Popular Dances

Dec 4, 2023 Uncategorized

popular dances

From the 1920s Charleston and the ’80s moonwalk to 2018 flossing and hand jives, popular dances come and go with varying degrees of intensity. Some dance fads linger in underground scenes for years before gaining mass appeal thanks to a specific artist, song or video. Others quickly reach the heights of popularity before disappearing into obscurity.

From dancing the Depression away to grooving with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” every decade has its share of dance crazes. Check out a few of the biggest ones below, from stepping back in time to the Roaring ’20s with the Charleston to doing the Time Warp at the movies to hustling in a disco club in the ’70s.

While the ’40s saw dancers trying to “shake up” the Great Depression, the Lindy hop was born out of the era’s swing music and Charles Lindbergh’s cross-Atlantic flight, reaching its peak in the ’50s with the release of the movie Hellzapoppin’. By the ’60s, teen culture was awash in rock and roll and the jive, while their parents continued to enjoy Latin rhythms like salsa and the tango.

Performance dance, also known as concert or theatre dance, is choreographed to set music and usually performed in a theatre setting. This is a stark contrast to social or participation dances, which are not choreographed and are danced by participants without a set piece of music. The earliest forms of performance dance date back to the Italian Renaissance, when theater, music, arts and poetry started to rise in popularity. Some of the most famous performance dances include ballet, acrobatics and tap dance.