What's the difference between Ballroom, Modern, Standard, International and Dancesport?
What's the difference between Ballroom Dance, Modern, Standard, International and Dancesport?
Ballroom is the most general and the oldest term that has been used sometimes to describe Waltz, Tango, Slow Foxtrot, Quickstep and Viennese Waltz and sometimes it was also used for Latin American dances, namely Cha cha, Samba, Rumba, Paso Doble and Jive.
Sometimes it was also used to refer to Old Time and Sequence dances. So the term "Modern Ballroom" (in short "Modern") was introduced in Australia to indicate clearly that the speaker was not referring to Old Time, Sequence or Latin-American dances. But in Europe the term "Modern" was already frequently used to describe a totally different type of dancing (eg. jazz or other form of solo dancing), so the Europeans called it "Standard" instead. But "Standard" had an unclear meaning in America, where there is an American version of it (called American Smooth). Therefore Americans introduced the term "International Standard" to make the difference clear.
Dancesport describes the competitive side of dancing Standard and Latin-American styles, where couples dancing is judges by judges and purpose of it is to achieve the highest possible placing. Dancesport is made of 3 branches: Standard, Latin-American and 10-dance.
10-dance is a combination of Standard and Latin, to take part in 10-dance competition you have to dance 5 Standard and 5 Latin dances.
On the other side of the scale we have Social dancing, where you dance for you own pleasure and to meet people. Here the divisions between style are not that important, so we still quite often say that we "Go Ballroom dancing".
There is also a third style of DanceSport which is completely Australian, which is called: New Vogue
Unlike the Standard Ballroom and Latin American styles of dancing, New Vogue is a sequence style of dancing. Everyone on the dance floor dances the same steps together. Thus making these dances easy to learn, and enjoyable. Many mature people prefer this type of dancing, but it also is popular at social Cabarets where there are large numbers of dancers on the floor, of mixed ages, who can follow easily the person in front of them.
New Vogue Dances are: Evening 3-step, Merrilyn, Parma Waltz, Gypsy Tap, Swing Waltz, Carousel, Tangoette, La Bomba, Charmaine, Lucille, Twilight, Barclay Blues, Tango Terrific and Excelsior Scottische