Mating Dance

"Dance is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire."

- George Bernard Shaw

Dancing, an age old form of entertainment between one or more people. Dancing in some form can be found in almost any culture and is about as old as time. It could involve one person, two people, a few people, or a whole group of people. It could for fun, or for exercise, and is commonly shown to be romantic. Why just look at those two, so close to each other. They are really getting into it.

... Wow, they are really getting into it.

This trope is applied whenever two people in a work of fiction are dancing and it comes off as overtly sexual. This is not about two people dancing and it is all nice and romantic, this is a bit more... carnal. It could just be the nature of the dance style. But it could just as easily be a regular dance and the people in question are really into each other. After all, both activities involve two people, physical movement, and a fair amount of panting and sweating.

This trope also applies to any song where dancing is used as a metaphor, or a euphemism, or a Double Entendre for sex. Not describing sex set to a beat, but they just as might as well have.

Tenuously related to Intercourse With You.

Comic Books

 * A certain dance scene from Elf Quest, but since the participants are nude to begin with it's probably not so much a metaphor for sex as foreplay.
 * In John Byrne's Next Men, "dancing" was the only term the Next Men knew for actual sex.

Films -- Animation

 * The "Animal Dance" segment of Cats Don't Dance ends with leads Danny and Sawyer, who have engaged in a one-on-one Dance Off, looking rather winded.

Films -- Live-Action
"Crown: Do you want to dance, or do you want to dance."
 * A lot of Bollywood movies have many dance scenes like this. Indian parents complain that the dancers are practically humping each other.
 * The Wedding Planner used this metaphor to great effect.
 * Two Words: Dirty Dancing.
 * The tango scene in Mr. and Mrs Smith.
 * Hell, the tango scenes in True Lies.
 * The lesbian tango scene in Frida.
 * Tango scenes in general do this well. Here's one from Take the Lead: with Antonio Banderas.
 * Not to mention the tango from Addams Family Values, which ends with all the bottles of champagne in the restaurant spontaneously popping their corks.
 * High School High took this to its extremes, with dancers quite accurately pantomiming intimate maneuvers. Of course, this is to be expected, the movie being an outright parody of such things.
 * The Thomas Crown Affair, version two featuring Pierce Brosnan as Crown and Rene Russo wearing an invisible dress. The scene ends with the line.


 * Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood employs this as well as parodying of the perception of licentiousness in the black culture. At the party, dancers are revealed in a pan shot starting with fairly normal dancing, then to grinding, then to two people buck naked and just having sex on the dance floor.
 * Moulin Rouge: "El Tango de Roxanne"
 * In Totally Awesome, Gabriel summons Lori in front of the entire dance class mid-routine and they end up grinding in front of everyone. At first, it seems an innocent part of the choreography. until their moans grow obnoxiously loud. Deb, in a fit of jealousy, kicks over the boombox and interrupts the routine.
 * In Walk Hard, Dewey Cox briefly works sweeping the floors in a club where black people "come here to dance erotically" in a parody of Idlewild.
 * Elena and Alejandro at the Don's ball in The Mask of Zorro.

Jokes

 * Ancient joke. Young man, married or soon to be, is talking with his elder about what forms of sex are permitted. "May we have sex face-to-face?" he asks. "Certainly," says the elder, "as often as you like." "Spoon-fashion?" asks the child, "doggy style?" "With my blessings," says the elder. "May we have sex standing up?" the young man asks. The elder gets serious, and says, "No, you may not, for that, my child, may lead to dancing."
 * There's one about a young fellow telling his friend that he got beat up because his girlfriend's father caught him dancing the lambada with her. The friend asks, "What, is he crazy?" and the reply is, "No, he's deaf."

