Ballroom Dance Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
48 free Ballroom Dance trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ballroom dancing is a sport that dresses like a party. Ten dances, each with its own tempo, character and rulebook, are judged on timing, footwork and floor craft by panels that place a final with a system first written down in the 1930s. Behind the sequins are a century of codified technique, two rival world bodies, and a seaside festival that has crowned champions since 1920. These 48 questions cover the Standard and Latin dances and where they came from, the terms dancers use on the floor, the American and International styles, the organisations and championships, the pioneers who shaped the craft, ballroom on film, and the judges, hosts and winners of Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with the Stars. Most are pitched for a pub table or a Saturday-night sofa; a handful are for people who know their Blackpool from their British Open. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a quiz night, a dance-school social or a Strictly final party.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which star's RKO screen-test report supposedly read 'Can't sing, can't act, balding, can dance a little'?
Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire had the last laugh: in 1947 the man written off as able to 'dance a little' co-founded the Fred Astaire Dance Studios, a chain teaching ballroom under his name.
Q 02Which dance, new to English ballrooms, did Lord Byron mock in an anonymous satirical poem of 1813?
The waltz
The waltz put couples face to face in a 'closed' hold, which scandalised many: an Edinburgh magazine writer of 1820 was 'inexpressibly shocked' to see Scottish women dancing it.
Q 03Which Latin dance, built on a Spanish military march, casts the leader as a matador?
Paso doble
Paso doble usually casts the follower as the matador's cape, swept around the floor. The ballroom version is so tightly choreographed that it is almost never danced socially.
Q 04Which competition 'Latin' dance is really a swing dance, carried to Europe by American soldiers during the Second World War?
Jive
Jive is grouped with the Latin dances in competition even though its roots lie in swing, and its name comes from African-American slang popularised by bandleader Cab Calloway's dictionary.
Q 05Standard couples travel around the floor following the 'line of dance', which runs in which direction?
Counter-clockwise
Counter-clockwise travel around a rectangular floor is the rule for the Standard dances, while most Latin routines are performed more or less in one spot.
Q 06Since 1920 the Blackpool Dance Festival has filled the Empress Ballroom, part of which entertainment complex?
Winter Gardens
Winter Gardens has been the festival's home since its first year, in a ballroom built in 1896. Blackpool's other great dance floor, the Tower Ballroom, is a separate venue.
Q 07After its long-time head judge died in 2023, Dancing with the Stars renamed which prize in his honour?
Mirrorball Trophy
The Mirrorball Trophy was renamed from season 32, when many of the original professionals returned to perform a group dance to 'Moon River' in tribute.
Q 08Ballroom star Vernon Castle survived wartime flying over the Western Front, then died in 1918 doing what?
Training pilots in Texas
Training pilots in Texas, he took sudden action just after take-off to avoid another aircraft and crashed. The crash-site monument records that his student and his pet monkey, Jeffrey, survived.
Q 09Which silent film star popularised a stylised Argentine tango in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)?
Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino's tango scene made him a star and set off a tango craze among American audiences.
Q 10Which Australian director turned his 1984 student play about dancer Scott Hastings into the 1992 film Strictly Ballroom?
Baz Luhrmann
Baz Luhrmann drew on his own childhood for the story: he took ballroom lessons as a boy, and his mother taught the dances for a living.
Q 11Which dance did Vernon and Irene Castle refine and popularise in Watch Your Step, Irving Berlin's first Broadway score?
Foxtrot
Foxtrot, by Vernon Castle's own account, had been danced by African Americans at an exclusive club for fifteen years before he and Irene made it a craze in 1914.
Q 12Which Latin dance grew out of the less syncopated music that Cuban violinist Enrique Jorrín began writing in the early 1950s?
Cha-cha-cha
Cha-cha-cha took shape at Havana's Silver Star Club, where dancers met Jorrín's new tunes with a quick triple step whose shuffle is said to have given the dance its name.
Q 13Which International Latin dance, the slowest of the five, is adapted from Cuban son?
Rumba
Q 21Ballroom tango does without which technique that shapes the other four Standard dances?
Rise and fall
Rise and fall means lifting through the knees and feet and lowering again. Tango's basic technique leaves it out on purpose, which is why dancers call it the 'level' or 'flat' dance.
