Dance Styles

Foxtrot

The Foxtrot (also: "Fox trot", "foxtrot", "fox trot") is a ballroom dance which takes its name from its inventor, the vaudeville actor Harry Fox. According to legend, Fox was unable to find female dancers capable of performing the more difficult two-step. As a result, he added stagger steps (two trots), creating the basic Foxtrot rhythm of slow-slow-quick-quick. The dance was premiered in 1914, quickly catching the eye of the talented husband and wife duo, Vernon and Irene Castle, who lent the dance its signature grace and style. It was later standardized by Arthur Murray, in whose version it began to imitate the positions of American Tango.

Waltz

A waltz is a ballroom and folk dance in 3/4 (help·info) time, performed primarily in closed position. The peasants of Bavaria, Tyrol, and Styria began dancing a dance called Walzer, a dance for couples, around 1750. At that time, the eighteenth century upper classes continued to dance the munuet. Another dance, the Ländler, an English country dance in 3/4 time spread from the countryside to the suburbs of the city. Nobelmen bored with the minuet began slipping away to the balls of their servants.[1]

Swing Dance

The term "swing dance" commonly refers to a group of dances that developed concurrently with the swing style of jazz music in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, although the earliest of these dance forms predate swing jazz music. The best known of these dances is the Lindy Hop, a popular partner dance that originated in Harlem and is still danced today. While the majority of swing dances began in African American communities as vernacular African American dances, a number of forms (Balboa, for example) developed within Anglo-American or other ethnic group communities.

Jive

Jive is a dance style in 4/4 time that originated among African-Americans in the early 1940s. It is a lively and uninhibited variation of the Jitterbug, a form of Swing dance. In Ballroom dancing, Jive is one of the five International Latin dances. In competition it is danced at a speed of 44 bars per minute, although in other cases this is reduced to between 32 and 40 bars per minute.

Rumba

Rumba is a dance organically related to the rumba genre of Afro-Cuban music. Throughout the history one may trace several styles of dances called "rumba". Some dancers[attribution needed] considered rumba the most erotic and sensual Latin dance, for its relatively slow rhythm and the hip movement. Rumba is actually the second slowest Latin dance: the spectrum runs bolero, rumba, cha-cha-cha, mambo in order of the speed of the beat.

Cha Cha

The cha-cha-cha (in Spanish cha-cha-chá) is a Latin American dance of Cuban origin. It corresponds to the Cha-cha-cha music introduced by Cuban composer and violinist Enrique Jorrín. See Cha-cha-chá (Cuban dance) for a description of the Cuban evolution of the dance. In ballroom dancing, it is increasingly popular to call the dance cha-cha.