30 Crazy Photographs That Capture the Disco Scene of the 1970s

The heyday of disco fashion blossomed from the music played at gay underground New York clubs such as the Loft, Tenth Floor, and 12 West in the early 1970s. Other clubs such as Infinity, Flamingo, the Paradise Garage, Le Jardin, and the Saint launched a disco culture that brought with it an anything-goes attitude and all-night dancing.

Studio 54 became the place to be seen in disco clothing such as boob-tubes, platform shoes, flared trousers and body-conscious shapes dressed in lurex, glitter and crazy patterns or colours. Studio 54 played an essential role creating the nightclub scene that is still with us today – a place where people dress to be noticed and in the latest fashion.

The successful movie Saturday Night Fever (1977) ensured that disco hung around for a few years before becoming very unfashionable when Punk Rock and New Wave became the new anti-fashion fashion. Below are 30 vintage photographs that show just how crazy 1970s disco really was...

A group of people get down on a mirrored dance floor, circa 1978. (David Redfern / Redferns)

Actor and singer Grace Jones gives a big smile to the camera while partying at Studio 54 in New York City, 1978. (Rose Hartman / Getty Images)

Metallic-painted dancers at a disco club perform on stage in New York City, 1978. (Waring Abbott / Getty Images)

A woman known as "Disco Granny" dances with a young man at Studio 54, circa 1978. (Images Press / Getty Images)

A crowd of dancers at the disco club in New York City, 1978. (Waring Abbott / Getty Images)

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Amazing Candid Photographs Capture Teenagers Dancing at the High School Dance From the 1960s and '70s

The school dance is looming and you have no idea what moves you will shake, much less how to do those moves. Dancing in front of other people can be intimidating, especially if you're already feeling self-conscious. These candid photographs primarily taken in the early 1970s, they give us a look at the high school dance when it was a time before disco, but after Woodstock. It had a little bit of the flavor of both the 60s and 70s, but plenty of teen awkwardness to go around.

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18 Amazing Photographs of American Dancer Edith Lambelle Langerfeld a.k.a La Sylphe From the Early 20th Century

Edith Lambelle Langerfeld (1883-1968), mostly known as La Sylphe, was an exotic American dancer who became a sensation while performing at the Folies Bergère in the 1890s.

Langerfeld was taken abroad by her mother at the age of six, when she began to dance. United States laws prevented her from performing on stage as a young girl. She traveled for eight years, making two trips around the world. Much of the time she spent in London, England, Milan, Italy, Paris, France and Brussels, Belgium. La Sylphe became fluent in five languages. She was the primary dancer at the Alhambra Theatre in London during her second world tour.

She made her debut in the United States at the age of 14, appearing first on the Pacific Coast. She danced in New York City beginning in 1899. There she introduced her rendition of The Vision of Salome dance.

“The young woman is of extraordinary slenderness and suppleness, and her performance is a contortionary marvel. Her dance, to an uninitiated observer, suggests that she has undertaken to tell the guidance the time by the movements of her slim legs, beginning with both feet decorously together at half past six, and ending in an incredibly divergent.”

La Sylphe's popularity in the United States increased after Salome by Richard Strauss was banned by the Metropolitan Opera in 1907. She called her performances The Remorse of Salome. She understood the body dance of the Far East, which had been termed "the houchee kouchee" when it was first observed at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. She was part of a vaudeville show at Koster & Bial's Music Hall in October 1899. She danced in a scene at a French ball included in a skit entitled Around New York In Eighty Minutes. A review described her as “a young woman who was seemingly made up of muscle but without bones, and who would make an ordinary contortionist turn green with envy at his talk of suppleness.”

Her mid-waist was covered only by several yards of pearls. On occasion she wore tights or a picketfence skirt and a gossamer bodice. She once complained about the bodice being too warm and threatened to leave it off in the next day's show.

Although her appearances often provoked shock, La Sylphe confessed that her New York performances were tame in comparison to those she gave earlier in Europe. She performed as close a rendition of her "muscle dance" as she dared, given American conventions. However, she admitted that a more accurate interpretation of the Salome dance would have more closely followed the dances of the Orient.

