Social Dancing

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

One offshoot from these early one-steps was the two-step--which is basically a marching step with interpolated skips. Neither the one-step nor the two-step had the major impact of later dance styles on American recreational dancing. The two-step was originally danced to the popular marches of John Philip Sousa. Ragtime, Dixieland jazz, and later swing, offered rhythmically complex musical frameworks for more sophisticated dance forms. With the revival in popularity of country and western music in the late twentieth century, the two-step survived as country and western dancing primarily as a line dance incorporating open couples.

The next dance to sweep the country was the foxtrot; its invention the most significant development in social dancing until the 1960s. Incorporating some aspects of the one-step and other new dances, the foxtrot was more enjoyable to dance because its combination of quick and slow steps allowed greater variety and flexibility than the monotonous one-step. Most ballroom dances that followed---the shimmy, Black Bottom, and Charleston--were variations on the foxtrot.

After ragtime, jazz became the dominant idiom of urban dance music and popular song up until the 1950s. The popularity of the foxtrot and its centrality to ballroom dancing was instrumental to the infusion of jazz into mainstream American popular music. The big dance bands of the 1920s and 1930s were the vehicle for the most popular and exciting dance vogue in the era before rock 'n' roll--swing and all the dances that grew out of it such as jitterbug, Lindy Hop, and Jive.

Rock 'n' roll, a new style of music that emerged in the late 1950s, and a synthesis of blues, rhythm, and country music--was a popular form of dance music. Songs like "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and "Rock Around the Clock" typified both this new music as well as a dance style. Couples continued to dance the jitterbug to early rock 'n' roll, but in the early 1960s, Chubby Checker recorded a dance song called "The Twist"--a dance in which partners shook their shoulders, swiveled their hips, but did not touch. As a dance it swept across the United States. And although the enthusiasm for it faded within a year or two, popular social dance was decisively changed. Coordinated couple dancing was a thing of the past. After the twist, social dancing was characterized by standing in one place, small foot movements (somewhat resembling the motion of putting out a cigarette), dance partners hardly touching one another, or dancing alone on a crowded dance floor. Partners usually maintained eye contact, but dance fashions no longer focused on footwork so much as the motion of the arms and upper body.

Less influential than the dance forms that emerged from jazz, rock 'n' roll, soul, and hip hop, although still highly visible at times, were Afro-Latin dances, such as the tango, rhumba, samba, mambo, cha-cha, and salsa. The tango was the first to arrive--creating a huge dance craze in 1913 and 1914. The tango traveled back and forth throughout the nineteenth century between Europe and Latin America as well as passing through Japan in the 1940s. In the course of these movements the tango was modified by black and Creole influences being transformed once more in the brothels and cafes of Buenos Aires in the 1930s and 1940s. Popular at the end of the twentieth century, the tango had enjoyed several revivals throughout the century.