It can be beneficial to familiarize yourself with the era and styles in order to recreate dances from the 1970s. Many of the era’s most popular dances originated in the United States and were popularized worldwide thanks to films and television shows. Watching films and television from the 1970s is a good way to start learning about the dances of the era; Saturday Night Fever, for example, is a film that placed dancing at the center of American popular culture. This 1977 film sparked massive dance crazes like the Hustle and Night Fever, and dance students today can use the film as a visual textbook to recreate 1970s dances.
In the 1970s, nearly all of the most popular dances were disco-based. Disco was a genre of music that combined Latin rhythms, soulful vocals, and funky back beats. Club disc jockeys spun extended mixes of hit songs, sometimes spanning the entire side of a long-playing record, to keep the dance floor packed. Individual dances were more common at the time, rather than dances tailored to couples. The dancing was mostly freestyle, with people simply moving to the beat of the music.
Line dancing, which had been popular in the 1950s, was revived during the disco era. A group of people facing each other performs a set of four-wall pattern steps without partners in this style of dance. The L.A. Hustle, also known as the Bus Stop, is a simple sequence of forward and back steps with coordinated hand claps and side-to-side motions from the 1970s disco line dances. The Hot Chocolate was a modernized version of the Hully Gully, a popular dance craze in the early 1960s. The Rollercoaster, the Disco Duck, and the New Yorker were also popular line dances in the 1970s.
It’s possible to do the Bump in a line or with just one partner. Dancers positioned themselves side by side and gently bumped their partner’s hip to the beat, as the name suggests. Partners used elaborate choreography that incorporated elements of older styles of salsa and swing dancing, bringing Latin dancing back into the mainstream. The Cha-Cha, Mambo, Rumba, and Tango had resurfaced as popular dances. Roller Disco, which was simply disco dancing on roller skates, was a brief fad in the late 1970s.
While disco was undoubtedly the most popular form of dance in the 1970s, other new forms of dance were also gaining popularity underground. As punk rock and heavy metal bands swept the globe, dancing became as ferocious as the music. Dancers slammed into one another haphazardly on the dance floor while moshing, head-banging, and body surfing, while Pogo dancing involved jumping up and down to the beat like a pogo stick. During the 1970s, new dances such as Popping and Locking and the Robot, in which the dancer moves like an automaton, became popular. Michael Jackson immortalized the Backslide and coined the term “Moonwalk” to describe it.