Novelty and fad dances

Fad dances are dances which are characterized by a short burst of popularity, while novelty dances typically have a longer-lasting popularity based on their being characteristically humorous or humor-invoking, as well as the sense of uniqueness which they have.

Dance crazes have been a part of social dancing for some time. In the Renaissance and after, European monarchs and nobles played host to a long succession of dance fashions, many of which spread into wider society. The minuet, the allemande, the schottische, the mazurka and the waltz had their day - though in many cases such dances endured for decades or even centuries before passing out of general use. By the time of Bach the suite of dances had evolved into a standardized cyclical musical form that formed the basis for the various movements of Baroque and early Classical instrumental works.

In the 20th century the advent of records caused novelty dances to arise and disappear much more frequently, spurred by printed media, radio, movies, television and the internet. In the early 1920s there was a string of dance crazes including the jitterbug and the Charleston. The tango swept the world in the late 1910s and early 1920s and was soon appropriated to the standard dance repertoire, the first in a series of 20th century Latin music dance crazes that included the merengue, the samba, the mambo, the rumba and the cha-cha-cha, many of which became standardized styles of western social dance and exerted influence on western popular music. Jazz, for example, was profoundly altered by Latin music from the 1940s on.

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