While tap dancers place emphasis on stage presence and arm movements, cloggers limit their upper body movement, focusing primarily on their feet. What sets clogging apart from other dance styles such as tap-dancing is the lack of upper body movement used during performance.

The shuffle clogging style is said to be the most popular style for bluegrass music cloggers while rhythm and stomp clogging are more popular with old-time music cloggers.

As for the shoes, many old clogging shoes had no taps and some were made of leather and velvet, while the soles of the shoes were either wooden or hard leather.Ĭlogging can be divided into five major categories: 1) shuffle clogging, 2) cadence clogging, 3) rhythm clogging, 4) stomp clogging, and 5) buck-dancing. What all these had in common was emphasizing the downbeat of the music by enthusiastic footwork. In later periods it was not always called 'clogging', being known variously as foot-stomping, buck dancing, clog dancing, jigging, or other local terms. By the 16th century a more conventional leather shoe with separate wooden pieces on the heel and toe called 'flats' became popular, from where the terms 'heel and toe' and 'flatfooting' derive. The dance has its origins in Wales and England where the traditional clog had a one-piece wooden bottom and a leather upper. Clogging is often considered the first form of street dance because it evolved in urban environments during the industrial revolution.Īs the clogging style has evolved over the years, many localities have made contributions by adding local steps and rhythms to the style. The use of wooden-soled clogs is rarer in the more modern dances since clog shoes are not commonly worn in urban society, and other types of footwear have replaced them in their evolved dance forms. The dance style has recently fused with others including African-American rhythms, and the Peruvian dance 'zapateo' (which may in itself be derived from early European clog dances), resulting in the birth of newer street dances, such as tap, locking, jump, hakken, stomping, Gangsta Walking, and the Candy Walk dance. Clogging is a type of folk dance in which the dancer's footwear is used percussively by striking the heel, the toe, or both against a floor or each other to create audible rhythms, usually to the downbeat with the heel keeping the rhythm.

Clogging dancing near cobden