Participatory and social dance.

Dances intended for participation.

Dances intended for participation rather than for an audience may include various forms of mime and narrative but are typically set much more closely to the rhythmic pattern of music, so that terms like waltz and polka refer as much to musical pieces as to the dance itself. The rhythm of the dancers' feet may even form an essential part of the music as in tap dance. African dance, for example, is rooted in fixed basic steps but may also allow a high degree of rhythmic interpretation, the feet or the trunk marking the basic pulse while cross-rhythms are picked up by shoulders, knees or head, the best dancers simultaneously giving plastic expression to all the elements of the polyrhythmic pattern.