Leading the Other: Gender and Colonialism in Partner Dancing's Long Century

Abstract

In the 1840s, the polka craze established lead/follow partner dancing as the normative social dance structure in the Atlantic world. In the process, it imposed a choreographed performance of bourgeois heteropatriarchy (originally developed with the waltz) on Europe's colonies and post-colonies. However, a central mechanism of the lead/follow system in social partner dance is the woman's body attitude, and as the nature of that attitude changes, so do the associated dances. In the Americas, women acculturated to African-rooted principles of polycentricity disrupted the equilibrium of the lead/follow dynamic, catalyzing the creation of new partner dance forms and techniques. On the one hand, this resulted in an intensification of the lead/follow system such that men could now control and shape the dissociated parts of their partners’ bodies. On the other hand, it also seeded the fissioning and eventual dissolution of the dance partnership itself.