If you think that a ballroom is a room full of balls with people dancing; you are absolutely wrong! A ballroom is a large room or hall inside a building or a hotel for the designated purpose of holding large formal parties called ‘balls’.

And a ballroom dance is a set of ‘partner dances’, sometimes enjoyed socially in a gathering while sometimes in a competition in the ballroom, thus the name.

Ballroom dance is a smooth style of dance with gentle flowing moves performed around the entire dance floor in a counter-clockwise fashion. The couple is constantly moving on the dance floor, smoothly transitioning from pattern to pattern.

As we know it today, this dance style probably originated from dances held in the royal courts way back in the 16th century. It’s also thought to be based on folk dancing. Ever since these dances started many variations and style emerged, some of the famous ballroom dances are:

Waltz, tango, rumba, cha cha, samba, Viennese waltz, quickstep, paso doble, mambo, lindy hop, jive, foxtrot and salsa.

• The tips of pointe shoes (where the dancer stands) are harden with the glue that it sometimes feels like wood or concrete.

• In Sweden, unlicensed dancing in public was illegal including ‘moving your feet to music’, it is only this year that the Swedish government has finally abolished the law.

• In 2008, ballet classes were instituted for police officers in western Romania to help them move elegantly while directing traffic.

• In 2008, the world’s first “sustainable” dance floor opened at Club Watt in Rotterdam, Sweden. Each tiles on the floor had springs hooked up to generators; the harder people dance, the more the springs were compressed and converted into energy, this ran the LED lights in the floor.

• Most ballerinas wear out two-three pairs of pointe shoes a week.

• A three-hour ballet performance is roughly equivalent to two 90-minute soccer games back-to-back or running 18 miles.

• Dancers have better than average peripheral vision. Because their head angles are widely used in dance, so dancers have to use their eyes if they want to look to the side, without turning their heads.

Published in Dawn, Young World, September 17th, 2016