20 Dances That Once Scandalized Society

The Charleston was born in Black neighborhoods in Charleston, South Carolina, and Harlem. Characterized by rapid kicking movements and swinging arms, it became the defining dance of the Roaring Twenties when the 1923 Black musical revue Runnin’ Wild introduced it to broader audiences. The movement was so vigorous that local governments outlawed it, pointing to the intense shuddering of floors, which raised concerns over whether it might cause buildings to collapse. They also worried about people spraining their shins while trying to keep up.

Danced in a close embrace, the Argentine Tango was created in working-class districts and brothels of Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the late 1800s. The dance made its way to Paris around 1910, where it sparked an international fad. Later, a Parisian journalist fabricated a tale that Pope Pius X had secretly viewed the dance, then banned it. Historians say the pope never saw it. Regional bans were real enough, however, when local Catholic bishops issued them.

Lindy Hop was created by African American dancers at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the late 1920s. The style fuses the Charleston with a more open, “breakaway” two-person form of dance. In June 1928, a dancer nicknamed “Shorty George” Snowden invented the name while participating in a marathon dance contest at Harlem’s Manhattan Casino. He had just heard about Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic flight. Dancer Frankie Manning introduced acrobatic lifts and flips to the dance, making it one of the most physically demanding styles of swing dancing.

The Can-Can wasn’t always an elaborate cabaret show. Before that, the Can-Can was a popular pastime dance for regular folks. It began in working-class Parisian dance halls in the 1830s as a high-spirited variation of the last move of the quadrille, a group social dance. Dancers showed off high kicks, lifted their petticoats, and did cartwheels, much to the dismay of moralists. It was Paris cabarets, such as the Moulin Rouge, that reimagined it as choreographed stage entertainment by 1889, featuring a star dancer named La Goulue.

Enslaved people on Southern plantations formed the Cake Walk, a stately processional of exaggerated struts, back-bending, and bowing that mocked the formal ways of the white plantation owners who were observing them. Not realizing the satirical aspect of the dance, they gave prizes to the winning couples, usually a richly frosted cake. This gave rise to the expression “takes the cake.” It made its way to Broadway in 1898’s Clorindy, a hit that spread the dance around the world by 1900.

The Waltz is a couple’s dance that spins around in 3/4 time. It developed from the rural folk dancing of Austria and Bavaria in the late 1700s, and quickly spread through Europe, displacing the more formal, aloof, and rigid group dances, with partners now locked together in an intimate, full-body embrace. One 19th-century guide to propriety by writer Elisabeth Celnart cautioned unmarried girls to avoid the Waltz because of its inappropriate closeness. That was not enough to prevent them from dancing it anyway, and the Waltz became the standard ballroom dance of the century.

In about 1910, the Turkey Trot was a ragtime couples’ dance consisting of hopping side steps and flapping arms to the fast beat of ragtime. A Philadelphia publishing firm fired 15 female clerks in 1912 for engaging in the Turkey Trot during lunch hours. A year later, newspapers said President Woodrow Wilson had canceled his inaugural ball because he feared the dance. Wilson called the tale “ridiculous.” His reason, he said, was that the event was too expensive and would interfere with the work of 2,000 government clerks.

The Mambo was an Afro-Cuban big-band dance created in Cuba in the late 1930s and 1940s, and subsequently popularized globally by bandleader Pérez Prado, the “King of the Mambo.” Between 1950 and 1955, New York’s Palladium Ballroom was ground zero for what fans dubbed “Mambo Mania,” where a mixed-race crowd danced together on the same floor, despite segregation still being present in most other public places. Notable Palladium dancers were Pedro “Cuban Pete” Aguilar and Millie Donay.

The Lambeth Walk was a strutting, arm-swinging novelty dance that relied heavily on Cockney street swagger, complete with a raised thumb and a shout of “Oi.” Actor Lupino Lane first introduced it in the 1937 London musical Me and My Girl before dance halls in both Britain and America took it up. British Ministry of Information editor Charles A. Ridley re-cut it in 1942 to make it seem like Hitler and his marching Nazis were doing it, which is said to have enraged Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

The Polka was a fast partner dance of half-steps and hops that originated in Bohemia in the 1830s. Legend says the step was improvised by Anna Slezakova, a Bohemian servant, but this is folklore, not historical fact. It was introduced to Parisian dance halls in 1840 by a Czech dancing master, igniting a fad that swept across Europe and America and inspired such rampant merchandising that cloth with small circles on it was renamed polka dot.

