Ballroom Dancing

Ballroom Dancing Revival

Despite some people regard ballroom dances old fashioned and boring they still survive and are quite popular. Although Prague is not so well known as Vienna for its ball parties, ballroom dancing there seem to experience real revival. Even the long Communist rule didn’t manage to destroy this old tradition, the testament of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

For instance, in Vinohrady, one of residential districts of Prague, known as rather bourgeois area before the WWW II, classes of ballroom dances that take place in local municipal palace are dearly admired and well attended. For local people doing ballroom dances is kind of tradition inherited from parents and grandparents. And even young kids who are often thought as generation having no other interests except computer games, cell phones and instant messengers are eager to attend these classes.

Classes schedule contains studying of such famous dances as Viennese and English waltzes, fox trot, two-step (or pasadoble), and naturally polka and mazurka as well. Besides all of this kids have some classes of etiquette and good manners basics, dealing with, for instance, how to dress and how to behave while attending a cocktail party or a banquet, etcetera. According to Ruzena Chladova, director of Vinohrady school, in the Czech Republic “dancing lessons are perceived as elementary social education.”

Today almost any article or piece of news deals with global crisis in this or that way. I have no intention to move against the common trends and I’d like to say that practicing ballroom dances is a good way to distract from grim reality. I believe that they have a great potential of making our world better and prettier.

Image: illustration from Le Bon Genre, Paris, 1805 (wikimedia.org)

Date: 12/12/2008