Disco dancing videos and lessons

1973 is the official birth year of the music we know as disco. That year, Vince Aletti, in an article for Rolling Stone magazine, used the term to describe a specific kind of dance music gaining popularity in “discotheques” (dance clubs featuring a DJ rather than a live band). The people going to these clubs wanted to dance together. The free-style single dancing of the sixties had become tedious and rather lonely. Both line dances and partner dances were created to popular disco songs. The dances borrowed their footwork from swing, salsa, fox trot, cha cha, and other partner dances. They added dramatic hand gestures and strutting, booty-shaking moves to draw attention to their dancing bodies. The beat was a steady throb that didn’t change tempo very significantly, and dancers were encouraged to keep on dancing until the break of dawn.

While plenty of disco songs simply insisted – as the Bee Gees did – that “You Should Be Dancing,” there were also a number of songs tailored to a specific dance, some of which came complete with verbal instructions. Van McCoy had dancers doing “The Hustle” in 1975. Originally the name of a line dance, the “hustle” title was adopted as the most common name for a salsa-infused partner dance that had earlier been called the “Disco Swing.” The new dance was featured on the local Buffalo, NY television show Disco Step-by-Step, which played new disco hits and provided dance instruction until it went off the air in 1980. The original hustle line dance came to be known in disco as the California Hustle or the Bus Stop.

Disco had its stars in the dance world, such as Roy Madrid, who helped choreograph partner dances for the movie Saturday Night Fever (1977). Dancer and choreographer Deney Terrio got the official choreography credit for the film. He taught John Travolta his memorable solo moves, and later hosted the disco-flavored Dance Fever – a televised variety show and dance competition – from 1979 to 1985.

The history of disco dancing can’t be totally separated from the history of disco culture, dominated in the late seventies and early eighties by jaw-dropping quantities of drugs (especially cocaine, Dexedrine, and Quaaludes) and promiscuous sex. In the disco era the party atmosphere was often more important than the quality of the dancing, but there was also a strong element of exhibitionism: amid all the public display, people certainly wanted to show off their skills on the dance floor.

Disco culture faded away in the mid-1980’s, but disco dance styles survived. Since the beat is easy to find and improvisation is welcomed, disco dance has become the unofficial dance choice at weddings and other events where non-dancers find themselves out on the floor.

Disco nostalgia took hold in the early- to mid-1990’s, and ushered in a brief revival of disco-style songs and period-piece movies like Boogie Nights (1997) and The Last Days of Disco (1998). The world of 1970’s disco is alive and well if you know where to look, and the best place to find it is in Buffalo, NY. The Buffalo Convention Center has held an annual “World’s Largest Disco” dance party since 1994, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for charity.