Transcript
What is Line Dancing? Hi, my name is Robert Royston, I’m a five time world champion of country dance working with artists like Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley. I really hope that you learn how to line dance and experience what it’s like to move to America’s music and that’s country music. So what is line dancing? Most of the time when you say to your friends I’m going to go line dancing they think of country music, going to a country bar, they think of Achy Breaky and things like that, but line dancing has been around for hundreds of years. Most of the dancing we do here in America stems from Europe, Africa or South America. And in all those dance cultures, historically there’s been some type of line dancing. Most of the time it was done in like the courts in Europe where people would line up and have like these pre-choreographed things that they would learn to do. A lot of times men on one side and ladies on the other side and it was a mean of interacting with the opposite sex while dancing and not necessarily touching and everybody doing side by side motion. We see it in Africa and we see it in South America as well. We’ll see men all line dancing next to each other doing the exact same choreography as a means of kind of a rite of passage for manhood, showing off for the women. And then we’ll see the women doing the same thing historically in those different areas where the women will get up and do set pieces of choreography as a mean of showing off for the man or as a rite of womanhood. So all that’s kind of influenced here in America over the last few hundred years where we see line dances throughout the centuries. Line dancing has kind of found a place though in country dancing to still live and breathe. So line dancing is a set piece of choreography done in a line, just as it implies. Most of the time we’re doing it to country music but they do it to hip hop, they do it to rock and roll, they do it to all different genres of music. And you can find line dancing everywhere from country bars to rhythm and blues clubs and of course at most weddings because where else would you be doing your electric slide but at a wedding. So line dancing is choreography where everybody gets in a line and does the exact same movement. Once you start line dancing and you start doing the exact same movement there is room of course for your own personality and to embellish inside of that line dance. So that is what line dancing is.
