Knowledge Transfer among Czech Dance Instructors

Ballroom dance and etiquette lessons are considered to be a unique phenomenon with more than one-hundred-year long tradition in the Czech lands. It is the young people´s sustained interest in the education in ballroom couple dances as well as the sufficient number of dance instructors leading the lessons that are necessary for the dance lessons to survive. Based on the investigation of archive sources and the analysis of qualitative interviews with twenty active dance instructors, the author of the study reveals the mechanisms of how the dance knowledge is acquired and passed down from generation to generation of ballroom dance instructors. From the year 1836, dance instructors were allowed to perform their professional activity only based on the license; beginning with the year 1924 this licence was conditional on passing an examination before the examination board. In the 1940s, the requirement of professional qualification resulted in the introduction of mass education of the applicants. In 1992, the profession of dance instructor was declared an unqualified trade, and in 1998 the subject “ballroom dance” ceased to exist in the only institution supposed to educate dance instructors. The study brings up different models of the path to becoming a dance instructor within the context of the afore-mentioned changes in legislation and the perception of the social status and prestige of these professionals.