Social Dancing

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

Rhumba music is popular throughout the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba. The rhumba as a dance migrated to the United States from Cuba---where it was a sex pantomime danced extremely fast with exaggerated hip movements and very aggressively led by the male partner. The music is played with a staccato beat. The samba, a Brazilian dance form first performed by blacks at carnival time and other holidays, is a difficult dance because of its speed and because its steps are taken on a quarter of a beat with a rocking motion. It was introduced to the United States by Fred Astaire and Dolores Del Rio in the 1933 movie Flying Down to Rio, where they danced the ballroom version of the samba, the carioca. The "Brazilian Bombshell," as movie star Carmen Miranda was known, popularized the samba's rhythms in her movies. Mambo is a voodoo term in Haiti, although as a dance it was created among upper-class Cubans for the ballroom. To some extent it evolved from the rhumba, although it is more difficult and danced fairly fast with jitterbug-like acrobatics and jerky staccato rhythm. The difficulties of the mambo led to the creation of the cha-cha, a simpler and easier dance, which resembled a much slower version of the mambo. In the United States the cha-cha has been the most popular Latin dance since the 1950s, although in the 1990s the mambo, tango, and salsa have eclipsed the cha-cha. Salsa, a Puerto Rican dance, has steadily gained in popularity in the last decade of the twentieth century.

In the 1970s new forms emerged that revived close couple dancing as well as a greater stress on footwork and coordination than did the post-Twist dances. The hustle and its close cousin, disco, grew up among the black and Puerto Rican bars and dance clubs in New York City. Saturday Night Fever (1977), starring John Travolta, had an immense impact on the popularity of disco dancing. Disco spurred an exhibition-style dancing, emphasizing improvisation and individual expression---the dancer becoming almost a soloist or choreographer. The hustle (and disco) closely resembles the Lindy except that disco music does not have the rhythmic swing of big band music. Instead, the hustle consists of dancing three beats against the music's four beats. One variation of the hustle was the "Good Foot" popularized by soul singer James Brown in his 1969 hit song, "Get on the Good Foot" which he performed in an acrobatic style. The "Good Foot" pointed towards breakdancing.

Hip hop as a musical style emerged in opposition to the increasing commercialization of disco, funk, and soul. It came out of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. This new style was created by DJs (disk jockeys) in dance clubs who blended, scratched, and inter-cut music from different tracks thus creating a new musical form. Break dancing or breaking emerged as dance form in response to a number of new developments. The DJs melding of percussion breaks from two identical records and playing the breaks over and over again generated opportunities for dancers to perform their gymnastic dance routines. Some break dancing routines were derived from the miming of robot-like actions, inspired by the character of Robot on the popular 1970s TV program, Soul Train. It also resulted from the incorporation of moves from martial arts---especially Kung Fu and Capoeira, the Brazilian dance-like martial art. In some cases, this also transformed violent conflict between gangs into dance competitions. Break dancing requires great skill and acrobatic abilities and was popularized by the 1983 movie, Flashdance. Hip hop musical culture continued to generate variations on break dancing such as popping, uprock, house, and bebop (a swing-like revival) that continued to influence social dancing at the end of the twentieth century.