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Amazing Color Photos of Teenage Dance Parties and Disco From the 1960s and 1970s

Vintage photos of the 1960s and '70s teenage dance parties and college-age night clubs complete with discotheques and go-go girls dancing inside of cages and on top of tables.

Teenagers' Twistick Lounge, Raleigh Hotel - South Fallsburg, New York

Mirrored Balls by Halboy Fixture Distribution - St. Louis, Missouri

Downtowner Motor Inn, Tony's Restaurant - Springfield, Illinois

Castaways Motel, Pool Bar - Miami Beach, Florida

Ginza Chinese Smorgasbord & Discotheque Dancing - New York

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Lindy Hop: The Dance That Defined the Swing Era

The Lindy hop is an American dance which was born in Harlem, New York City in 1928 and has evolved since then with the jazz music of that time. It was very popular during the Swing era of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Lindy was a fusion of many dances that preceded it or were popular during its development but is mainly based on jazz, tap, breakaway, and Charleston. It is frequently described as a jazz dance and is a member of the swing dance family.

In its development, the Lindy hop combined elements of both partnered and solo dancing by using the movements and improvisation of African-American dances along with the formal eight-count structure of European partner dances – most clearly illustrated in the Lindy's basic step, the swingout.

Lindy hop is sometimes referred to as a street dance, referring to its improvisational and social nature. In 1932, twelve-year-old Norma Miller did the Lindy hop outside the Savoy Ballroom with her friends for tips. In 1935, 15,000 people danced on Bradhurst Avenue for the second of a dance series held by the Parks Department.

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Working as a Rockette: Rare and Amazing Behind the Scenes Photos Capture Everyday Life of Famous Dancers in 1964

The December 11, 1964, issue of LIFE magazine featured an article titled The Rockettes Go On and On: World's Most Famous Kick, with illustrated with photographs taken by Arthur Rickerry, they show how the dancers themselves prepped for four shows a day, seven days a week, on one of the most famous stages in the world. The piece also focused on five young dancers who, out of the many, many hopefuls who auditioned in 1964, were talented and driven enough to make the grade:

Little girls who grow up to be Rockettes are born and raised in places like Milford, Mass., and Niles, Ohio, and Erie, Pa., and they get thrust into dancing classes by their mamas when they are scarcely more than toddlers. As they grow older they hear about the great dance spectacle at the Radio City Music Hall and start to wonder if... 

The more enterprising ones write letters asking how one goes about becoming a Rockette. They get polite form replies listing the requirements: they must be high school graduates, between 5-feet 5-inches and 5-feet 8-inches tall, have good figures and be excellent performers in tap, ballet, modern jazz dance and high kicks. 

Each more frightened than the other, they decided to join forces in a city that turned to be even more perilous than they had imagined. They paid $300 a month for a shabby two-room apartment in a run-down hotel — and nobody told them they were being overcharged. They were snapped at by waitresses and cabbies and pushed and shoved about in the subway. But four times a day they changed into spangles and feathers and make-up and danced before 6,200 patrons who had paid to see them.

All these years later, at least that part of the story remains unchanged. After all the hard work and hard knocks and sore muscles and self-doubts, the Rockettes head out on stage and there — eagerly waiting, happily anticipating — are thousands of men, women and (of course) children who have come from near and far to see them.

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27 Black and White Photos That Document the Annual Christmas Dance of Lynchburg College, Virginia in the Late 1950s

An amazing photo collection from Lynchburg College Archives that show Annual Christmas Dance of students in Lynchburg College, Virginia from the late 1950s. Few from 1960.

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Beautiful Black and White Photos of Ballet Dancers From the 1920s

In the 1920s and 1930s ballet was not yet popular in the United States, but American audiences were fascinated with "toe dancing." (This was a combination of Pointe with acrobatics and stunts.) Another popular dance was "toe-tapping" known today as Tap Dancing.

