A Century of Dance: A Hundred Years of Musical Movement, from Waltz to Hip Hop

Featuring a colorful if lightweight survey of the last 100 years of social dance, Driver, a London-based arts writer, describes how an era is reflected in its social dances--because dance is interwoven into ordinary people's daily lives as ""social ritual, leisure activity, entertainment."" Driver credits technological advances--records, television and movies--with changing dance styles and fueling fads nationwide. Beginning with the turn-of-the-century waltz, which, he says, ""ruled the dancehalls"" at the time, (and the first social dance to turn dancing couples face-to-face), Driver traces how popular music and contemporary style melded into dances mirroring the social changes of the century. Ragtime, vaudeville, tap, Broadway, rock 'n' roll, the disco-hustle craze and the Latin American influence (spread by Xavier Cugat and Ricky Martin, among others) are brought to life with 360 energetic color and b&w photographs of performers and dance posters, eye-catching sidebars (""The Great Dance Bands,"" ""Bob Fosse"") and other graphics. On the other hand, the author's commentary is fairly superficial (Savion Glover's mother realized early on that ""he had an unusually advanced sense of rhythm""), and Driver's accuracy is sometimes suspect (he incorrectly places Madonna dancing ""briefly"" with the Paul Taylor Company). From the turkey trot to hip-hop, this volume gives a vivid visual record of all the century's dance crazes. (Jan. 1)