These close hold partner dances were highly controversial. The Waltz was a "close hold" dance, with the man and woman's bodies in almost constant contact. The ballrooms of Europe and America would never be the same. Then, in 1814, the Waltz exploded onto the dance floors of Vienna. Both involved the man lifting the woman from the ground, which obviously required a close connection – in the case of the Volta, this involved a male thigh under the female buttocks. There were exceptions, such as an Elizabethan court dance called the Volta, and a much earlier alpine turning dance called the ländler. When people danced with partners it was mostly in open hold, with just their hands in contact. In fact, dance floors all over the country seem to be filling new Lindy Hoppers who are unknowingly becoming expert physicists.įor thousands of years, dancing was primarily a group activity with men and women dancing separately. The recent resurgence of swing music has put this dance firmly back on the dance floor. The Lindy Hop was a coming together of tap, the Charleston and the Breakaway, and was danced to the swinging jazz rhythms of the time. This may be an apocryphal tale but it has some truth in it, because this form of swing dancing certainly emerged from the ballrooms of Harlem at this time. A journalist looked out over a crowded dance floor in Harlem and asked a nearby dancer, "What do you call this dance?" The dance did not yet have a name, but it was 1928 and Charles Lindbergh (nickname "Lucky Lindy") had just "hopped" across the Atlantic, and so the "Lindy Hop" was born.
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