Literature

 * In Discworld novels, Nanny Ogg has much more to say about folksongs, folk dances, maypoles and suchlike things than Granny Weatherwax wanted to hear. And it's not exactly about that song.
 * One short story in the Wild Cards series makes mention of the Wedding Pattern, a dance a Takisian couple does at their wedding party that's supposed to end in full-on copulation.
 * In The Old-Girl Network by Catherine Alliott Polly tries to win Nick over through this method, but is too drunk. In the second book, Going Too Far she shares such a dance with Sam.
 * Referenced in David Eddings' Elenium, when a would-be Gentleman Thief is trying to teach his Thieves Guild to act like gentlefolk, and chastises one prostitute for concluding one of her business arrangements on the ballroom floor. She retorts that it's just a different kind of dancing, to which he replies that the vertical kind is in vogue at the moment.
 * In the Kiesha Ra series, the dances of the Serpiente are supposed to be much more sexual that those of the Avians. A certain kind is only to be danced with between mates.
 * In the Night Huntress books, Cat uses the excuse of blending in a night club to get very physical with her ex. Visibly aroused, he tells her that if she doesn't stop teasing him he'll find them a room and finish what she's starting.
 * The Action Heros Handbook has an entire chapter titled "How to Dirty Dance" that covers this sort of dancing.
 * The Queen of the Black Coast does this for Conan the Barbarian. Right in front of her crew.

Live-Action TV
"Buffy: Why, are you jealous?
 * Doctor Who
 * The episodes "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances" make use of the second version of this trope, but it was also invoked in "The Girl In The Fireplace".
 * The metaphor showed up again in the episode "Silence in the Library" (or possibly "Forest of the Dead").
 * Sabrina Bryan and Mark Ballas were like this on Dancing With the Stars. It was no surprise to find out they hooked up in real life.
 * Heck, pretty much everyone does this at least once. This is a family show, right?
 * Parodied in Babylon 5 when Ivanova got out of having sex with an alien by convincing him that a strange dance routine was how humans did it.
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy did this with Xander in the Season 2 premiere, apparently just to make Angel jealous. Or maybe to mess with Xander's head to. Both worked:

Angel: What, of Xander? He's just a kid.

Buffy: Is it 'cause I danced with him?

Angel: "Danced with" is a pretty loose term. "Mated with" might be a little closer."


 * In How I Met Your Mother Lily and Marshall rediscovered their youth while dancing in a club. Ted, as the narrator, comments on their dancing first being nice and then getting icky.
 * You could say Carlos and Nora get into this at Bree's wedding in Desperate Housewives. By the end of the night he's getting her zipper open and heading towards the third base... Tom comments on this and Gabby gets really upset.
 * Xena: Warrior Princess
 * "The Bitter Suite". The Tango. Ares. Xena. That is all.
 * Also "Heart of Darkness". Gabrielle and Xena that time.
 * Star Trek Deep Space Nine ("You Are Cordially Invited"). During Jadzia Dax's party, Nog can be seen doing the Ferengi mating dance for an amused Kira Nerys (the dance was made up on the spot by actor Aron Eisenberg,). At the end of the scene, Jadzia and the others join in too.
 * The famous, scorching hot tango between Niles and Daphne in the classic Frasier episode "Moon Dance" probably qualifies, even though the desire is unspoken and unacknowledged — the sexuality of the dance is in the characters' and actors' chemistry

Music

 * "Private Dancer" by Tina Turner and "Dancing with Myself" by Billy Idol use dancing as a metaphor for sex.

Puppet Shows

 * The Mating Dance from Dinosaurs. Robbie even gets caught practicing it in his room in one episode.

Theater

 * The musical Company has the solo dance number "Tick Tock" (cut from some revivals), in which Kathy's movements are a metaphor both for the ideal of "making love" and the banality of "having sex" -- the latter being what Robert and April are heard but not seen doing.
 * Similar to "Tick Tock" is "Bang!" which was cut from A Little Night Music. It was put into Putting It Together, in which two characters do a dance which is a metaphor for sex and narrated by another character. The fact that the other character is referred to as "the Observer" throughout the show adds an aspect of voyeurism to this song, remedied only by the fact that he isn't actually "there".
 * Pippin
 * In a similar vein, when Pippin and Catherine get into bed, they temporarily disappear while a scantily clad dance couple executes a seductive routine. The climax of this is the woman dancer making an acrobatic leap and the man catching her in his arms; the first time, they don't connect and Pippin and Catherine are revealed apologizing to each other.
 * "With You" from the same show leads to a sex orgy in interpretive dance form.
 * "Contact" in Rent, in which the ensemble's dance converges under a big white sheet.

