From ragtime New York to the dance halls of Havana, Buenos Aires and London, ten dancers, teachers and one composer who turned partner dancing into a twentieth-century art.

At the start of the twentieth century, partner dancing was either a stiff society ritual or a craze that respectable people disapproved of. By the end of it, ballroom and Latin dancing had become a codified art with international championships, teaching syllabuses used around the world, and a place on television screens in dozens of countries. That transformation happened in ballrooms and on stages from New York to Havana, from Buenos Aires to London, and it was driven by a surprisingly small number of people.

Some of them were performers who made the public fall in love with a new dance. Others were teachers who wrote down what the feet were doing so that anyone could learn it. The ten below, several of them couples, did both, and between them they shaped the waltz, the foxtrot, the tango, the mambo, the rumba and the cha-cha-chá that are still danced today.

1. Vernon and Irene Castle

The couple who made dancing respectable

Vernon Castle, an Englishman, and Irene Castle, from New Rochelle, New York, married in 1911 and within a few years had made the new ragtime dances fashionable. They smoothed the wild turkey trot and one-step into graceful forms, popularized the Castle walk, the hesitation waltz and the maxixe, and in 1914 published Modern Dancing, a guide for a nation learning to dance in public. Irene’s bobbed hair and loose gowns set fashions of their own. Vernon died in a plane crash in 1918 while training pilots in Texas, and their story became a 1939 film starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Start with that film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.

2. Victor Silvester

The man who set the tempo

In 1922 Victor Silvester and his partner Phyllis Clarke won the first World Ballroom Dancing Championship, and he spent the rest of his life making ballroom dancing teachable. His book Modern Ballroom Dancing, published in 1927, became a best-seller that stayed in print for generations. Frustrated that ordinary dance records kept changing speed, he formed his own band in 1935 to play in strict tempo, and Victor Silvester and his Ballroom Orchestra went on to sell some 75 million records. His BBC television program Dancing Club ran for seventeen years. Start with his signature tune, “You’re Dancing on My Heart.”

3. Arthur Murray

The man who taught America to dance

Born in 1895 in Podhajce, then part of Austria-Hungary, Arthur Murray began teaching in New York in 1914 and turned dance instruction into a national business. He sold lessons by mail, recorded instructional records that came with coupons for studio lessons, and built a chain of studios that by his retirement in 1964 numbered more than 3,500. His wife and partner Kathryn, born in Jersey City, hosted The Arthur Murray Party on television from 1950 to 1960, bringing the foxtrot, the rumba and the mambo into living rooms across the country. Start with a surviving episode of The Arthur Murray Party.

4. Monsieur Pierre and Doris Lavelle

The pair who wrote down the Latin

Pierre Zurcher-Margolle, a Frenchman from Toulon known professionally as Monsieur Pierre, was a leading London teacher when he traveled to Cuba in 1947 and was told by local dancers that he was dancing the rumba out of time. He took lessons every day, came home determined to teach the authentic Cuban style, and in 1947 founded the Latin American section of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing with his partner Doris Lavelle. Their work led to the syllabus of 1955 on which international Latin dancing still rests: rumba, samba, paso doble, jive and cha-cha-chá. Start by watching any modern world Latin final; every step descends from their notes.

5. Enrique Jorrín

The composer who invented a dance

Enrique Jorrín was a Cuban violinist with the Orquesta América who noticed, in the early 1950s, that dancers in Havana struggled with the syncopations of the dance music of the day. He wrote tunes with a simpler, steadier pulse, and the dancers answered with a triple step whose shuffling sound gave the new style its name: cha-cha-chá. His “La Engañadora,” recorded in 1953, launched a craze that crossed from Cuba to New York, Paris and London within a few years, and Monsieur Pierre soon added the dance to the international syllabus. Few composers can claim to have created a dance. Start with “La Engañadora.”

6. Pedro “Cuban Pete” Aguilar and Millie Donay

The king of the Palladium

In the late 1940s and 1950s, the Palladium Ballroom at Broadway and 53rd Street in Manhattan was the capital of mambo, a place where, as one account put it, the ability to dance mattered more than class or color. Its greatest dancer was Pedro Aguilar, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1927, who earned the name Cuban Pete there in 1949. With his partner Millie Donay he won contest after contest, and he invented some one hundred original moves. Tito Puente and Life magazine both called him the greatest mambo dancer ever, and he became the only Latin dancer featured in the Smithsonian’s Latin jazz exhibition. Start with Tito Puente’s “Ran Kan Kan” and imagine the floor.

7. Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves

The couple who put tango on the stage

Juan Carlos Copes was seventeen, and María Nieves fourteen, when they began dancing together in Buenos Aires. In the 1960s they created the first choreographed tango stage shows, turning a social dance of the milongas into theater, and they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show between 1962 and 1964. Their partnership outlasted their marriage by decades. Their greatest triumph came with Tango Argentino, which opened in Paris in 1983 and reached Broadway in 1985, and set off a worldwide tango revival. Copes later served as chief choreographer for Carlos Saura’s 1998 film Tango. Start with that film.

8. Walter Laird

The author of the Latin technique

Walter Laird won the World Latin Dance Championship three times, from 1962 to 1964, with his partner Lorraine, but his lasting influence is a book. The Technique of Latin Dancing, first published in 1961 and revised again and again, set out each figure with a precision that dance teacher organizations came to treat as definitive. Its tables of steps, timing and action shaped how Latin dancing has been taught and judged ever since. As a coach he trained a generation of champions, among them Donnie Burns, who appears below. If Monsieur Pierre brought the Cuban rumba to Europe, Laird made its grammar exact. Start with his book, still in print.

9. Bill and Bobbie Irvine

The champions of both worlds

Bill Irvine, born in 1926 into a mining family in Kilsyth, Scotland, and his wife Bobbie were the dominant couple of 1960s ballroom. Between 1960 and 1968 they won thirteen world championships, and in 1966 they achieved something unheard of by winning both the standard and the Latin American world titles, a double they repeated at the Royal Albert Hall in 1968. In 1967 they became the first ballroom dancers to be made MBE. Their mastery of both styles set a standard of versatility that few couples have matched since. Start with archive newsreel footage of the pair, which shows their polish better than any description.

10. Donnie Burns and Gaynor Fairweather

The partnership that ruled Latin

Donnie Burns, a Scot born in 1959, and his partner Gaynor Fairweather won the World Professional Latin Championship fourteen times, a record of dominance that made them the defining Latin couple of the late twentieth century. Trained in part by Walter Laird, they combined his technical exactness with a modern athletic drama that changed what audiences expected from Latin dancing. After retiring from competition, Burns became president of the World Dance Council in 2005, helping to steer the art form he had helped to shape. Start with any recording of their world championship finals.

Final thoughts

What unites these ten is the belief that a dance can be both a pleasure and an art. The Castles and Arthur Murray made dancing a public joy, Victor Silvester, Monsieur Pierre and Walter Laird made it a discipline with its own grammar, and dancers from Cuban Pete to Juan Carlos Copes showed how much feeling that grammar could carry. The traffic between Havana, Buenos Aires, New York and London runs through every one of their stories.

Trimming the list hurt. Augie and Margo Rodríguez, the mambo champions of the Palladium, missed the cut by a whisker, as did “Killer Joe” Piro, the ballroom’s master of ceremonies and a celebrated dance teacher. Consider them numbers eleven and twelve, then find a floor: this is one art that is best understood by the feet.