Dance and its opportunities

With dance improving throughout all these years, and still improving even now, we will travel back in time to have look at how the most remarkable change in dance has happened throughout the years, writes Rafaela Sousa.

Dance has changed a lot throughout all the years. It is not known how dance started, since it’s been around for centuries, or even more. Having said that, no one is ever sure when and how it was created. However, it was late in the 20^th century when different types of dancing have been appearing and becoming the popular dances that we still see today.

Dance movies were a huge impact in today’s dance profession, it helped a lot through the changes of dance. And it was around 1980’s that the classic dancing had died down a bit, and club dances became more popular.

In a recent interview with Alan Wake, the principal of ACW Dance Studios, he mentions that movies such as, ‘Saturday Night Fever’ and ‘Grease’ were the ones that helped a lot through the changes in the profession. Wake admits that, since Saturday Night Dance and Grease came out the dance profession changed drastically. And because of those movies, people were astonished with their types of dancing, and that was when Disco was born, and everybody started to go out to clubs and disco dances.

“The [dancing] profession changed hugely since the year I joined, back in the late 70’s. Saturday Night Fever, really started to change the dance profession from my point of view, because it was so popular… and we were having to teach all these new dances from that, and then Grease came out, and then all those other club’s dances came out over the years…” Alan says.

When I asked about whether film and TV inspired dance the most, he answered: “Oh yes! Definitely! Definitely had a big impact on us [dance]!”

At that time, Alan tells there was no script for the dance teachers at all, therefore, the studio, (or ‘the dancer supervisor’ as he likes to say), he was at the time, spent hours in the cinema just watching Saturday Night Fever so they could try to pick up some dance moves from the film, then after they would try their best to teach in their studio, as there was not another way of learning the dance moves besides that.

Those movies are still so popular, that there are still lots dance parties and clubs that are based in the 80’s style.

Although the dance profession changed in the 80’s, it was not until the 90’s and 2000 that dancing became more sexualised. People changed a lot the way they dressed. Alan confesses that one type of dance that changed a lot is Latin dance.

“The Latin dance is much more sexually orientated than it used to be,” He says,

“The outfits they wear [nowadays] has always has always been questionable of how much they wear for Latin since some of the girl’s dresses are getting so revealing.”

Although dancing has remarkably changed throughout all these years, it helped a lot on ‘figuring out’ the style of dance that we have today. And it gave us new insight on what is dance like, and how creative you can be with it.

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