plus a few other things.

For a visual accompaniment to this SwitchXperience journey you can follow along with Saska Media who made stories for the event and Tumbao Pix who took incredible pictures.

Prologue: Boarding the SwitchX Express

I discovered the existence of SwitchXperience at my first ever WCS lesson in early March of 2024 in Amsterdam. That lesson had All-star Hélène Mickle and her husband Matt substitute teaching. As a Rolerotation enthusiast I wanted to know more about the switching scene in WCS as I didn’t really know much about it at the time. I figured a teacher could point me in the right direction, so after the lesson I went to talk with Hélène. Through a stroke of serendipity I could probably not have chosen a better person to ask, as it turned out that Hélène was a switch enthusiast and one of the co-creators of SwitchXperience. After getting the lowdown on the switching scene and following the SwitchXperience instagram page, I jumped in head first and had a couple of switching dances in the short social that followed the class. I was hooked!

While there was a SwitchXperience event coming up just a couple months later in the spring in Berlin, I decided I wanted to get a better grasp of the fundamentals first, before committing to any festivals, and instead waited for the autumn edition of the event. This would be the second edition of the Paris event. The first SwitchXperience started in Berlin in 2023 and this event draws its inspiration from Alice in Wonderland.

I kept following along on their instagram updates, and the organizers started weaving their magic before the ticket sales for the event even began. To unlock the sale of tickets the students first had to find the keys to the Academy. This was done through a series of image puzzles released on the SwitchXperience social media. As it turns out, being the fastest to solve these would also earn you points for the tribe tournament.

When registering for the ticket you had the option for picking your preferred tribe, along with a personality test to help you decide. As a night owl with a sugar addiction and a background in alchemy (chemical engineering), my results were somewhat inconclusive, but the Moonshifter tribe came out slightly ahead so I went with them.

During the registration for the ticket, there was also a text box where you could add a fun fact about yourself, which I regrettably left empty as it seemed a bit random at the time, although it would later serve a purpose.

I had also seen fellow role rotation teacher Mar Mensah commenting on one of their instagram stories. This made me curious so I asked her about it at Terra Livre 5. Turns out that she started learning WCS about the same time as me and had also bought a ticket for the next SwitchXperience. Having a fellow westie at Terra Livre meant we could test out our skills during Kizomba songs. As we were leaving the festival we both expressed our excitement for our upcoming joint first WCS event and hoped it would be able to catch some of the magic you can experience at a Terra Livre festival.

Summer passed and the SwitchXperience was getting closer and closer. This of course also meant updates on the programme for the festival. This was done in the form of a lovingly crafted 17 page long SwitchXperience guide, containing everything you needed to know, including venue information, tribe descriptions, event & point rules, drinks menu, and of course a detailed schedule for the weekend. You could really see the organisers showing the passion and dedication for their event through their communication. Most of the official communication, such as the guide, emails, Whatsapp messages, stayed on theme using language and visuals suitable for a magical academy.

Finally October came around. The time had come for me to step through the wardrobe and board the SwitchX Express, setting off towards the magical Academy of Switchcraft and Stealery in Paris.

I arrived in time for the Thursday pre-party at Temple du Swing. It was a nice party with lots of switching going on, but was otherwise a pretty standard social party. At least I could go to bed with my inner switching bug satiated for now.

Friday: Introductions are in Order

The day of the festival arrived. First up in the programme of the festival was a walking tour around Paris themed on sweets, which offered a nice opportunity to socialize a bit with some of the other students, while snacking on some delicious ice cream, macrons, mochis and more. When I arrived at the venue, I spotted a Mar among the people waiting for the walking tour to start. I quickly went to say hello and catch up. She introduced me to some of her WCS friends from Lyon, including hobbyist magician Augustin, who would play an important part in the story later on.

We arrived back at the venue with minutes to spare before the first workshop began. Since there was quite the queue for registration, the staff just ushered us into the dance hall telling us to register later after the workshop.

The first workshop was a two hour introduction to stealing partners. The whole weekend there were a total of 10 workshops and a tribe choreo challenge (more on that later) across 3 different levels (cookie/beginner, cherry/intermediate and mint/advanced). All workshops except the last one focused on stealing, switching and/or improving your secondary role, so the different levels were to indicate your familiarity with the workshop subject as opposed to a general west coast swing dancing level.

