5 Most Popular Dances in the United State of America

The United State of America, the most powerful country in the world, is known for diverse western culture, influenced by Native American, African, Asian, Polynesian, and Latin American cultures. It encompasses the traditions and customs that are different in religion, food, clothes, language, music, dance and million other things. Be it the third largest country in the world with the population of more than 320 million, The USA presents before the universe different types of dances. It is the home of ‘hip hop dance’, and its derivative ‘Rock and Roll’, and modern square dance. 

Some of the popular American dances include swing dance, modern dance, Cajun Jig dance, cakewalk, B-Boying and many others. 

Swing Dance

Swing dance is a type of dance, which is performed in a group. It is performed with a concurrently jazz music. This prototypical dance is lindy hop, a famous partner dance, which has been originated in Harlem and is still danced today. 

Modern Dance

Developed in the early 20th century, American modern dance earlier broke with European classical forms by giving into the weight of gravity. The dance is performed by moving body from the center rather than the limbs. Characters while dancing emphasizes an emotional directness in their choreography. Lately, Liz Lerman and Mark Morris have shown that graceful, exciting movement is not restricted by age or body type.

Apart from the above-mentioned dances, there are some folk dances performed in America. Below are some of them. 

Cajun Jig

Cajun Jig is also known as pop music. This is the most traditional music. Cajun One Step in this dance is among the simplest of Cajun dance forms. This dance has been popular in Louisiana since the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is performed too fast or slow with Cajun music played under 2/4 or 4/4 timing. 

Cakewalk Dance

Cakewalk Dance, which is also written as Cake-Walk, is a dance, originated from the ‘Prize Walks’. Earlier it was performed only by men, but now women can also participate in this dance. Thus, the original dance changed into a grotesque dance, which is now very popular throughout the country. 

B-Boying

B-Boying is also known as breaking or breakingdancing. This is a style of the street dance, which is born by African American and Puerto Rican youths in New York City. It has been popular since early 1980s worldwide, especially in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Russia and South Korea. In this type of dance, dancers show four kinds of movement: toprock, downrock, power moves, and freezes. 

Even though modern trends allow for much wider varieties of music along certain ranges of tempo and beat patterns, characters perform B-Boying typically with funk music, hip-hop and mainly breakbeats. 

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that there are many other types of folk and traditional dances performed in the United State of America. They are Cajun Jitterbug, Square Dance, Contra Dance, Virginia Reel, Zydeco dance, Clogging and many others.