Clogging

Description

Clogging is a type of folk dance in which the dancer's footwear is used musically by striking the heel, the toe, or both against a floor or each other to create audible percussive rhythms, usually to the downbeat with the heel keeping the rhythm. The dance style has since fused with others including African-American rhythms, and the Peruvian dance "zapateo" (which may in itself be a derivate of very early European clog dances), resulting in the birth of newer street dances, such as tap, locking, jump, hakken, stompin, Gangsta Walking and the Candy Walk dance. The use of wooden-soled clogs is rarer in the more modern dances since clog shoes are not commonly worn in urban society, and other types of footwear have replaced them in their evolved dance forms. Clogging is often considered the first form of street dance because it evolved in urban environments during the industrial revolution.

As the clogging style has evolved over the years, many localities have made contributions by adding local steps and rhythms to the style. The dance has origins in Wales and England. In the fifteenth century the all-wooden clog was replaced by a leather-topped shoe with a one-piece wooden bottom. By the 16th century a more conventional leather shoe with separate wooden pieces on the heel and toe called "flats" became popular, from where the terms "heel and toe" and "flat footing" derive.

In later periods it was not always called "clogging", being known variously as flat-footing, foot-stomping, buck dancing, clog dancing, jigging, or other local terms. What all these had in common was emphasizing the downbeat of the music by enthusiastic footwork. As for the shoes, many old clogging shoes had no taps and some were made of leather and velvet, while the soles of the shoes were either wooden or hard leather.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha cha cha (dance)>"Metasyntactic_variable"</a>, which is released under the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0</a>.