Dancing In Colonial America

The way this dance was, you had to enter the ballroom floor with a specific way of stepping to the beat using your heels, but also like ice skating in a way. Dancing wasn’t as easy as it is now, well for some people. Some other types of dances were Jigs and reels, which as I mentioned before enslaved people and lower class white people would use these methods of dancing, but so did the Virginians. When you would dance “Jigs” it required to only dance with one person and partner, for the “Reels” you could have as much as six people dancing.
When it came to teaching and learning the dance, it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. Yes, like every other dance you were able to observe and pick up some steps here and there, but most were not easy. It was better to get taught how to dance. So as far as dancing teachers the “first teacher in Colonial Virginia was Charles Cleate” (Dance during the Colonial Period, n.p). The dancing masters would travel and have dancing lessons in different cities big or small. Like I said since dancing was a way to define the person, there were more and more people wanting to take dancing classes to better their standing within the society. There were not many people who could pay for dance classes, and those who had enough money to pay for themselves, would also send their kids to learn how to dance with professionals. As stated on Dance History Alive “Those who …show more content…
Women would wear dresses, very long dresses and had many layers to the dress with hoop skirts underneath the dress to make it pop out a little as mentioned in Fordney Foundation “Women’s gowns were very confining and cumbersome. Most gowns were ornate in design with many layers of clothing and hoop skirts” (The History of Ballroom Costumes, n.p). They would wear high hairstyles and a lot of accessories such as ribbons on the hair and pearls on the dresses. They would wear a dress under the main dress so it can make them look