An interesting question, and one that's been covered in earlier threads. Essentially, early Northern dancers emulated 60’s soul artists’ dance styles seen in USA music shows featuring the footwork of Major Lance, Jackie Wilson, James Brown and others. When Wigan opened in 1973, the dance style was predominantly shuffling side to side with much rapid footwork. As the scene moved on, it attracted masses of attendees not aware of the Wheel-Torch dance style so the late 70’s witnessed the arrival of the ‘lazy two-step style’ popular in discos. Packed dance floors to some extent forced this ‘dancing-on-the-spot’ approach as there was no space to move side to side. The late 70’s saw the emergence of a modern dance style that later came to be called ‘shuffling’ - the faster sounds of the contemporary newies encouraged dancers to move backwards and forwards. Today’s events usually display a variety of dance styles with older attendees favouring the lazy-two-step, youngsters wearing trainers doing the ‘modern shuffling’, veterans embracing the Wheel-Torch old-style shuffle and plenty of free-style-dance-how-you-wanna punters generally doing their own thing.