In my experience so far WCS classes and workshops are more focused on technique compared to bachata, and SwitchXperience was no exception. My favourite workshop of the weekend was the cookie (beginner) level workshop for switching which consisted of a lecture by Igor Pitangue and his life/dance partner Antoine Piedfert demonstrating the difference between leader and follower body mechanics and technique using the basic sugar push as an example. It ended up being them lecturing for about 45 min interspersed with a few partner exercises, but they maintained a captive audience throughout.

After the first workshop it was time to check-in. During the process I was offered a cookie and received my armband, which was a fluffy purple string which was cute but seemed somewhat flimsy, compared to the usual festival wristband. I expressed this concern to the person putting on my armband asking what would happen if I wore it in the shower, as I kind of expected it would start to look like a wet dog. He replied with “Apparently it stays on.” expressing a similar level of skepticism. Mine managed to stay on the entire weekend, but a couple of other people I talked with needed theirs replaced a few times. The arm band could also help you see which tribe the other students were in as each tribe had a different colour armband.

As the previous workshop was the first time I dabbled in stealing in WCS, I skipped the second workshop which was a combined cherry and mint stealing workshop, and instead I had a quick look around the venue before going for some r&r before the night’s party.

The venue itself was a concert hall called Salle Colonne located in the 13th arrondissement near the center of Paris. Despite what the name implies there were thankfully no columns in the actual concert hall.

In the venue each tribe had its own space dedicated to it, and all the decorations were suitably on theme for both the tribe and the festival itself. Each tribe also had a wall where an envelope for each tribe member was hanging in alphabetical order. The purpose of these envelopes was for people at the festival to leave encouraging messages for each other, using the copious amount of post-it notes and markers lying around the venue. In essence, it was a nice way to promote socializing and community building, which I really liked. By the end of the weekend you could take your envelope with you, so you could read the messages people had left you. I think I left between 5-10 messages for people I talked and danced with during the weekend, and when I got home I found 5 notes, 4 of them with lovely thank you messages and one with a hand drawn picture of a wolf howling (go Moonshifters!).

It was time for the first party of the school year. I arrived just before the opening ceremony was scheduled. Plenty of people were already grooving on the dance floor, despite the party not having officially started yet. In general music was played during the weekend whenever there were breaks or downtime, so people could dance and practice at their own leisure. The music played at the parties during the weekend was mostly the standard fare you could expect at any WCS party, but with a few additions of songs suitably on theme like Ed Sheeran’s “I See Fire”.

The music stopped and it was time for the opening ceremony to start. In keeping with the pageantry displayed by the organizers out on the floor strode Raphael Ettedgui wearing his wizardly robes. Raphael is Hélène’s partner in crime and another one of the co-creators of the SwitchXperience, and he would be MC-ing for the weekend.

Raphael started out by welcoming students, both old and new, to the start of the school year, and explained the rules for the event and what to expect. He also mentioned that Augustin would be showcasing his mystical abilities with a close-up magic show later in the evening, already earning the Rolemorphers some bonus points.

After the formalities of the welcome introduction was over, it was time for the Academy teachers to be introduced via a spotlight dance for each teacher couple/throuple. In the bachata world, the modus operandi is getting popular headliner artists, and featuring them heavily in marketing materials to promote events. For SwitchXperience, the event itself is the attraction, and getting a popular artist is just a bit of added extra trimming to an already juicy steak. As far as headliners go for the event, it would be the aforementioned Igor Pitangui, along with the duo of Kyle Fitzgerald and Mélodie Paletta, but I didn’t get the impression that either of them were heavily featured in any of the marketing I saw for the event. They were just there in line with all the other teachers at the festival.

Not long after the teachers introduction had concluded “Madness” by Muse started playing, signifying the start of one of SwitchXperience’s pièce de résistance. The Switch and Steal Madness. This meant that for the next 30 minutes everyone on the dance floor was consenting to be switched and stolen. Imagine a role rotation bachata birthday dance, but with 100 people and it’s everybody’s birthday! Due to popular demand they had doubled the Madnesses for the event, meaning 2 x 30 minutes at every party, with time slots indicated in the program.

