Social and Vernacular Dance
Dance forms that arise in everyday social life and popular culture rather than in the concert tradition.
Definition
Participatory and popular dance forms embedded in social life and transmitted largely outside formal concert institutions.
Scope
This topic covers participatory and popular dance forms practiced in social settings, including ballroom and partner dances, swing and jazz dances, and the street and club forms of hip-hop and related cultures. It examines their social functions, modes of transmission, and the cultural and racial histories that shape them, especially the Africanist roots of much American vernacular dance.
Core questions
- How do social dances function within communities and everyday life?
- How are vernacular forms transmitted and transformed outside institutions?
- What is the Africanist contribution to American vernacular dance?
Key concepts
- participatory dance
- partner dance
- improvisation
- Africanist aesthetic
- social transmission
Key theories
- Africanist aesthetic in vernacular dance
- The argument that core features of American vernacular and concert dance, such as polyrhythm, grounded movement, and improvisation, derive from a pervasive but often unacknowledged Africanist presence.
History
Social and vernacular dance has long circulated through communal gatherings, dance halls, and clubs. Scholarship from the late twentieth century recovered the histories of African American social dance and traced its decisive influence on popular and concert forms alike.
Debates
- Recognition and appropriation of vernacular forms
- Scholars debate how vernacular dances created within marginalized communities are credited, commodified, or appropriated as they enter mainstream and concert culture.
Key figures
- Jacqui Malone
- Katrina Hazzard-Gordon
- Brenda Dixon Gottschild
Related topics
Seminal works
- gottschild1996
- malone1996
Frequently asked questions
- How does social dance differ from concert dance?
- Social dance is participatory and embedded in everyday gatherings, learned informally, whereas concert dance is created for presentation to an audience and typically transmitted through formal training.