Originally an Afro-Cuban carnival street procession, the Conga features a pronounced, steady march beat and a distinct, characteristic thump-kick. Cuban-born bandleader Desi Arnaz introduced the dance to Miami and New York nightclubs in 1937, forming dancers into a single file, with everyone grasping the waist or shoulders of the person in front. In his shows at Manhattan’s La Conga nightclub, the dancing line became a permanent part of the festivities, a fun dance that requires no instruction and still appears at weddings nowadays.

Enrique Jorrin, the Cuban composer and violinist who headed the Orquesta América, saw that the dancers were tripping over the fast, syncopated rhythms of the mambo, and in 1953 he created the Cha-Cha. With its simple melodies, each of the three steps of the Cha-Cha footwork coincided perfectly with the beat. His first single “La Engañadora” became a smash in North America and Europe the following year, and Cha-Cha was thereafter one of the mainstays of dance halls and high school dances.

The Shimmy kept the lower body almost motionless while the shoulders vibrated backwards and forwards very fast, and it was developed in African American venues and cabaret shows in the late 1910s. It was popularized by Gilda Gray in the Ziegfeld Follies and became a dance hall fad in the Prohibition era. The story goes that Gilda Gray coined the term when she said, “I’m shaking my chemise,” although the term was used in African American speech prior to her claim. Many ballrooms displayed “No Shimmying” signs, but flappers ignored them.

The Black Bottom was said to have originated in Black communities of the South in the early 1900s, with its roots in both Atlanta and New Orleans. It featured stamping the feet, shaking the hips, and slapping the buttocks. The Black Bottom was popularized by songwriter Perry Bradford and dance instructor Billy Pierce. It became a nationwide phenomenon when Broadway dancer Ann Pennington danced to it in George White’s Scandals in August 1926. At one point, it even surpassed the Charleston as the most popular dance in American dance halls.

The ballroom Rumba developed from Cuban son and the Afro-Cuban folk tradition known as rumba. The ballroom Rumba first made its way across North America and Europe after the 1930 hit song “The Peanut Vendor” was recorded by Cuban bandleader Don Azpiazu and his orchestra. It’s danced with a slow-quick-quick beat, but it also brought dancers their first exposure to Cuban motion, which involves swaying hips while bending and straightening knees, a move not previously used in ballroom dance. During the Depression, dance schools promoted it as a romantic “dance of love.”

“Jitterbug” was originally Harlem slang for “a drunkard” until bandleader Cab Calloway’s 1934 hit “Jitterbug” gave it a new life as a moniker for wild swinging dancers. Soon, jitterbug became the generic word for an American-accented, high-energy, highly stylized form of Lindy Hop that featured fast feet and elaborate twirls and dips. From 1942 to 1945, American servicemen danced it at military bases and dance halls across Europe and the Pacific. American servicemen carried it from base to base, and dance halls across Europe and the Pacific picked it up in turn.

A popular dance called The Grizzly Bear came out around 1910. It was danced in the Pacific Coast dance halls to ragtime, which was fast, syncopated music. Dancers huddled close together and rocked back and forth heavily, imitating a grizzly bear. In 1910, comedian and vaudeville performer Fanny Brice performed The Grizzly Bear on stage, and that same year composer George Botsford commemorated it in sheet music. Dance halls attempted to keep young couples from dancing The Grizzly Bear by putting up “No Bear Hugging” signs.

Vernon and Irene Castle, a husband-and-wife team of exhibition dancers, popularized the dance as the Castle Walk in Irving Berlin’s 1914 Broadway musical Watch Your Step, complete with syncopated orchestrations by Black ragtime bandleader James Reese Europe. The smooth, one-step was danced on the balls of the feet, leaving behind the bouncing and torso-shaking of its animal-dance predecessors for clean, marching strides. The Castles were a national style icon, opening dance academies and helping to make bobbed hair cool for women.

Vaudeville artist Harry Fox invented the Foxtrot in 1914 while performing on a New York City rooftop theater. Fox performed it as a fast trotting step alternating with slow walking steps, in 4/4 time. The smooth transition between slow and quick steps, its flexibility with music at almost any speed, and its reduced physical demands compared to the jerky, exhausting animal trot dances made it a staple of dance class curriculum. In the 1920s, British dance federations codified it into the slower, smoother form we know today.

In the dance called the Big Apple, a caller calls out dance steps as everyone does them in a circle or individually in the center. In 1936, Black youth in Columbia, S.C., did the dance at a club owned by a local entertainer named Frank “Fat Sam” Boyd. Boyd had converted a former synagogue into a dance hall. White students at the University of South Carolina watched the dances from the balcony above and began teaching the dance to students at their home colleges. Life magazine called 1937 the year of the Big Apple.

This content was created with the help of AI.