How much are dance movements/steps an "obvious" and "natural" response to a particular music, and how much are they something that result from social agreement/indoctrination, etc.?

I think the idea of "dance movements" and "dance steps" and the idea of pop music are ideas in a love/hate conflict. "A dance" which goes with a pop song works on 3 levels - as part of the 'work' (the singer dancing); as a marketing gimmick (it has its own dance); as an extra level of initiation (I can do the dance). On the other hand nothing suggests "triviality" or "faddishness" like a specific dance and pop clubbing has been about self-expression (in clothes, in dancing) as much as uniformity.

Except of course for those 'traditional' ballroom style dances which have a respectability that sometimes elides into stuffiness - the tango is the 'coolest', the foxtrot probably at the other end of the scale. Where did the steps for these originate - a v.interesting qn I have no idea how to answer!

Something very interesting is square-dancing and line-dancing because country music and dance music aren't popularly thought of as mixing, and because even by formal dance standards they're ultra-regimented.

For a clear answer, watch a four-year-old dance.

For instance: last night I got up and danced during a cumbia, even though I don't really know how to dance to cumbia. I took a workshop in it a while back and in some cases I found that the timing of the steps didn't match what I heard as the stress in the music.

I know that when I first learned the basic step for salsa dancing, it didn't initially make much sense to me. That was probably due, at least partly, to the fact that I was hearing the complexity and sometimes frenzy of the music, and not seeing it reflected in the basic. Now it feels perfectly natural, after x hundred hours of dancing that way.

Any thoughts on how this applies to more free form types of dances? How many rave dance conventions are there for instance? Or aren't there?

You can swap my parentheses for "part of the work" and "marketing gimmick" round if you want by the way.

I remember my mom asking me how I danced when I went out dancing (free style, before getting into Latin dance or that sort of thing). "Well, mom, there aren't really any steps." So I demonstrated what I would normally do, and there was a step of sorts there, but nothing I had thought about.

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I think it's interesting that in so much of Latin music, songs are connected to a particular type of dance. Even the slow balads called boleros have a dance that goes with them.

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It looks "wrong" to me when I see new salsa dancers bouncing up and down while dancing to salsa or merengue, but is that just a learned thing? It must be, since most beginners naturally seem to boounce up and down.

"boounce" was accidental, but amusing.

My Mum has never really got around the idea that kids now don't dance with each other.

For the answer to this question, please refer to the Motion Picture: "Lambada: The Forbidden Dance"

To ask the question differently: take a music which has developed at least a loosely structured corresponding dance. If you introduced that music to someone who had never seen the dancing before, how close would their dancing be to the dancing from that culture?

If I ever have kids, I will probably try some of these experiments, like an 18th century lunatic philosopher trying to discover what the natural language is by not teaching his child any.

"Okay, now let's see how little R. responds to Cambodian court gamelan."