Web Comics

 * The "Out!" story arc of Least I Could Do introduces Rayne to grinding. He feel that the art of the pick up should be something more than just rubbing your junk on a girls ass and ends up in a hump off that ends painfully.
 * In Crossoverkill, when Captain Perfect asks Hoodoo what kind of dancing she wants, her answer is "Dirty."

Western Animation
"Eduardo: You are now carrying my child.
 * La Tango De La Muerte from The Simpsons:

Lisabella: But how?

Eduardo: It is the mystery of the dance."


 * Avatar: The Last Airbender: Fans can cite the Kataango. Also known as The Battle of the Sexings. For the uninitiated, this is the dancing scene in the third-season episode "The Headband" -- details over here.
 * The tango scene in Hey Arnold.
 * Yet another tango scene: the start of Wakfu episode 22 of season 1, with Sadlygrove and Evangelyne (pictured above, video here). Note that it's a Dream Sequence (for one, Eva can barely even walk in high eels).
 * Shane uses this to "distract" the lovely bandit leader Daisy O'Mega in Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. The scene is... awfully suggestive by the standards of the era, especially the shot of the hat landing on the bed.
 * Aaahh Real Monsters has the monsters reproduce literally by dancing!

Real Life

 * Much of Latin dancing is this in essence. The Argentine tango, for example, if Len Goodman (who should know what he's talking about) of Strictly Come Dancing is to be believed, was originally a "check out the client before you take his cash" thing in the brothels of Buenos Aires.
 * Argentine Tango isn't a Latin dance. In fact it's not even, strictly speaking, ballroom, but its own style. Tangueros and milongueros HATE IT when you call it ballroom. Len knows more than the average guy, but Strictly Come Dancing and its American cousin actually are piss-poor demonstrations of what AT should look like. (For what it should actually look like, the Robert Duval film Assassination Tango is a better example. Especially interesting to remember is that it was often, in its early years, a solo/challenge dance, and the partnered version was often practiced between men.) A better example of a Latin dance would be rhumba, based on Cuban son, or its related dance Bolero. The 'figure-eight' cuban hip action and long, languid lines really doesn't leave much to the imagination.
 * The Lambada was called "The Forbidden Dance" because of freaked out parents who thought it looked too much like sex for American children and teens to be allowed to do it.
 * The waltz had a similar reputation in the 19th century -- and even in the 21st it does kinda look like that. The common dance before the waltz was the menuet, a dance that was slow, soft, graceful and didn't involve touching anything other than hands. Suddenly the fashion was for a dance that was much quicker, meaning there was all sorts of panting and sweating, that involved what was practically embracing a possibly unknown woman/man, that involved dancing so close you could get away with pressing your bodies against each others, and that gave a man ample opportunity to look straight down his partner's cleavage...
 * Depending on precisely how the lead arranges the hold, any of the International Standard dances are close-contact sports that can involves some interesting "Wait you want what where now?" moments.
 * Reggaeton, natch. The perreo is outright designed to be the closest thing to sex you can do in da club without getting kicked.
 * Daggering
 * Gypsy (really Roma) dances were (and still are, all too often) taken to be extremely sexual. They were (and are, in many areas of the world) accused of being devils, harlots and sex fiends by Moral Guardians and Church Militants alike. It doesn't help that some denominations have difficulty distinguishing between a Mating Dance and other forms and just declare it all sin.
 * Of course, there's the Mating Dance of the spiders to signal that the spider is a mating partner and not food...
 * Ever been to a upper middle school or high school dance? Virtually all the ones who "dance" dance like this with their date or the nearest member of the sex they are interested in. It's called "Grinding" and is not technically a dance, but is supposed to be.
 * Some religious groups explicitly forbid (or at least frown upon) dancing, believing that it leads to other things. Some go so far as to censor the words "Praise the Lord in the dance" from the Psalms.
 * So, most of dance in general.