I started out cautiously joining in after the first couple of songs and taking a couple of breaks in between songs, but by Sunday I had fully succumbed to the Madness, staying in for the full 30 minutes and clamoring for more by the end of them.

Not long after there was a surprise announcement! Seems like some tech gnomes had messed with the technical systems and there had been a cookie leak and everybody’s secrets had been spilled. By this I mean that during the next few songs on screen appeared the fun facts that you had the option of putting in when buying the ticket for the event, but only if that person had also accepted the delicious cookie offered during the check-in.

Sometime during the party elves had made popcorn for everyone, which started appearing in bowls around the venue. For Saturday’s party the elves were a little more ambitious making mountains of chocolate cake that lasted throughout Sunday’s party as well. As mentioned earlier some of the Sweetchers had also brought boxes and boxes of candy that they offered to other people as the weekend went on.

So cookie leaks and tasty treats were small magical touches that just helped elevate the event even further.

The night continued on with many amazing dances, and as the party drew to a close, a quick attendance for the tribe points was done, and then people started shuffling home to get some rest. It was like this for the Sunday party as well. A somewhat anticlimactic affair compared to typical rituals you see at the end of bachata parties like animations or the croquetas at Terra Livre.

Saturday: Going Tribal

Saturday morning I opted to skip breakfast/lunch in favour of more sleep, and headed directly to the venue. On the schedule today were three switching workshops, the first two of which were the intermediate cherry-level classes on switching, which proved to be fine for me.

The end of the afternoon brought along the tribe choreo challenge by Clement Turpain and Evgenia Itkina, the other two co-creators of SwitchXperience. The choreo challenge was essentially a two hour choreo workshop, where members of each tribe had to learn and perform a fairly lengthy choreography, featuring switching, specific to their tribe. Later in the evening the tribes would be performing the choreos for the other tribes. There were also points up for grabs as the choreos would be judged. As I had yet to eat anything my mood and energy levels were starting to flag, but I managed to power through the two hours of practice. At this point I wasn’t quite sure what to feel about the choreo, but nevertheless I was committed.

During the workshop we collectively as moonshifters also decided to make wolf howling (Awooooo!) our official battle cry. This meant for the rest of the weekend whenever Moonshifters were called up for attendance, or mentioned by Raphael, we would let loose our battlecry.

We were practicing the choreo in the secondary location, which didn’t have quite enough room, so we were scheduled to meet later in the main venue for 15 minutes of final practice.

But first, food!

After dinner and subsequent choreo practice, it was party time.

The Saturday party was the official tribal theme party, but considering the whole event was themed on a magical academy with distinct tribes, many people also dressed up for the other parties. Some people were wearing school uniforms, or wizarding gear befitting an event set in magical school. Some could also be seen wearing attire, coloured hair, and make-up appropriate for their tribe. This meant animalistically themed clothes for the Moonshifters, a more steampunky look for some of the Rolemorphers, and the Sweetchers were dressed in pink and often seen handing out candy to strangers. In keeping with the Moonshifter spirit I had adorned my trusty animal shirt featuring a cat shooting lasers out of its eyes, riding a shark barfing out a rainbow.

After a bit of dancing it was time for the tribes to show off their choreos. I must say I was genuinely impressed by what I saw the other two tribes showcasing, and while I might have been on the fence earlier, mainly due to hunger, seeing the choreos in action, got me fully onboard.

Moonshifters 3rd

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Sweetchers 2nd

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Rolemorphers 1st

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The second part of the entertainment for the evening was the pro J&J. Probably the part of a WCS festival that most people are familiar with, as this is where all the viral Instagram and Tiktok videos of WCS comes from. To start this event the lights died down and appearing on the screen was a giant talking donut, proclaiming it was the Donut of Destiny, and it would be conducting the teacher J&J. Other than the wise cracking Donut of Destiny presiding over the event and all the couples switching, the pro show was a pretty standard affair as far as WCS events go.

While I was intending to last until the end of the party for one of those sweet sweet points, I ended up calling it quits an hour before close.

