Dance Trivia
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This dancing trivia quiz has 177 free questions with answers and covers every corner of the dance floor. There are the ballroom and Latin classics (waltz, tango, foxtrot, cha-cha, salsa, merengue, samba), the ballet canon (Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, the Ballets Russes, Nureyev, Misty Copeland), the crazes that swept the world (the Charleston, the twist, the Lindy Hop, the Macarena, the moonwalk) and the traditional forms from Hawaiian hula and Maori haka to flamenco, Bharatanatyam and Irish stepdance. It also takes in dance on screen and stage: Dirty Dancing, Saturday Night Fever, Fred Astaire, Riverdance, Dancing with the Stars and Strictly Come Dancing, plus oddities like the dancing plague of 1518 and breaking's debut at the Paris Olympics. Roughly a third of the questions are easy enough for anyone who has been to a wedding, and the rest get progressively harder for dancers, teachers and pub-quiz regulars. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic or primary source, and each question shows the page that confirms it.
30 of 177 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which partner dance was born in the 1880s in port areas along the Río de la Plata?
Tango
The tango grew up in the 1880s in the port districts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo; Argentina and Uruguay jointly had it inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2009.
Q 02Ballet originated during the Renaissance of the fifteenth century in which country?
Italy
Ballet began in Italy, in the lavish court spectacles of 15th-century Renaissance princes; it was later refined in France and Russia, which is why its step vocabulary is French.
Q 03The waltz is danced in which time signature?
3/4
The waltz is in 3/4 time, one strong beat followed by two lighter ones per bar. The name comes from the German walzen, to roll or turn, and the close hold scandalised polite society around 1800.
Q 04Michael Jackson unveiled the moonwalk on a 1983 TV special marking the 25th anniversary of which record label?
Motown
Motown staged the anniversary special, though Jackson had long since left the label for Epic; he unveiled the moonwalk there while performing his new solo hit Billie Jean.
Q 05Breaking (breakdancing) made its debut as an Olympic sport at which Games?
Paris 2024
Paris 2024 gave breaking its Olympic debut, yet the sport had already been left off the Los Angeles 2028 programme in October 2023, months before its first Olympic battle.
Q 06Breaking developed among African American and Puerto Rican youth in which New York City borough?
The Bronx
Breaking emerged in the Bronx in the early 1970s alongside hip-hop, whose DJs such as Kool Herc looped the rhythmic drum breaks of funk and soul records for the dancers.
Q 07Which composer wrote the ballet Swan Lake in 1875-76?
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote Swan Lake in 1875-76, the first of his three ballets. He never saw the version most companies now dance: it was revived in St Petersburg in 1895, after his death.
Q 08The score of The Nutcracker is noted for its use of which bell-like keyboard instrument?
Celesta
Celesta chimes give the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy its voice; the composer came across the newly invented instrument in Paris and at once asked his publisher to buy one for the ballet.
Q 09The Nutcracker ballet is set on which night of the year?
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve is when the ballet opens, at a party where Clara is given the nutcracker doll that springs to life at midnight; the plot comes from an 1816 fairy tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann.
Q 10In The Nutcracker, the toy soldiers battle an army led by whom?
The Mouse King
The Mouse King is beaten when Clara throws her slipper at him, distracting him long enough for the nutcracker to win the fight; the nutcracker, by then a prince, leads her on to a land of sweets.
Q 11Flamenco developed within the gitano (Romani) subculture of which region of Spain?
Andalusia
Andalusia's gitanos kept flamenco largely to family gatherings until the cafés cantantes of 19th-century Seville put singers and dancers on stage for paying audiences.
Q 12Riverdance began life in 1994 as a seven-minute interval act at which televised event?
The Eurovision Song Contest
The Eurovision Song Contest interval, broadcast from Dublin on 30 April 1994, lasted only seven minutes; within a year its producers had built the piece into a full-length stage show.
Q 13Which Irish dancing champion starred with Jean Butler when Riverdance opened as a full stage show in Dublin in 1995?
Michael Flatley
Q 21Which Latin dance music is tied to New York's Fania Records, whose All-Stars filled Yankee Stadium in 1973?
Salsa
Salsa, Spanish for 'sauce', was the name under which Fania sold New York's Cuban-rooted dance music; label co-founder Johnny Pacheco led the All-Stars, whose 1973 stadium show drew more than 40,000 fans.
Q 22Which BBC ballroom contest is sold around the world as Dancing with the Stars?
