A short history of ballroom and dancesport

From the ballroom to the dance hall

Ballroom dancing began as social dancing, not sport. The waltz reached London society in the 1810s and was treated as a scandal at first, because the couple held each other in a closed hold. Within a generation it was the dance every ball was built around.

The next wave came just before the First World War. The tango arrived from Argentina by way of Paris, where it was a craze by around 1912 and 1913. The foxtrot came from the United States around 1914. In the 1920s the Charleston added a burst of speed. Dance halls and hotel tea dances filled up, and teachers found that every school taught the same dances differently.

That last point is where dancesport begins. Once couples wanted to compete against each other, somebody had to agree what a correct foxtrot looked like.

Writing the technique down: the English style

The Imperial Society of Dance Teachers was founded in London in 1904 and became the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) in 1925. In 1924 it formed a Ballroom Branch, whose committee set out to standardise the waltz, the foxtrot, the tango and the quickstep.

Standardising meant three things:

• a fixed list of figures for each dance, with names everyone used;
• a technique for each figure: footwork, alignment, rise and fall, timing and the amount of turn;
• a graded syllabus, so a student could be examined and awarded a medal, and a judge could tell a basic figure from an advanced one.

The quickstep is a good example of how the style was shaped. It grew out of a faster foxtrot in the 1920s, took steps from the Charleston, and was settled into its own dance in England in the later 1920s. The Viennese waltz was added to the competitive group later, which gives the five dances of today's Standard (also called International Ballroom).

The ISTD's technique books were revised over the following decades, and other British teaching societies taught to the same standard. This English style is what the rest of the world adopted, which is why it is called the International style.

Blackpool and the rule-makers

The Blackpool Dance Festival was first held at Easter 1920 in the Empress Ballroom of the Winter Gardens. In 1931 it began the British Professional and Amateur Ballroom Championships, which it still runs as the British Open Championships each spring. For many dancers, winning at Blackpool still carries more weight than almost any other title.

In 1929 the British teaching societies formed the Official Board of Ballroom Dancing to agree on rules for competitions and to settle disputes between societies. It was later renamed the British Dance Council, which still governs dance competitions in Great Britain. (Some histories date the Board to 1930; the Council's own history gives 1929.)

The Latin American dances

The Latin dances took their competitive form in England after the Second World War. Teachers who had studied the rumba, the samba and the paso doble, and the American jive, brought them into the British syllabus. The ISTD formed a Latin section in the late 1940s and made it a separate branch in 1951. The cha cha cha was added in the 1950s.

In 1963 the Official Board asked the ISTD's Latin committee to write an official technique for all its societies to use. A professional World Latin Championship had already started in 1959. From then on, competitive ballroom had two international styles side by side:

A couple who dances all ten competes in Ten Dance, which still has its own championships.

The international bodies: two lines that run side by side

An early international federation, FIDA, was founded in Prague in 1935 and was suspended in 1956. The two bodies that shaped today's sport came after it.

The professional line. The International Council of Ballroom Dancing (ICBD) was founded in Edinburgh in September 1950 by fifteen countries. It was renamed the World Dance & DanceSport Council in 1996 and the World Dance Council (WDC) in 2006. In 2007 it started the WDC Amateur League, an amateur circuit of its own.

The amateur line. The International Council of Amateur Dancers (ICAD) was founded in Wiesbaden in 1957 by eight European countries. It became the International DanceSport Federation (IDSF) in 1990 and the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF) in 2011. In 2010 it took in a professional organisation as its Professional Division; in 2024 that division was folded into WDSF itself.

So the old division, with the WDC for professionals and WDSF for amateurs, is no longer clean: each now has dancers of both kinds. A third body, the World Dance Organisation (WDO), was founded in 2019. The federations guide explains how they differ today.

The Olympic question

The International Olympic Committee gave the IDSF provisional recognition in 1995 and full recognition in 1997. Recognition means the IOC accepts a federation as the world governing body for a sport. It does not put the sport on the Olympic programme.

Ballroom has never been an Olympic medal event. Dancesport has been on The World Games, the multi-sport event for recognised non-Olympic sports, since 1997, and it was a medal sport at the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou.

The first time any dance discipline won Olympic medals was breaking, the competitive form of breakdance, at Paris 2024, run by WDSF. Breaking is not on the programme for Los Angeles 2028. Whether dance returns at a later Games is undecided, so treat any claim about it with care.

The American styles

In the United States, ballroom grew up through dance studios rather than clubs. Large franchise chains taught millions of social dancers from the 1920s onward, and each developed its own syllabus for dances Americans actually danced socially. Out of that teaching came two competitive styles of their own:

The National Dance Council of America (NDCA) was founded in 1948, under an earlier name, as a council of dance teacher organisations. It joined the international professional body, today the WDC, in 1962. The US National Championships it recognises go back to 1971 and have been held in Orlando since 2007.

The other American invention is less about steps than about who dances with whom. In the US the most common competitive partnership is a student dancing with their own teacher, called Pro-Am. The US competition system guide explains how that shapes almost everything else.

Amateur dancing in the US

The amateur side organised separately. The United States Amateur Ballroom Dancers Association (USABDA) was founded in 1965, with Olympic recognition for ballroom as one of its early aims. It became an affiliate of the US Olympic Committee in 1999 and was renamed USA Dance in 2005. It is the US member of WDSF and runs the National DanceSport Championships for amateurs, with a large collegiate scene beside it.

Timeline

Questions

Read next

• Dancesport federations explained
• Ballroom levels, age groups and categories
• How US ballroom competitions work

Terms in this guide

Each of these is explained in the glossary.

• Standard
• Latin
• American Smooth
• American Rhythm
• Ten Dance
• Pro-Am

Sources

Checked on November 3, 2026. Each document is linked in the language it was published in. Where sources disagree, the text says so.

1. ISTD: Our history
2. ISTD: History of modern ballroom
3. ISTD: History of Latin American dance
4. British Dance Council: History of the BDC and WDC
5. WDSF: How it all started
6. WDSF: History
7. WDSF: The World Games
8. WDSF: Breaking debut at Paris 2024
9. WDSF: Statement on the LA28 decision on breaking
10. NDCA: History
11. USA Dance: History
12. Britannica: Foxtrot
13. Britannica: Tango
14. Wikipedia: Blackpool Dance Festival (pointer, checked against the festival)
15. Wikipedia: World Dance Council (pointer)