History of Dances

International Style Samba

The five dances: Samba, Rumba, Paso Doble, Cha Cha, and Jive, are danced the world over both socially and in DanceSport competitions. The dances are for couples, usually each consisting of a man and a lady. The holds vary from figure to figure in these dances, sometimes in closed ballroom hold, sometimes with the partners holding each other with only one hand. The figures in these dances are standardised and categorised into various levels for teaching, with internationally agreed vocabularies, techniques, rhythms and tempos. But it was not always so. These 'Latin & American' dances have some diverse origins.

The Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Rumanian) derived from the ancient Latin language, define a culture that has spread over a substantial part of the Americas. Three dances from this area plus one from Spain/France and one from the U.S.A. constitute the set of dances now internationally standardised as the 'Latin-American' dances. Note that the term 'Latin-American' here is an abbreviation of 'Latin and American' rather than a reference to the geographic area of 'Latin America' (Lavelle, 1975, 1).

The three dances from Latin America evolved as a fusion of Indigenous, European and Negro forms. The European conquerors imported Negro slaves from various parts of West Africa into a large part of the Americas at an early stage, mainly because of the difficulty the Europeans had in persuading the Indigenes to work for them. The Negro slaves were imported in such number that by 1553, they outnumbered the Europeans in Mexico, and the Viceroy, Luis de Velasco, urged Charles V of Spain to prohibit further influx (Sadie, 1980, 10/522).

Dancing played a substantial part in all three component cultures: European, Negro and Indigenous. In 1569, the Viceroy of Mexico ordered the Aztec Calendar Stone to be buried because the main recreation of the Negroes had become dancing around it. Subsequently, Velasco decreed that dancing be confined to Sundays and feast days only, and then only in the afternoons between the hours of noon and 6 p.m. (Sadie, 1980, 10/522).

Through the 17th and 18th centuries, a gradual fusion of the three cultures occurred to produce a new culture: Creole. As European dances were imported into Latin America, they were adopted and 'creolized' (Sadie, 1980, 10/529). In Cuba, the Contradance became the Contradanza Habanera (i.e., from Havanna) with the adoption of a syncopated rhythm: (Sadie, 1980, 5/86)

This became the 'Danzon'. Later, as the music became more syncopated with the inclusion of bars with the rhythm: it became abbreviated to the 'Son'. This rhythm had been used as early as 1795 in Brazil in a Modinha (love song) which had become popular in Europe at the turn of the 19th Century (Behague, 1979, 92). Complex syncopated rhythms are a feature now of all the Latin-American dances.



The dance was later combined with the Maxixe (Raffe, 1964,438). This was also originally Brazilian: a round dance described as like a Two Step (Burchfield, 1976, II/865), and named after the prickly fruit of a Cactus. The Maxixe was introduced into the U.S.A. at the turn of the 20th century (Stetson 1956,30).

The Maxixe became popular in Europe after a demonstration in Paris in 1905. It was described as having the steps of the Polka done to the music of the Cuban Habanera (Chicago, 1985, 7/968). The present day Samba still contains a step called the Maxixe, consisting of a chasse and point (Romain, 1982,19).


The Samba was further popularized in the 1950's by Princess Margaret, who played a leading role in British society (Rust, 1969, 103). The Samba was formalised for international propagation by Pierre Lavelle in 1956 (Lavelle, 1975, 69).

The dance in its current international form still has figures with with very different rhythms, betraying the heterogeneous origins of the dance, e.g. the Boto Fogo is danced to a '1 & a 2' quarter beat rhythm, whereas the Natural Rolls are danced to the simpler '1 2 &' half beat rhythm. It still retains a hip movement on the half beats between steps (the 'samba tic'), a flat carriage of the torso, and is danced with the weight forward onto a bent standing leg.