[TANGO-L] Ballroom dancing - jerky tango head movements

[Ecsedy Áron <aron @MILONGA.HU>]

Dear Nicole,

> school of dance, not necessarily what has developed in social 
> dance - like swings styles and latin styles - is that 
> Ballroom was developed by the English, not the Americans.  
> There's actually an British dancer, who's name I can't recall 
> right now, who was the first to develop a "Ballroom Dance 
> Syllabus".  Apparently he travelled around the world 
> examining different dance styles from various cultures to 
> create the Ballroom dances (which all roots come from some 
> other place than England obviously).  And if you examine the 
> dances themselves, you will see combinations of traditional 
> dance styles...for example ballroom samba "steps" are a 
> combination of various Brazilian dance forms. One of the 
> first well-known Ballroom teams, who helped to bring Ballroom 
> to the rest of the world, were the Castles, were from 
> England.  I know they were around in the 1910's. So the 
> British form of Ballroom dancing was developed in the early 
> 1900's, and became a regular part of British culture by the 
> 1920's-30's. The American form started to take hold about 
> this time, in the 1930's, specifically with people like 
> Arthur Murray who helped to popularize it.

You are right in that standardization was done by the English. However, the
dances themselves were not invented by the English. See short history:
http://www.dancerite.co.uk/Ballrom_dancing.htm (NB: it has a reference to
the invention of jerky tango head-movements in the 1930s)

The first standardizations had been done by the Imperial Society of Teachers
of Dancing (http://www.istd.org/) in the early 1920s. There was also NATD
(http://www.natd.org.uk/), which contributed to many things now part of
ballroom dancing (such as the medal system).

The guy you were referring to is Alex Moore, who was active from the late
1920s.

Cheers,
Aron


Ecsedy Áron
***********
Aron ECSEDY

Tel: +36 (20) 329 66 99
ICQ# 46386265
http://www.milonga.hu/

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