Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. (alternative spelling of dancehall English)
WordNet
n. large room used mainly for dancing [syn: ballroom, dance palace]
Wikipedia
Dance hall in its general meaning is a hall for dancing. From the earliest years of the twentieth century until the early 1960s, the dance hall was the popular forerunner of the discothèque or nightclub. The majority of towns and cities in the West had at least one dance hall, and almost always featured live musicians playing a range of music from strict tempo ballroom dance music to big band, swing and jazz. One of the most famous dance hall musicians was Glenn Miller.
Other structural forms of dance halls include the dance pavilion which has a roof but no walls, and the open-air platform which has no roof or walls. The open air nature of the dance pavilion was both a feature and a drawback. The taxi dance hall is a dance hall with a specific arrangement, wherein the patrons hire hall employees to dance with them.
Starting in the early 1930s, The Savoy, a dance hall in Harlem (an African-American neighborhood in New York City) was the first truly integrated building in the United States — for both the dancers and the musicians. "We didn't care about the color of your skin. All we wanted to know was: Can you dance?"
The early days of rock n' roll were briefly played out in dance halls until they were superseded by nightclubs.
The dance halls of Jamaica in the 1950s and 1960s were home to public dances usually targeted at younger patrons. Sound system operators had big home-made audio systems (often housed in the flat bed of a pickup truck), spinning records from popular American rhythm and blues musicians and Jamaican ska and rocksteady performers. The term dancehall has also come to refer to a subgenre of reggae that originated around 1980.
Dance Hall is a 1950 British film directed by Charles Crichton. The film was an unusual departure for Ealing Studios at the time, as it tells the story about four women and their romantic encounters from a female perspective.
A dance hall is a room for dancing.
Dance hall or dancehall may also refer to:
- Dance hall (Jamaican), a music venue in Jamaica
- Dance Hall (1929 film), a 1929 American musical film
- Dance Hall (1941 film), a 1941 American comedy film
- Dance Hall (1950 film), a 1950 British film
- Dancehall, a musical genre
- "Dance Hall", a song by Modest Mouse on the album Good News for People Who Love Bad News
Dance Hall was an American musical film directed by Melville Brown and written by Jane Murfin and J. Walter Ruben, based on the short story of the same name by Vina Delmar. It was RKO's second to last release of the decade, and was a critical and financial flop.
Dance Hall is a 1941 American comedy film directed by Irving Pichel and written by Stanley Rauh and Ethel Hill. The film stars Carole Landis, Cesar Romero, William "Bill" Henry, June Storey, J. Edward Bromberg and Charles Halton. It is based on the novel The Giant Swing by W. R. Burnett. The film was released on July 18, 1941, by 20th Century Fox.
Usage examples of "dance hall".
Archie never went back to that dance hall, or any other around LA.
The dance hall had a deck of hard-shined wood that seemed to extend beyond the open porches that overlooked the ocean.
The visitor, pausing before the entrance to a dance hall, turned suddenly to stare directly at Hendley.
At breakfast he'd pop up from under a table to crack an egg on a bald man's head and at midnight he'd suddenly race through the dance hall in a Gay Nineties bathing suit and dive through a window into the lake.
Me, if it was left up to me I'd make gambling legal tonight but I'd break anyone for any protection racket, any dance hall protection or girls or whatever.
For the past twenty-four hours he had hardly slept, planning out the work needed to make a Cinderella transition from ore smelter to dance hall.
Laughing, shaking his head, grinding, no longer outwardly but deep within, every tooth in his head, he joined a Langfuhr SA sturm, whose headquarters and meeting place was the Kleinhammerpark Beer Hall, a spacious establishment with a park by the same name, with dance hall, bowling alley, and home cooking, situated between the Aktien Brewery and the Langfuhr railroad station.
Actually, its original coating was a strong, rusty umber, but the passing centuries had sapped the mineral pigment of its oxidic potency, leaving it a flat, dull rose, like a dance hall memory, and so thin that the original wood showed through it like the night sky through a canopy of fishnet.
She spotted a fire escape farther along, allowing rapid exit through one of the dance hall's windows.
And now the dance hall girl buys a chemical to kill the seed of her lovers, and lives to be seventy-five in a room full of gadgets which cool the air and veritably eat the dust.