New Vogue Dance
New Vogue dances originated in the 1930s and ’40s, when some Australian dancers rebelled against the formal balletic foot work of the English Old Time dances and started to choreograph sequence dances based on the Modern Ballroom technique. Len Hourigan of Brisbane coined the term “New Vogue” for these dances. They have many open positions, which make them attractive to watch, like the English Old Time, and unlike Standard Ballroom dancing in which observers see only the backs of the couples. The dances also have only the footwork, alignments and basic holds prescribed, leaving scope for the dancers to add their own shaping and styling, which makes them very expressive to dance and to watch.
New Vogue Dancing is quite popular now, being danced at social dances in clubs and public halls around the country. In the Dancesport competitions and championships held around the country, there are usually more entries in the New Vogue events than in either the Standard Modern Ballroom or the Latin & American events, and this makes Australian competitions somewhat different from those overseas, such as those of North America or Europe. New Vogue dances are sequence dances for couples, each couple consisting usually of a man and a woman. In sequence dances, every couple on the dance floor performs the same steps at the same time, and at the end of the sequence, the steps are started again. This makes New Vogue dances relatively easy to learn, as a beginner can easily copy the movements of adjacent dancers on the floor. They typically have 8, 16 or 32 bar sequences, and so need music with a similar musical phrasing. New Vogue dances have been choreographed to all the dance rhythms. Over the years, many hundreds of New Vogue dances have been choreographed. Many are presented at regular competitions which are held to provide showcases for such new choreography. In the end though, only a limited number have actually gained wide popularity. Over the years, a number geographical variants of many of the dances evolved, and so in 1967 the Australian Dancing Board of Control started standardising a subset of the dances for competitions and dancing championships.
Many of the simpler New Vogue dances are sequences of regular Standard Modern Ballroom or Latin & American “Steps”. A “Step” (also called a “Figure” or “Variation”) is a standardised series of movements which has been given a name. The “Steps” used in this article are taken from those listed in the syllabuses of the major dance societies, particularly the Federal Association of Teachers of Dancing. Actually, the length of a “Step” is not fixed, but can vary from a single step (as in the “Slip Pivot”) to several bars (as in the “Fregolina”). Nevertheless, these simpler dances can be well described by a list of the names of the “Steps” composing them, together with additional instructions regarding directions and dance holds. A number of such Scripts are available here in the various rhythms, each dance being described as above with simple abbreviations for the directions and dance holds.
These dances are more complex than the simpler social sequence dances described above, and need a more complex mode of description. A number of books offer tabulations of the movements for each step of each dance (Boyd, 1984a; Hesketh, 1989). For the web pages associated with this project, the dances have been described in Labanotation (Hutchinson, 1954). This is a symbolic graphical script for describing and/or prescribing general human movement to an arbitrary degree of accuracy. Most professional dance companies have a notator on staff who maintains notated scores of the dances in the repertoire of the company.
As may be seen, the dance is notated on a pair of vertical staffs, one for the man’s movements (on the left) and one for the woman’s. Time advances symbolically upwards, and the dance actually starts at the double bar line. Symbols below this denote the starting position. Each staff consists of a central line, with a line each side. Symbols adjacent to the centre-line refer to weight-supporting movements of the legs. Symbols to the left of the centre-line refer to movements of the left limbs, and to the right of the centre-line: the right limbs. As may be seen, the initial movement of the man is with the left leg. A symbol with a nick out of its top signifies a forward movement, so the man may be seen to step forward onto the left foot and then onto the right foot. A parallelogram denotes a turn, to the left or to the right depending on its orientation and by an amount denoted by the pin in its middle. Thus after his first two steps, the man may be seen to take a quarter of a turn to the right. The next support symbol for the man is a triangle denoting a side step, and so on. The notation is quite easy to learn, but for those who find that a problem, further assistance has been provided.
