Major Categories of Dancing

In Dancing in a World of Horseradish I explained how dance halls are a great place to find a mate. In this post, I'll explain how dancing works. There are three major categories of dancing:

• Club dancing like disco and break dancing
• Social dancing (aka partner dancing) like waltz, salsa, tango, bachata, lindy hop, west coast swing
• Community line dancing like square dancing and contra dance

Here is an examples of each:

Club dancing

Social dancing

Line dancing

Which major category of dance a style belong to depends on the relationship between participants:

• In club dancing, men are mostly showing off to women.
• In social dancing, dancers work in pairs, usually with men "leading" and women "following". (More about this later.)
• In line dancing, everyone does the same thing.

Line dancing is great for community building because everything is doing the same thing together—it can be like a great church in this way. Where people often get confused is in the difference between club dancing and social dancing. If you don't know much about dancing, then club dancing and social dancing can look like the same thing from the outside. They are not. They are very, very different. They've got different gender dynamics, technical expectations, and alcohol norms.

Club dancing is a lemon market which, in dating, which means women are getting hit on too much, men are having trouble getting womens' attention at all, and everyone is drowning their misery in alchohol.

Where club dancing is Hobbesian, social dancing is civilized. Exact gender relations hovers somewhere around 50:50 and there are few annoying people. Why does this happen? It's because of how social dancing works.

How Social Dancing Works

Social dancing is done in pairs with a lead and a follow. Ostensibly, the lead indicates what move the two will do together and the follow does that move. At all but the most beginner levels, the feedback is bidirectional. The lead is listening for as many signals from the follow as vice-versa.

Keeping all of this together, are steps. In typical salsa, for example, the lead will go left-right-left-pause-right-left-right-pause and the follow will do the reverse right-left-right-pause-left-right-left-pause. This keeps everyone moving in the same time and sets the stage for beautiful improvization.

That's basically it. Everything else is just details.

Why does this produce better gender dynamics? Because everyone has similar expectations. Leading and following aren't exactly the same, but they've both got a skill floor for the dance to work.