Fusion Dance

Fusion is the one entry in this family that is not a Black American vernacular form. It emerged in the United States in the 2000s, with some accounts placing its beginnings in the 1990s, when dancers from the blues and swing revival scenes began improvising to music outside those genres. Rather than a fixed idiom it is a method: lead and follow with no required vocabulary, drawing technique from tango, contact improvisation, ballet, popping and whatever the track suggests, so a hip-hop record might pull popping into the dance while a downtempo electronic track pulls something closer to blues. Documented milestones include the Tangoed Up In Blues workshops that bridged the San Francisco blues and tango communities in 2005, the Lindy Booty weekends in California from 2004 that programmed non-Lindy music, the Houston Fusion Exchange in 2008 as the first national fusion event, and Recess Productions, which ran more than sixty events from Colorado to Europe between 2008 and 2018. The scene is notable for foregrounding explicit consent practices and for decoupling dance roles from gender more thoroughly than most partner forms. Its relationship to blues is contested: fusion borrows blues aesthetics and shares venues and personnel with the blues revival, but it is a contemporary invention with no claim to the historical lineage.