A Brief History of Partner Dancing in England

Partner dancing has been the main social activity of the human race for many centuries. (The reason for this is that it combines humanity's two favourite activities: music and sex.) In Europe, peasants invented folk dances, some of which were refined into ballroom dances by the aristocracy. By the 1920s in England ballroom dancing was the predominant social dance even among the working classes. [citation needed for this] In the US, the descendants of African slaves created jazz music and performed 'swing' dances to it. The Lindyhop (also called the Jitterbug Jive) became the predominant working class dance.

During the Second World War, US troops imported the Lindyhop, then called simply 'The Jive', into Europe. The modern English "Rock'n'Roll" is simply a form of the Lindyhop taught by American dance schools in the 1950s that was later imported along with the music.

During the 1960s, for the first time in millennia, partner dancing ceased to be popular in England. "The Twist" was the first popular dance that did not require a partner. Neither of the main youth music subcultures, the Mods and the Rockers, were interested in partner dancing. During the 1970s some forms of US Disco dancing (e.g. The Hustle) involved partners, but these did not catch on the UK. Glam rockers (later prog rockers and stadium rockers) swayed rather than danced. Punks moshed (jumped and fought) in time to the music. The 1980s were dominated by the New Romantics who wouldn't dance for fear of people looking at them (listen to the lyric of 'Safety Dance' by Men Without Hats!). In the 1990s, people wanted to dance again, and Acid House met that need, but they had to take Ecstasy to do it and were not interested in anything as mundane as partners or steps. Finally, my own generation, the Brit Pop Indie Kids, would have quite liked to dance but by now all folk memory had been forgotten and they could only remember how to bop up and down.

Previously England had relied on the US for new injections of dance styles. The US spent the 80s, 90s and 2000s listening to rap music which, although spawning many innovative styles of dance, did not feature partner dancing. So, assuming recent decades are a historical anomaly and partner dancing is to return, whence is it going to come?

Candidates for a Revival of Partner Dance in England

	Ballroom	Salsa	Modern Jive (Ceroc)
Difficulty for beginners	Difficult	Quite easy	Very easy
No of figures	Few	Lots	Hundreds
Social dancing after lessons	Rarely	Always	Always
Footwork	Complex & essential	Simple	None
No of competitions	Hundreds	Few	Few
No of London classes/week	3	About 50	About 50
No of London social dances/week (estimated)	1 or 2	50 classes, plus a few nightclubs	46 class nights plus 1 or 2 nightclubs
Most common teaching method	Private tuition	Small groups	Very large classes
Floor space required per couple	Lots (a bit less for Latin than Standard)	Not much	Almost none
Web presence	Almost none	High	High
Connection with partner (opinion)	High	Medium	Low
Books available	Lots	One	None

In every category the dances seem to rank in the same order. Ballroom on the left, Salsa in the middle and finally Modern Jive on the right. For example, ballroom is more difficult for beginners to learn, while Modern Jive is easiest. Standard and Latin Ballroom are usually taught together and so they are grouped together here, but in fact Standard is always even further left than Latin - it is slightly more difficult, requires slightly more floor space, etc.)

Getting figures for how many classes there are nationally (or even just in London) is difficult. I am only aware of three Ballroom classes in London that are open to the general public. (One in central London, one in South Kensington.) One of those requires advance booking, one is Latin only and one includes many other non-ballroom styles. There are many run by universities, but these are aimed at only student competition dancers. [Interestingly, Oxford and Cambridge universities do have very large, popular social dance societies, from which they draw the cream of the social dancers to form the best competition teams in the country. I once suggested this tactic to the London university dance society (who have trouble recruiting enough dancers) and received a very hostile response. Their society was strictly for competition dancers, and they did not want social dancers like myself hanging on their coattails.]

I have heard of a few more classes around the London suburbs, but since they all have minimal or non-existent presence on the world wide web, they are impossible to find unless you already know someone who dances there.

There are a lot of Salsa classes listed on the web - more than even for Modern Jive - http://www.salsajive.co.uk/ lists over a hundred in 'Greater London'. Some of these may be no longer running since Salsa has now past its peak, so I have estimated 50 within London proper. The website http://www.uk-jive.co.uk lists 46 weekly Modern Jive classes in London. Some of these may in fact be around the periphery of London and some may be for other styles of dance, but it is still a fact that anyone in London can dance Modern Jive on any night of the week without travelling far.

Many of the Salsa classes are taught in 'mainstream' nightclubs. Salsa is the only one of these dances that has so far crossed over into mainstream consciousness - people will go to Salsa nightclubs even if they are not Salsa dancers.

[Argentine Tango and swing dance (mainly Lindyhop) are also enjoying recent popularity, but I do not yet have any experience of these styles so I have not included them in comparisons. My suspicion is that they are probably more popular than ballroom but less popular than Salsa.]

Ballroom dancers are very keen on replacing the term 'ballroom dance' with 'dancesport' because they want to be recognised as genuine athletes. The problem is that this focus on competition has lead to ballroom losing very badly in the race to become the new English national partner dance, as you will see in the next section.

The popularity in recent years of television programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing has been heralded us an indication of a resurgence in the public's interest in ballroom dancing, but this simply isn't true. Granted, dancesport is very popular, but then competitive dancing never really went away. Social partner dancing is the issue, and here ballroom is still losing very badly to other forms of dance.

So, what are the reasons for this? First, there is the nature of the dances themselves. According to my thesis, popularity is directly linked to how easy a dance is to learn. Although in my opinion the reward of mastering the challenge of learning ballroom is more than worth the work required, most English people do not like to challenge themselves, and those who do are drawn to competitive dancing rather than social. However, this cannot be the whole story, because these 'difficult' ballroom dances were easy enough for mass popularity in the past. I think two factors are really to blame: the legacy of ballroom teachers of the 1920s and competition from new dances today.

We have many reasons to be thankful to ballroom teachers. They were responsible for codifying the chaotic steps that were developing across the nation's ballrooms and palaises into fixed forms that could be taught, examined and used for competition. If they had not done this, ballroom dancing may not have survived. However, it survived in a fossilised form. It was no longer a living developing language of the people - it was more like Latin after the fall of Rome, a dead language to be studied only by the cognoscenti. Part of the reason for this is that these teachers were not first and foremost teachers - they were world champion competitors who also happened to teach, and so naturally they were primary interested in competition. It has been claimed that Americans, being more canny businessmen, were more interested in teaching and so developed the Smooth and Rhythm styles to be easier to learn [but I have not verified this]. In any case, I would not suggest simplifying the dances overnight. But if dance teachers began focusing more on social dance and if ballroom did again become the nation's social dance, new simpler ballroom forms would naturally evolve and I would hope teachers would not try to obstruct this process. The popularity of sequence ballroom in Australia may be an example of this.