DanceWith.co.uk

Dance with History 1970 to Why do we dance?

1977 Disco Hustle

danced by John Travolta in SaturdayNight Fever

1980s Rave parties at Manchester's Haçienda nightclub

1990s French Jive or Modern Jive

Accessible Jive-Salsa fusion, "featuring many spinning actions for the lady".

1997 "Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room."

Mary Schmich "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young" from Chicago Tribune, 1st June. Quoted in Baz Luhrmann's song, Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen).

1998 Salsa

Buena Vista Social Club released by Ry Cooder and the Afro Cuban Allstars leads to an explosion across Europe of Son Music and Salsa Dancing.

Bandleader, Wille Colón, writes, "Salsa's magic has always been transmitted from skin to skin - in a seductive dance clinch, and through a sheet of dried goats skin - the voice of the drum"

Why do we dance?

"Dance is an instinctive mode of muscular reaction... expressing feelings or emotions, or simply expressing excess energy."


"The desire to dance is one of the primitive instincts of mankind. It has been said that 'dancing is older than anything except eating, drinking and love'.

"It is a fact that emotion stimulates the body into movement. Even primitive cave-drawings depict men dancing. The desire to move in response to emotion is a physiological fact which will survive as long as people exist. The persistence of rhythm and its intimate association with sex and life itself is undeniable, and rhythm and movement come together in dancing"