In America, great dancers performed on Broadway and in Hollywood and people loved to do all kinds of social dances but when it came to Ballet, Americans only had the few touring troupes from Europe and Russia.

All this changed when George Balanchine, a famous dancer with the Ballet Russes, came to America after the death of Diaghilev, and decided to form his own company. Balanchine saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the movies and thought that there must be people who could become great ballet dancers in America. In 1934, he founded the School of American Ballet in New York City along with the dance company that would become the New York City Ballet. Balanchine created many new, interesting ballets and restaged many of the classics. Thanks to Balanchine, The Nutcracker has become a holiday tradition.

National American Ballet, August 20, 1924

Elsie Robinson, June 30, 1925

Swan Lake, 1924

Clothes in the wind, June 30, 1925

Russian dancer Desiree Lubowska, June 30, 1925

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A German Dancer Couple Created Extravagant and Playful Costumes Before They Committed Suicide in 1924

Knowledge of the astonishingly bizarre and tragic art of Walter Holdt and Lavinia Schulz is obscure and largely based on the rediscovery in 1986 of artifacts deposited in a Hamburg museum back in 1925.

The artistic power within this couple apparently lay with the woman, for virtually nothing is known of Holdt. After suffering from a severe ear disease, Schulz (1896–1924) studied ballet, painting, and music in Berlin, where as early as 1913 she came into contact with Herwarth Walden’s Sturm circle of expressionists. Through this circle she became friends with Lothar Schreyer, who invited her, “my first student, a genial person with violent passion,” to perform, apparently nude, in his wild production of August Stramm’s Sancta Susanna in 1918.

When Schreyer, disillusioned by his struggle to form an avant-garde theatre in Berlin, moved to his native Hamburg in 1919, Schulz followed him. It is not known whether she met Holdt there or whether they had already met by this time. In Berlin Schulz was a costumer and seamstress for Schreyer’s early Kampfbühne productions, including the 1920, Edda-inspired Skirnismól; Holdt played Skirnir in a heavy, robotically abstract costume but seemed to dance in it without difficulty.

Schulz married Holdt in April 1920, and the couple soon drifted away from Schreyer, for, as Schulz explained in a note, “Expressionism is not a solution; expressionism works with machines and industry.”

Schulz and Holdt led a fanatically austere existence in a bizarre expressionist cellar apartment without a floor, bed, or hot water. They slept on straw and dedicated themselves religiously to the construction of their strange mask dances, wearing gray tights during the day so that they could work on the dances as they worked on the masks and costumes.

The couple became obsessed with recovering an archaic Aryan-Nordic identity free of Jewish-Christian contamination. According to H. H. Stuckenschmidt, who was their friend, Schulz craved hardship: “Poverty, hunger, cold, Nordic landscape with snow, ice, and catastrophes: that was her world, and with Holdt she found it.”

The marriage, however, experienced intense strain. The couple had great difficulty earning any money and longed to find a way to live without it; Holdt apparently possessed a character that was not entirely trustworthy, and Schulz was violently jealous, perpetually terrified that Holdt would betray her for another woman.

In 1923 she gave birth to a son, but in this last year of the great inflation she and Holdt suffered from continual hunger. In June 1924 police discovered their bodies in the bizarre cellar apartment, with the baby between them. Schulz had shot Holdt to death, then killed herself.

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Dancing at Kilgarriff’s Café in Jamaica Plain, Boston in 1976

According to Voices of East Anglia, the venue was owned by Thomas Kilgarriff, who was born in Dunmore, County Galway, Ireland. He moved to America when he was 21 and worked hard as a ditch digger and a carpenter until he had enough money to buy the Kilgarriff’s Cafe in the 1940s.

The venue became well known in Jamaica Plain, it regularly showcased live Irish music and talent contests. Mr. Kilgarriff would book traditional Irish musicians and Irish pop bands to perform there, attracting all ages from Go Go boot wearing young ladies and hippy types to well dressed older gents. Below are some interesting vintage photographs captured an amateur night at Kilgarriff's Café in 1976.

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