fan dance

The tradition & historical record

In the West, a fan dance (i.e., a dance performed with fans) may be an erotic dance performance, traditionally by a woman, but not exclusively. Beyond eroticism it is a form of musical interpretation. The performer, sometimes entirely nude or apparently so, dances while manipulating two or more large fans that can be constructed from many different materials including ostrich feathers, silks, velvet, sequined and organza fabrics. The unifying factor in all is the spins, or fan staves, that give form to this prop. ²

In the 1970s gay men removed the solid pin at the center of the fan and replaced it with knotted string allowing for a fluid curvaceous movement. This disco art has been seen in San Francisco's Trocadero (perhaps first before the East's Paradise Garage), New York's Roseland Ballroom plus numerous circuit parties from Corbett Reynolds 1996 "Jungle Red" Party in Cleveland to the White and Winter Parties of Miami and London's 1998 Red Heart's Ball. More difficult to construct (and manipulate) than the flags commonly used today, there are but a handful of artists, male and female, who occasionally exhibit this style of dance. The 1997 and 2016 Dance on the Pier images both give a closer look at a pair of medium-sized fans caught in fast motion. At times these fans travel in a simple elliptical pattern seen as a circle by the audience while further into the choreography one might see a perfect windmill, helicopter blades, a set of wings or even Carmen's skirt. ²

The 1963 film Gypsy is a musical about Gypsy Rose Lee, a noted fan dancer. ²

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Fan dance”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ²

fan dance is type of dance including hand fans as props, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ¹

The source record links this tradition to 3 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ¹