The people, the professionals, the atmosphere for great social dancing for over 95 years!
We provide the perfect atmosphere to allow your dancing dreams to become reality!
- Arthur Murray Dance Studios have been teaching the world to dance for over 95 years. Today there are studios throughout USA, Canada, Puerto Rico, Israel, Germany, England, South Africa, Italy and Japan.
- The Melbourne Studio caters for surrounding suburbs including; Richmond, South Yarra, Toorak, Prahran, Armadale, Carlton, Docklands, Flemington, Middle Park, Albert Park, Camberwell and Hawthorn.
- The Blackburn Studio caters for surrounding suburbs including; Mont Albert, Doncaster, Balwyn, Surrey Hills, Ferntree Gully, Knox, Box Hill, Nunawading, Heathmont, Vermont South and Mitcham.
- The Brighton Studio caters for surrounding suburbs including; Elwood, Ormond, Caulfield, Bentleigh, McKinnon, Moorabbin, Highett, Cheltenham, Oakliegh, Heatherton.
- Being the largest longest running most experienced dance studio in the world means we can offer you the best dance tuition available.
Learn to Dance like the Stars!
- Because our teaching methods are proven to be the fastest and most effective means of learning to dance, Arthur Murray’s is consistently the choice of the A-list.
- The studios have taught many celebrities, from the Kennedys and Rockefellers to famous individuals like Ingrid Bergman, Jane Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, Caesar Romero, Tanya Roberts, Gloria Estefan, Cybill Shepherd, Madonna, Mel Gibson, Dan Akroyd and many others. Arthur Murray studios dance with the stars!
- Clint Eastwood danced in The Bridges of Madison County. Michael Douglas danced in The American President. Al Pacino tangoed in the Scent of a Woman. We admired Patric Swayze in Dirty Dancing. Even Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau danced across the big screen on a cruise ship. John Travolta is legendary for his disco fever and his angelic moves in Michael.
- Watching the stars dance is fun! Watching any good, practiced dancer is a delight. We welcome the opportunity to teach you to dance like they do. It’s much more fun to be the star yourself!
Franchisees
Each studio owner has had to fulfill all the Arthur Murray Inc. stringent rules and regulations, is fully qualified with proven success in the industry. All studios owners;
- Are themselves professional dance instructors
- Have been involved with Arthur Murray’s for over 10 years.
- Have proven themselves on a management level before owning a studio.
- This means every studio is in strict accordance with the franchise regulations that has made Arthur Murray’s the #1 studio for over 95 years and ensures your dancing success and enjoyment.
Contracts and Enrollment Programs
We understand that you have dancing goals and we want to help you achieve them! Our professional instructors take the time to map out their recommendations for a program to suit your ability, time and finance. You will then have clear expectations, guide lines and goals to make your dancing dreams happen in the most fun, fast and effective ways possible, plus guaranteed success and results.
St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 2002 Gale Group. Arthur Murray
The logo of Arthur Murray International Dance Schools is the stylised silhouette of a man and woman dancing. Drawn with broad and sweeping lines, it suggests movement, elegance, and romance, the very qualities that have been associated with the name of Arthur Murray for over eight decades.
Combining his love of dance with a canny business sense and a shrewd perception of human nature, Murray first began giving dancing lessons to earn some extra money. By the time he retired, there were hundreds of studio franchises bearing his name--a name that had become synonymous with ballroom dancing itself.
Born Moses Teichman, the son of Austrian immigrants, Murray grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was a shy, hardworking youth who attended high school by day,studied draftsmanship by night, and worked as an errand boy in between. To overcome his shyness, he asked a girl friend to teach him to dance, and by the time he was 17, he was giving lessons himself. In the next few years he studied with the famous performers and dance instructors Irene and Vernon Castle and, through them, he got a job in the resort town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, teaching dance to upper-class vacationers. It was 1914 and World War I was imminent; a Germanic (not to mention Jewish) name like Moses Teichman might have made the customers nervous, and at Irene Castle's suggestion, the young man changed his name to Arthur Murray. Following his introduction to elite society in Marblehead, he went to college in Georgia, where he continued to supplement his income by giving dance lessons.
Before 1900 there was little ballroom dance in the United States beyond the fox trot and the polka, but the advent of jazz and ragtime in the early decades of the twentieth century brought a wave of new dances that swept the nation. The Kangaroo Dip, the Chicken Scratch, and the Turkey Trot were just a few of the new dances Americans were anxious to learn. With an acute sense of business timing and strategy, Murray rode the new wave of dance popularity, teaching lessons, organising dances, and even tapping into the new mail order market to sell lessons by mail. His success prompted Forbes magazine to feature an article about him, headlined "This College Student Earns $15,000 a Year. "Murray owed the success of his mail order campaign to his innovative approach to dance instruction--his famous "footsteps." Rather than merely describing the movements of a particular dance, Murray invented the concept of diagrams, with silhouetted footprints illustrating the movements. His advertisement, under the banner "How I Became Popular Overnight," has remained a Madison Avenue classic. The combination of accessible learning techniques and their appeal to the socially insecure, made lessons "the Arthur Murray way" wildly popular.
Another trademark of Arthur Murray's approach had originated perhaps that first summer in Marblehead. Perceiving that social dancing was associated with both romance and refinement, Murray promoted those associations in his lessons. When he opened his first franchise studios in 1938, he continued the tradition of providing elegant instructors who would adhere to his philosophy of teaching dance "not as isolated feet or step movements, but as an integral part of social life and an expression and celebration of it. "From those first studios, Murray went on to build an ever-expanding dance empire. There was a dip in business during the Depression, but, by 1946, there were 72 Arthur Murray Studios nationwide, and in the 1950s he graduated from sponsoring early television shows to having his own. Arthur Murray's Dance Party ran from 1950 to 1961, and ushered in a new boom in ballroom dancing to accompany the country's new prosperity. At its height, the show brought 2000 new students a week to Arthur Murray Studios around the country. Many celebrities, from Elizabeth Arden and Katherine Hepburn to Enrico Caruso and the Duke of Windsor, learned to dance in an Arthur Murray studio. Also in the 1950s, Philip Masters and George Theiss, former students of Murray's, joined the organisation. Though their names would never be as famous as their mentor's, they would eventually take the helm of the organisation that became known as Arthur Murray International (AMI).
The Studio remained on the cutting edge of new trends, sending instructors to study in Cuba and bring back the latest in Latin dance. It was Arthur Murray instructors who introduced the Lambada to the United States in the 1970s, having discovered it in Paris where it was fast becoming the rage. When Murray retired in 1969, there were more than 350 franchise studios internationally, pulling in a gross annual income of over $25 million, but the "no-touch" individualistic style of dancing that became popular in the 1960s decreased the demand for ballroom dancing. AMI persevered, however, capitalizing heavily on the skilled disco-style dancing of the late 1970s as popularised by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (1977). Happily, all fashion is cyclical, and the "retro" culture of the 1980s and 1990s once again came to admire the elegance, romance and agility associated with social ballroom dance. By the end of the century in which it was born, AMI was still there, holding out the promise of grace, style and popularity in its packages of instruction.
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