The Culture of Fusion Dance

After dancing fusion for 10 years—and in recent years, serving as a DJ and organizer—I’ve attempted to describe this dance to many people. Now I’m trying to capture its essence in writing. Here’s my best attempt at answering the question “What is fusion dance, and what is the culture surrounding it?“, written for an audience  that’s already familiar with partner dance.

(This is a personal take, and it’s biased toward the European fusion scene, where I have the most experience.)

What fusion is not

In better-known partner dance styles (e.g. Salsa, Tango, Blues, Lindy Hop, West Coast Swing, Brazilian Zouk) there is typically a long history, musical tradition, and widely accepted steps, patterns, and moves.

Fusion has none of these. No long history: it emerged around 2010. It has no musical tradition, as it borrows inspiration from many different sources, especially new and obscure artists. It offers no standard library of steps, patterns, or moves, beyond simple weight shifts.

Fusion is The Borg

Fusion is like the “The Borg” in Star Trek: greedily consuming the music, moves, and postures of other dance styles—including non-partner dances like hip-hop, contemporary, and contact improv—and fusing them into an ever-evolving whole.

The all-inclusive nature of fusion means that different scenes might feel very different. In traditional partner dances, you can go from one location to another and fit right in: Salsa in New York is like Salsa in Medellín is like Salsa in Seoul. Fusion has lots of local flavor. Different music emphasis, different frames, different norms. It’s The Borg… but The Borg is lumpy.

Embodied, connection-based, and endlessly surprising

Without a shared library of music, frames, steps, or moves to fall back upon, every fusion dance with a new partner is a brand-new journey. Whether following or leading, you must remain extremely sensitive to your body, your partner’s body, and how each of you are interpreting the music. Unless you’ve danced with someone many times, you can take nothing for granted.

Fusion aligns heavily with “embodiment” culture, i.e., feeling and naming what’s happening inside your body with sensitivity and precision. The opposite of this would be brain-first dancing: relying on a strict mental map that delineates  what “we must do” to a certain kind of music.

In fusion, you’ve got to leave such thinking behind. Nothing is obvious. You’re not just speaking one foreign language—you’re hopping between multiple foreign languages.  The way you dance with one person to a certain song may be very different to how you dance it with another person.

The interplay of all these variables creates an endless fountain of surprise, delight, and modes of connection. It demands full attention, and it rewards flexibility, adaptability, playfulness, and the willingness to laugh at yourself. This is what makes fusion so delightful.

Sober, silly slobs

There’s very little alcohol or drug consumption exists at fusion events. This is very different from other dance scenes where drinking is normalized, where people might say “I need a few drinks before I can dance well.” In light of the sensitivity and awareness required to dance fusion, a fusion dancer is more likely to say, “I’ll have just one drink—or nothing at all—in order to dance well.”

Fashion is entirely optional within fusion. Your best dance might be with the person who puts zero effort into their appearance (beyond basic hygiene), and your worst dances might happen with the person who “looks amazing.” Physical attraction can never be fully separated from the magic of partner dance, but if there’s one community where it counts the least, fusion may be it.

Fusion dances are playful, experimental, silly, and sometimes sloppy. There’s no routines or choreographies, so nothing is polished. These dances often doesn’t look good on video. When connection is king, you don’t have to look amazing or be technically talented to have a “great dance.”

A musical wonderland

Fusion music comes from a wider variety or sources than any other dance scene. The songs must be “danceable,” an ever-changing and hard-to-define standard. If there’s one agreed-upon metric in this realm, it’s probably BPM (beats per minute): fusion songs can be very slow/empty, but never too fast. A clubby techno song is almost always too fast.

Fusion DJs are constantly exploring and pushing the limits of danceability, integrating songs from lesser-known styles and newer, electronic-influenced artists. Within a standard 1-hour set, most fusion DJs will migrate between multiple styles/flavors. Like the weather, if you don’t like what you’re hearing at a fusion dance, wait 10 minutes, and it will probably change. This expectation of variety limits the popularity of live performances at fusion events, because no matter how talented an artist, their music will sound very similar after an hour.

The musical standards of a local fusion scene are often set by a handful of organizers and DJs with idiosyncratic and unbalanced tastes. This is a feature, not a bug. Fusion DJs are constantly searching for new songs rather than remixing a canon of classics.

High-inclusion, queer by default

“Would you like to lead, follow, or switch?” is the classic first question that two fusion dancers ask each other. Even if they’ve danced together before, the idea is to minimize assumptions and maximize inclusion. Fusion dancers don’t assume role preference based upon someone’s gender presentation. The most sought-after dancers are often those who learn to both lead and follow (rather than stick with just one role). Queer, trans, and non-binary dancers feel more easily “at home” in fusion dance communities than more traditional, gender-normative ones.

The value of “high inclusion” also means welcoming dancers with limited experience and those coming from non-standard backgrounds (like ecstatic dance and contact improv). For more experienced partner dancers, this can lead to frustration. While no community can ever do away with “the cool kids club,” fusion communities tend to be extremely welcoming, anti-hierarchy, and non-elitist compared to other dance styles, even when that means that you’re not always dancing “at your level.”

Switching, co-leading, and dances with more than two

In most partner dances, one person leads and the other follows. In fusion this is often true, but there’s also a culture of “switch” dancing, in which roles are silently swapped (either by “giving away the lead” or “stealing the lead”) in the middle of a song, perhaps multiple times.

Some dancers also interpret switching as “co-leading,” in which the roles of lead and follow dissolve, and both partners lead at the same time. In my experience, this requires a lot of practice to do well, otherwise it dissolves into unsatisfying chaos.

Something else you’ll almost never see at other dances is three-person (or more) dances, in which lead/follow roles are loosely defined and fluidly changing. Much like co-leading, dances with more than two people require high levels of experience and awareness, and when done well, can feel utterly magical.

Fusion as a reaction to the mainstream

Finally, there’s an ongoing conversation about whether fusion is “its own dance” or only exists in relation to more traditional partner dances. In other words, can you learn to dance fusion before learning any other partner dances?

My take is that you can embrace the values of fusion immediately (please do!)—and also, if you don’t get some training in a more traditional forms of partner dance, you’ll feel limited in the depth, vocabulary, and the number of connective moments you can enjoy. It helps to learn some of the rules before breaking them.

At the end of the day, fusion is a counter-cultural mash-up of hyper-modern, left-leaning values: consent, embodiment, inclusion, queerness, and polyamory. It’s an ongoing reaction to the traditional norms of partner dance, existing in partnership with the mainstream. It evades strict definition, and it will continue to evolve.

Other people’s opinions

Some other people’s attempts to define fusion that I enjoy (and frequently reference) include…