Paradoxes of Sport Dance

Initially, social dances from the American continent (already hybrids of LatinAmerican national, folk and traditional dances), flooded Europe. In this process, the British context proved to be the most hostile one, and the one capable of creating an effective initiative aimed at transforming the newly arrived forms into stylized and standard forms. The dance practice and the standardized versions as performed inside the sport dance community, have completely separated those dances from the ones they were based on and of which they are the "cleansed" version. However, the dance practice of sport dance is not recognized by broader public as special and different and it is constantly mixed, interlaced and related to the social dances, using the aesthetics of one in order to advertise the other. Also, from the issues concerning the imprecise (identical) terminology of dances and from the template sport dance was created on, certain confusions, overlaps, and reciprocal influences can be detected in sport dance and social dances. Relating sport dance to social, folk or national dances of areas denoted in their names, especially Latin American, still connects the sport dance to the origins of those dances that provided the basis for its' standardization.