Q 22Men's Standard ballroom dance competition dress, with tail coat and bow tie, follows which formal dress code?
White tie
White tie is the most formal evening dress code, by now rare outside state banquets and grand balls, yet men's Standard finals are still danced in tails.
Q 23The term 'dancesport' was invented to help competitive ballroom dancing gain what?
Olympic recognition
Rumba, despite its name, differs completely from Cuban rumba in both music and steps: American dance halls of the 1930s borrowed the word for a blend of big-band music and son.
Q 14Which Brazilian dance, popularised in the United States by Carmen Miranda, is competed with a knee-driven 'bounce'?
Samba
Samba in the ballroom would look foreign in Rio: the international version has drifted far from Brazil's own partner samba, the samba de gafieira.
Q 15Which slow dance is one of the five American Rhythm dances but has no place in International Latin?
Bolero
Bolero reached the ballroom from Cuba, where it began as slow romantic songs for a lone singer with a guitar. It is unrelated to the older Spanish dance of the same name.
Q 16Which competitive style dances the Standard repertoire with open and separated movements as well as closed hold?
American Smooth
American Smooth allows closed, open and separated movements where International Ballroom permits only closed positions, and its men have even abandoned the tailsuit.
Q 17Ballroom tango differs from Argentine tango through its more open frame and what kind of strong movement?
Staccato
Staccato movement, with its sharp head snaps, marks ballroom tango, a style that took shape once the dance had left the River Plate for Europe and North America.
Q 18In ballroom terminology, a turn described as 'natural' rotates which way, as opposed to a 'reverse' turn?
To the leader's right
To the leader's right is 'natural' and to the left 'reverse'. In Victorian English ballrooms 'reversing' was thought bad form, so couples spun the same way all evening.
Q 19What is the ballroom dance term for a three-step figure in which the feet are closed on the second step?
Chassé
Chassé is French for 'chased'. English speakers mangled the word into 'sashay', first recorded in 1836 for a gliding dance step.
Q 20What name is given to the rhythmic hip rotation seen in Latin ballroom dances?
Cuban motion
Cuban motion is not driven by the hips at all: they rotate because the dancer bends and straightens each knee in turn, keeping both slightly soft.
Olympic recognition arrived in 1997, when the IOC accepted the sport's governing body. Ballroom itself has never been on the Games programme, as of 2024.
Q 24In which 1992 film does Al Pacino's blind ex-colonel lead a young stranger through a tango?
Scent of a Woman
Scent of a Woman sets the dance to 'Por una Cabeza', a 1935 Carlos Gardel tango whose title is racetrack slang for winning 'by a head'; its narrator is a compulsive gambler.
Q 25Which ballroom dance took shape in 1920s England, growing partly out of the Charleston?
Quickstep
Quickstep began as a hybrid: English dancers of the 1920s took a fast version of an older ballroom favourite and worked in the Charleston, minus its wild kicks.
Q 26Which London body, formed in 1904, codified the ballroom technique now called International Style?
Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing
Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing members formed a ballroom committee in 1924 to work out the technique. One member's handbook stayed in print for decades, running to more than fifty editions.
Q 27The ballroom film Shall We Dance? takes its title from a song in which Rodgers and Hammerstein musical?
The King and I
The King and I has Anna teach the King of Siam to polka to it. In the 1956 film Deborah Kerr only mimed the number: the voice belonged to Marni Nixon, Hollywood's hidden singer.
Q 28Bandleader Victor Silvester, whose dance records sold 75 million copies, insisted on holding every tune to what?
A strict tempo
A strict tempo meant each record kept to the exact beats per minute laid down for its dance. His bands and their imitators even did without singers, who might blur the rhythm.
Q 29Which studio-chain founder, born Moses Teichman, staged the world's first 'radio dance' at Georgia Tech in 1920?
Arthur Murray
Arthur Murray dropped his German-sounding surname amid First World War anti-German feeling, and his wife Kathryn hosted The Arthur Murray Party on TV from 1950 to 1960.
Q 30A 1982 Frank and Ernest comic strip said which star did everything her dance partner did, 'backwards and in high heels'?
Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers got the tribute from the strip's creator, Thaves, but the line is often credited to Texas politician Ann Richards, who made it famous in a 1988 convention speech.