Taxi dancer

A taxi dancer is a paid dance partner in a partner dance. Taxi dancers are hired to dance with their customers on a dance-by-dance basis. When taxi dancing first appeared in taxi-dance halls during early 20th-century America, male patrons would buy dance tickets for ten cents each. When a patron presented a ticket to a chosen taxi dancer, she would dance with him for the length of a single song. The taxi dancers would earn a commission on every dance ticket earned. Though taxi dancing has for the most part disappeared in the United States, it is still practiced in some other countries.

The term "taxi dancer" comes from the fact that, as with a taxi-cab driver, the dancer's pay is proportional to the time he or she spends dancing with the customer. Patrons in a taxi-dance hall typically purchased dance tickets for ten cents each, which gave rise to the term "dime-a-dance girl". Other names for a taxi dancer are "dance hostess", "taxi" (in Argentina), and "nickel hopper" because out of that dime they typically earned five cents.

The first descriptions of taxi dancing were documented as early as 1913 in San Francisco's Barbary Coast neighborhood. At the time, the ticket-a-dance system operated in what were called closed dance halls, because female customers were not allowed — the only women permitted in these halls were the dancing female employees.

Taxi dancing then spread to Chicago where dance academies began to adopt the ticket-a-dance system for their students. This system was so popular at dance academies, that taxi dancing quickly spread to an increasing number of non-instructional taxi dance halls. Taxi dancing's popularity peaked in the 1920s as scores of taxi dance halls opened in Chicago, New York, and other major cities. At that time, the taxi dance hall surpassed the public ballroom in becoming the most popular place for urban dancing.

The ticket-a-dance system was the centerpiece of the taxi dance hall where the taxi dancers worked. Taxi dancers typically received half of the ticket price as salary and the other half paid for the orchestra, dance hall, and operating expenses. Although they only worked a few hours a night, they frequently made two to three times the salary of a woman working in a factory or a store.

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Wikipedia