Dance in The United States - Swing Dance

Swing Dance

Main article: Swing (dance) See also: Lindy hop

The term "swing dance" refers to a group of dances that developed concurrently with jazz music in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The prototypical swing dance is lindy hop, a popular partner dance that originated in Harlem and is still danced today. While the majority of swing dances began in African American communities as vernacular African American dances, some forms, like Balboa, developed within Anglo-American or other ethnic group communities.

Dances such as the Black Bottom, charleston and tap dance travelled north with Dixieland jazz to New York, Kansas City, and Chicago in the Great Migration (African American) of the 1920s, where rural blacks travelled to escape persecution, Jim Crow laws, lynching and unemployment in the South (during the Great Depression).

Swinging jazz music features the syncopated timing associated with African American and West African music and dance — a combination of crotchets and quavers which many swing dancers interpret as 'triple steps' and 'steps' — yet also introduces changes in the way these rhythms were played — a distinct delay or 'relaxed' approach to timing.

Swing dance is now found globally, with great variety in their preferences for particular dances.