This study deals with the history of ballroom dancing in South Africa. While reference will be made to the founding of ballroom in the early eighteenth century in South Africa, the study will mainly focus on the period between 1920 and 1940 in the Johannesburg, Pretoria region. The study will determine how and why ballroom dancing came to South Africa from abroad; how South Africans borrowed from the international dancing world; what they copied, what ideas they followed, how they chose to dance ballroom and how this affected South African society at large. Copyright / Dissertation (MHCS)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Historical and Heritage Studies / unrestricted

Basic element of competitive Dance Sport is the dance couple. For being succesful, it's needed to master the combination of specific dance skills, sport skills, stress resilience and skills connected to dance partnership, mainly communication skills and conflict resolution skills. Since the scientific research of conflict resolution among competitive couples is very scarce, aim of our explorative qualitative research is to understand how Latin Dance Sport couples experience conflicts and their subjective meaning of partnership in competitive dance. Experiences of dancers of various dance classes and their trainers were gathered using questionnaire (= 43) and half-structured interviews (= 13). Based on themati analysis, relevant themes were identified and described, and explanatory model further based on activity theory, game theory and theory of interdependence was proposed. Model suggests that contradiction of two different motives (competitive success vs. partner relationship) in the activity systems of competitive dance predisposes possible complex relationships between (implicit and/or explicit) aims of dancers, their type of partnership, possible expressed conflicts and their preferred styles of conflict resolution (based on the unique context of every dance couple). Relevant identified themes...