Taxi dancer

Poster for the film Ten Cents a Dance (1931) with Barbara Stanwyck as a taxi dancer

A taxi dancer is a paid dance partner in a ballroom dance. Taxi dancers work (sometimes for money but not always) on a dance-by-dance basis. When taxi dancing first appeared in taxi-dance halls during the early 20th century in the United States, male patrons typically bought dance tickets for a small sum each.[1][2][3] When a patron presented a ticket to a chosen taxi dancer, she danced with him for the length of a song. She earned a commission on every dance ticket she received. Though taxi dancing has for the most part disappeared in the United States, it is still practiced in some other countries.

  1. ^ Cressey (1932), pp. 3, 11, 17.
  2. ^ Burgess, Ernest (1969). "Introduction". The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life. Montclair, NJ: Paterson Smith Publishing. pp. xxviii. ISBN 0875850766.
  3. ^ Freeland, David. Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan's Lost Places of Leisure. (New York: NYU Press, 2009), p. 192.