Helene and Kyle

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Sunday: The Final Battle for Points

Based on Saturday’s experience I wisely decided to not skip breakfast Sunday morning, before heading to the day’s workshops. First up was the previously described cookie level switching workshop, which ended up being my favourite of the weekend. Second was another dive into stealing technique. The last workshop of the event was the only one not themed on stealing/switching, and was instead an open level modern dance affair by Igor, the main part of which was everyone was sitting in a big circle and being encouraged to enter the center of the circle and express themselves through dance, but no more than four people at a time.

The entertainment for Sunday evening was the steal team battle, in which teams of four would showcase their stealing and switching skills in battle against other teams. For most of the Sunday the organizers had been encouraging students to sign up for this, as just signing up would net your tribe points. I decided to just be a spectator for the upcoming battles.

A nice moment during the competition was when Devon Cole’s “Hey Cowboy” came on. A song often played at WCS events, where at one point during the song she can be heard howling the Moonshifters’ battlecry, which of course in proper wolf-like fashion prompted every Moonshifter in the audience to join in.

1st Place

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The end of the competition also meant the end of the tribe tournament was near, as that would be concluded before the last party of the event started. Throughout the weekend the Role-morphers and Moonshifters had been neck-and-neck, so I was excited to see what the conclusion would be.

But before the final results were announced sorcerer supreme Augustin had asked to recite a wonderful poem that he had written about the event.

After taking the poem into consideration (10 points), Raphael could announce that the winners of the tribe tournament was… drum roll please… the Rolemorphers! The response was uproarious cheers and applause from the audience. They wouldn’t directly reveal the point totals or which tribe came second (Moonshifters obviously), but they did mention that there was less than a 10 point difference between the two. This of course meant Augustin, the one person at the event closest to having actual wizard powers, had pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the hat with both his last minute poem and earlier close-up magic show. The prize for winning the tournament, other than bragging rights, was that the next time the Academy opened it would have a Rolemorphers theme, similar to how this time it was themed on the Sweetchers, who had won the previous year.

After that the last party of the weekend started, which was just a good fun time. No more surprises or announcements. During this last part of what had been a fantastical weekend, I touched base with Mar. Both of us had gone in hoping the event would be as good as Terra Livre, and we both felt those expectations had been thoroughly met and exceeded. For me this also meant that SwitchXperience had taken the crown from Terra Livre as the best social dance festival I ever had the pleasure to attend. No minor achievement in my eyes as Felipe and Tiago set a very high bar.

As I mentioned earlier there were no rituals, so after the last song people just said goodbye to each other and shuffled off into the night, returning to their muggle lives.

While I have mentioned the four co-creators of SwitchXperience, I would be remiss not to give a shout-out to the remaining two members of the organizing team for this event, Valérie and Laura.

Epilogue

For the next few days I was riding that festival high, meaning I could barely sleep as my mind was reliving the past weekend’s events, and I was gushing about the event to everyone I talked to. There was also a tinge of disappointment as nothing quite like this exists in the bachata world. In fact I realized that most bachata festivals disappointingly just use the same cookie cutter formula. Very few organizers are innovating or trying to break the mold.

This also brings me to why I wanted to write this article. I see no reason why a festival like this couldn’t exist in the bachata (or any other social dance) scene.

I’m hoping some established organizers or people wanting to get into organizing will read this and feel inspired to get a little more creative with their dancing events.

But dear reader that’s not all! Instead of waiting around and hoping other organizers will magically bring an event like SwitchXperience to the bachata world, I’ve decided to jump into organizing myself. Together with Annika I have founded Bachata Beyond for the purpose of running more immersive bachata festivals. We already have our first festival in the works: “The Enchanted Realm of Rhythm” set for the first weekend of December this year. In the spirit of SwitchXperience we will steal some of their ideas (with their blessing mind you) and bring them to the bachata scene.

If you managed to get this far into my ramblings, thank you so much for taking the time to read this…

Oh, who am I kidding! The real reason I wrote this article is obviously for some sweet sweet bonus points for the Moonshifters the next time the Academy of Switchcraft and Stealery opens their doors. Go Moonshifters, AWOOOOOOO!!!