On a Saturday evening in June, the dance floor at Santa Monica’s Central Social Aid & Pleasure Club was packed with patrons enthusiastically dancing, singing and doing call-and-response with the DJ. It’s a scene that could have been unfolding on umpteen dance floors across the city, but in this case, something very different was going on.

The cool-kid crowd was moving and grooving to silence. Or so it seemed.

Actually, the revelers were taking part in a phenomenon known as “silent disco,” a dance party where the booming music is both private and shared. Instead of getting their audio fix from the massive speakers found at most dance clubs, partygoers donned custom wireless headphones to tune in to a live DJ broadcast.

The term silent disco was coined in 2005 at the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival, where headphones were used to share music en masse without violating local noise restrictions. Robbie “Motion Potion” Kowal, a San Francisco-based DJ, was the first to try the concept in the U.S. at Tennessee’s Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in 2006. Since then, he’s invested in his own set of 1,000-plus headphones and has taken silent disco on the road to clubs, festivals and public spaces where noise ordinances would otherwise make a dance party impossible…

Since she was a teenager, Long Beach resident Darma Elofson has considered herself a mod, part of a stylish subculture with roots in 1960s Britain that set itself apart from motorcycle-jacket-clad rockers. The mod revival that surged stateside and across the Pond in the late 1970s and early ’80s introduced devotees like Elofson to its tenets of soul music, Italian scooters, and — above all — sharp dressing.

“Typically, as a mod, your shirt would be buttoned up,” she says. “It’s a clean-cut kind of thing, nice and neat, ’60s style.” But on second Saturdays, Elofson untucks her shirt and undoes a few buttons so she can let loose on the dance floor at Club Soulside, a monthly party of Northern soul, Motown, and vintage reggae music at that keeps ’60s British subcultures alive and kicking — literally — at West Adams’ Cafe Club Fais Do-Do.

The Northern soul dancers who turn up are known for doing the Shuffle, a high-energy dance which calls for kicks, spins, and tricks that draw on the theatrics of Motown sensations…

It’s Friday night, the lights are low, and music by Beyoncé is pumping, but this is no ordinary nightclub. Dancing couples glide by doing sophisticated ballroom dance steps. And there’s no one checking ID at the door: The average age here is 50.

Welcome to Urban Ballroom Fridays, a gathering held at the Los Angeles Steppers Connection (LASC) dance studio in Inglewood every second and fourth Friday of the month for devotees of urban ballroom, a partner dance that combines the refinement of ballroom dance steps with the soulful music of old-school Motown such as the Temptations and contemporary R&B like Queen Latifah, Ne-Yo, Babyface, even George Michael.

The evening starts with a dance class taught by Victor Brown and Ujazi Calomeé, but afterward even more people show up, the lights are dimmed, tables and refreshments are laid out, and the floor opens up for a party. By about 10 p.m., the dance floor is filled with a mostly African American crowd in the 40s through 60s age range, dressed to impress. Ladies sport skirts and strappy heels; many of the men are decked out in vests and fedoras…

When a circle forms in the middle of a nightclub dance floor, it’s often one of two things: Either someone in a drunken party has decided to bust out “the sprinkler” or a posse of breakdancers takes over to showcase its acrobatic power moves.

But at the Floor, a unique multi-genre dance night held every third Monday at Hollywood’s King King, anything’s possible (except, perhaps, the sprinkler). Because it attracts professional dancers and dance enthusiasts from all over the stylistic map, you’re just as likely to glimpse a swing dance couple sweeping through the circle with flips and aerials as a pair of tango dancers gliding across in a sultry embrace, or a tap dancer banging out a jazzy freestyle duet with the band’s saxophonist.

Gathering a diversity of styles was a primary motivation of the night’s creators, Carolina Cerisola and Sascha Escandon, professional dancers who met in the salsa scene. When they started the Floor in 2008, they saw a need for a place where people from different corners of the dance community, who seldom cross paths, could come together…

A couple of years ago on salsa dance floors across Los Angeles, a new trend began to emerge. Amid the frenetic, conga-driven salsa tunes, DJs started to slip in a few tracks of bachata — a romantic, guitar-based music that originated in the Dominican Republic.

There’s no fog machine, no platform shoes and little polyester in sight. There’s not even a disco ball. And yet, every Wednesday night, the Double H Club at the Hacienda Hotel in El Segundo, near LAX, morphs into a den of that iconic dance from the 1970s, the hustle.

Immortalized in the 1975 Van McCoy song “The Hustle,” the dance may conjure images of “Saturday Night Fever”-style line dancing set to disco tunes. But at the Double H Club, which has been hosting a dedicated hustle night on Wednesdays for more than 10 years, the hustle is more “Gaga” than “Bee Gee.”

Since the ’70s, the hustle has evolved into a refined partner dance that’s a close cousin to social dances like West Coast swing and salsa, and the music has changed with the times. Hustle’s steady pulse lends itself to everything from ’80s Madonna and Michael Jackson to ’90s house music to Lady Gaga’s latest release…