Social Dancing

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Jeffrey Escoffier

Social dancing refers to all those forms of dance that are recreational and public. It is not a professional form of dance, except for exhibition dancing or teaching, nor a form of theatrical dancing, like ballet, modern dance, tap dancing, or flamenco, although such forms of art and entertainment incorporate steps and gestures from social dance. In American society almost everyone has some sort of relationship to social dancing. Many people participate with great intensity in social dance activities for a period of their lives. In pre-industrial societies and working-class communities, social dancing has often been a group activity, but by the end of the twentieth century in many parts of the world, social dancing was primarily a form of couples dancing.

Folk dancing is the earliest form of social dancing. Most folk dancing is a group activity, and often includes only a single sex. A common folk dance form is the European round dance that is for both men and women in which the dancers are linked in a circle by holding hands, or holding the arms and shoulders or the waist belts of the other dancers. The couple dance where a man and woman hold each in their arms is a late development in folk dancing. Couple dances probably originated as courtship or wedding dances. Folk dances have often existed in a dialectical relationship with court dancing. Folk dances were usually codified by "dancing masters" when they were introduced to the aristocratic courts so that the dances could be taught more easily.

English country-dances were exported to France, where they were codified and introduced into French aristocratic circles. Known as the contredanse, they were group dances that formed circles and lines of dancing to make an elaborate shape through which members of the court could thread. In the minuet, a related dance form, couples danced as part of the group. These early ballroom dances were grouped together under the title of cotillion and quadrille. Elite ballroom dancing of this sort was destroyed by the French Revolution.

After the French Revolution, the waltz swept across Europe; it was considered a "popular" democratic dance---the dance of the rising middle classes. Social dance moved out of the ballroom of the aristocratic court into public dance halls and "assembly rooms." Paris had, in the period after the revolution, over 700 dance halls. It was also the first dance of urban life. The waltz was the first example of the "closed couple" dance---the dance partners faced one another and were in intimate physical contact with one another. Because of that and its whirling and the intoxicating effect of its 3/4 time, it was thought to be vulgar and lascivious. The waltz was introduced to the United States in the early nineteenth-century. The waltz remained the dominant form of social dance in Europe--where it culminated in the Viennese waltzes of Johann Strauss--and North America. Other dances that emerged rivaled it for short periods of time, but did not displace it until late in the nineteenth century.

At the end of the twentieth century in the United States, most forms of social dance were hybrid dance forms descended from European and African musical and dance traditions. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of the social dances that Americans participated in were imported from Europe, but since the beginning of the twentieth century American popular forms of social dance have originated in or were primarily influenced by African-American music and dance styles. Even the many forms of Latin dancing that have also been popular--from the tango, to the samba, to salsa--are cross acculturations of African and Hispanic musical traditions.

The emergence of ragtime, in the 1890s, revolutionized social dancing in the United States. Composed by Black musicians as piano music to be played in saloons, bars, brothels, and cafes, ragtime was rarely written down or recorded. The first identifiable style of jazz, ragtime comes from ragged music, also known as syncopation, where the musical stress is on an unaccented beat and then held over until the next beat. The most famous ragtime composer in the early twentieth century was Scott Joplin. His pieces, "Maple Leaf Rag" and "The Entertainer" were among the most popular compositions of the day. Ragtime radically changed American dance styles. Before ragtime, there was an emphasis on learning complicated steps and the pleasure in movement. After ragtime, the main impetus of social dancing was the music's rhythm and the impulse that it gave to dancing.

The one-step--called so because one step was taken to each beat of the music with a constant tempo--was the first kind of dancing done to ragtime. The one-step spawned a series of other one-step dances accompanied by different arm and body gestures: the turkey-trot involved flapping one's arms like a turkey, the grizzly bear included lurching like a bear, and so on with the bunny hug, the shiver, and the Boston dip. Vernon and Irene Castle, a world famous, husband and wife team, adapted the one-step as the Castle Walk and popularized it across the country, commanding huge fees for performing ballroom dances in exhibitions, cafes, and theaters. The one-step and the other new dances were much simpler--they undercut the social distinction to be gained by ballroom dancing lessons. Anyone could learn them by observation in an evening of dancing. One English observer noted, that "[A]ll you have to do is grab hold of the nearest lady, grasp her very tightly, push her shoulders down a bit, and then wiggle about as much like a slippery slush as you possibly can." Many new dances also allowed much closer physical contact between the couple, in part because they were somewhat slower than the waltz or the polka.