New Vogue

Sociable | Sequenced | Easy Going

Aussie Grown Sequences

New Vogue dancing is low stress, socially empowering, and easy to master. Learn quick and easy sequences that everyone knows, dance with anyone and become part of the social community. Upgrade to more challenging routines and expand your styling repertoire with your friends.

New Vogue is a set of sequence dances that originated in Australia in the 1930s. New Vogue could be classified as the folk dance of colonial Australia. Because the bands available at the time were often military bands, or military trained musicians playing in their down time, the early New Vogue dances included a lot of marches and waltzes. This is because that’s what those bands played, lots of 2/4 and 6/8 marching music, and lots of 3/4 waltzes of varying tempi; the remnants of this can still be seen today. The exact history of some dances we simply don’t know - they were possibly created in a pub, by accident, when a band was playing, and then just “stuck”. After that, someone teaches it to someone who in turn passes it on to someone else and so on, and each time something is added or changed.

Dances like the Barn Dance are a great example of this organic creation, with no written script from which the dance was taught or created, and only later a written script was recorded based on what someone had already learned or saw being danced. So, this begs the question - which Barn Dance is the right Barn Dance? The answer, of course, is they all are. But for certain examination or competitive settings, recognised scripts are the primary source material. When outside of these settings the worst that will happen is someone on the dancefloor may be dancing a different sequence to you. Regional differences in the older New Vogue dances are still seen today, and in typical Aussie fashion, each region thinks their way is the best and only way.

Some of the dances we now call New Vogue were actually imported from England as written scripts, and then taught in Australian studios. The most common way of describing steps at that time was referencing classical ballet terminology, and there weren’t many, or any, classical ballet trained instructors in Australia. So, sometimes the interpretation or mis-interpretation of a written script gave rise to dances that were nothing like what was being danced in England. Thus, the “Australian” way was born by accident, and grew into what we now call New Vogue. The Evening 3 Step is a fantastic example of this, with some reports indicating this is an adapted version of the Eva 3 Step.

By the 1930s and 40s the term New Vogue had been coined as a way of distinguishing the newer Australian versions and creations from their English Old Time predecessors. It is believed that New Vogue was preferred as a name because it made the style sound more appealing, particularly to younger dancers. At this time more Australian-born dancers and choreographers were arriving on the scene, and New Vogue sequences were being created within Australia from scratch deliberately, rather than as an import gone wrong or an old pub dance being written down.

Over the decades up to the late 1970s, competitive New Vogue dancing was established in Australia and New Zealand, but the style did not make its way out of Oceania. Today New Vogue is still danced at a competitive level and remains a favourite of many social dancers as well. The question of what exactly is a New Vogue dance is sometimes a contentious one. Due to the origins of the New Vogue style, it’s difficult to say where the line is between a New Vogue dance and a sequence dance of a different classification.

All New Vogue dances are sequences, meaning everyone dances the same steps at the same time. Because of the sequenced nature of the New Vogue dances, beginner dancers often find them easier to learn compared to freestyle dances in the Modern Ballroom or Latin American faculties. An added benefit of a set sequence is that the hold can be changed more readily. The New Vogue dances employ many different holds that other dance styles would find problematic, and at the competitive level dancers are not required to be in hold at all. This has led to a sense of continual evolution over the past decades as the stylisation of dances on the competition floor and even the interpretation of the steps keep changing.

Once the sequence has been learned, dancers are free to focus on developing more advanced technique and styling without any fear of the routine changing. The mixture of a set sequence, and the ability to style and personalise the dance to taste, has made the New Vogue dances very popular with beginner and competitive dancers alike. Of course, all New Vogues are sequences, but not all sequences are New Vogues. There is a set of 4 criteria that has been used to varying degrees in the past to help classify dances as either being New Vogue or not. The 4 criteria are: the dance had to be arranged in either Australia or New Zealand; the sequence had to be either 16 or 32 bars long; the dance had to contain at least 2 different holds; and the dance had to be in 1 of the following 4 rhythms: foxtrot, march, tango, or waltz.

At one point all 4 criteria would need to be satisfied, but in modern times dances that satisfy only 2 or 3 have been taken into the fold. For competitive and examination New Vogue dancing, organisations such as Comdance, the Australian Dance Board, and Dancesport Australia have final say on what is admitted under the New Vogue banner for them. For everyone else, if the music is playing and you know the steps, that’s all you need. While the term New Vogue is often used to describe many sequence dances of different styles, there are 15 recognised dances used in the competitive scene, with a 16th vying for inclusion. However, for Comdance examination purposes, the list of acceptable New Vogue sequences has been expanded to give instructors and students a wider selection. All competitive New Vogue dances are composed in one of four rhythms: Foxtrot, March, Tango and Waltz.

Learn from scratch, no prior experience needed. Learn with confidence in a fun and safe environment. Learn how you learn best, either in the classroom, or by private tuition. Everyone has to start somewhere, you don’t have to know how to dance, to learn how to dance New Vogue.