Strictly Come Dancing
Strictly Come Dancing blends two older titles, the BBC's long-running ballroom series Come Dancing and the 1992 film Strictly Ballroom; overseas versions run as Dancing with the Stars.
Q 23Who hosted Dancing with the Stars for its first 28 seasons, starting in 2005?
Tom Bergeron
Michael Flatley, the first American to win a world Irish dancing title, led the show with Jean Butler, but he and Riverdance parted ways in October 1995, on the eve of its second London run.
Q 14Which Spanish duo recorded 'Macarena', which topped the US chart for 14 weeks in 1996?
Los del Río
Los del Río's Antonio Romero improvised the chorus on a 1992 trip to Venezuela, in praise of a local flamenco dancer; the Bayside Boys remix then held the US No. 1 for 14 weeks in 1996.
Q 15The Charleston, the defining dance of the 1920s, is named after a harbour city in which US state?
South Carolina
South Carolina's port of Charleston gave the dance its name: it began as a Black folk dance of the American South and became a national craze after the 1923 Broadway musical Runnin' Wild.
Q 16Whose 1960 cover of Hank Ballard's 'The Twist' set off a dance craze?
Chubby Checker
Chubby Checker's cover topped the US chart in 1960 and again in 1962; Hank Ballard's original, released as a B-side, had climbed no higher than No. 28 on the Hot 100.
Q 17Modern hula's ukulele grew from a small guitar brought to Hawaii from where?
Portugal
Portugal: immigrants who landed from the ship Ravenscrag in 1879 played the little guitar for the islanders, who soon adopted it as their own; the older hula kahiko keeps to chant and traditional percussion.
Q 18Capoeira, blending fighting with dance, acrobatics and music, comes from which country?
Brazil
Capoeira was developed in Brazil by enslaved Africans and their descendants; it was banned under the 1890 penal code, and Mestre Bimba opened the first officially permitted academy in Salvador in the 1930s.
Q 19The Lindy Hop was born in 1928 in the African-American communities of which New York City neighbourhood?
Harlem
Harlem troupes such as Whitey's Lindy Hoppers carried the dance out of the neighbourhood's ballrooms and into Hollywood films such as A Day at the Races and Hellzapoppin'.
Q 20In which 1994 film do a hitman and his boss's wife enter a twist contest at a 1950s-themed diner?
Pulp Fiction
Pulp Fiction puts Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace on the dance floor to a Chuck Berry song; the part revived John Travolta's career and earned him his first Oscar nomination since Saturday Night Fever.
Tom Bergeron hosted from the 2005 premiere through season 28 in 2019, most of those years while also fronting America's Funniest Home Videos; ABC replaced him with Tyra Banks in 2020.
Q 24Which 1990 documentary about New York's drag ball scene brought voguing to the mainstream?
Paris Is Burning
Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary on the city's ball culture, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1991; voguing takes its name from the model poses in Vogue magazine.
Q 25Bharatanatyam, a classical dance long performed in Hindu temples under the name Sadir, comes from which Indian state?
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu's temple dancers were for centuries its only performers; it reached the public stage only around 1930, when revivalists renamed the old Sadir as Bharatanatyam.
Q 26The name of the north Indian classical dance Kathak comes from a Sanskrit word meaning what?
Story
Kathak comes from katha, Sanskrit for story; the kathakaars were travelling storytellers who danced tales from the Hindu epics, and the form later absorbed Persian influences under Mughal court patronage.
Q 27Which actor played dance instructor Johnny Castle opposite Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing (1987)?
Patrick Swayze
Patrick Swayze, who had trained in classical ballet, also co-wrote and sang She's Like the Wind for the film's soundtrack; the single reached No. 3 on the US chart.
Q 28Dirty Dancing is set at Kellerman's, a family resort in which mountains?
The Catskills
The Catskills were the setting only on paper: the film was shot far from New York, in Virginia and North Carolina, with a Virginia mountain lodge standing in for Kellerman's.
Q 29Tony Manero, John Travolta's disco-dancing character in Saturday Night Fever, lives in which part of the New York area?
Brooklyn
Brooklyn's Bay Ridge is Tony Manero's home turf; the story came from a 1976 New York magazine article that its writer, Nik Cohn, admitted twenty years later he had made up.
Q 30Which Kirov Ballet star broke away from Soviet minders at a Paris airport in 1961 and defected?
Rudolf Nureyev
Rudolf Nureyev was told at Le Bourget on 16 June 1961 to fly home to Moscow instead of on to London with the company; suspecting a trap, he slipped his KGB minders and asked for asylum.