The polar opposite of Dance Battler.
This is when a character normally unskilled in dance instead calls upon their martial or magical training to impress people with a set of moves that would normally only be used in combat in something like a dance contest, cheerleading tryout or similar.
Importantly, they are explicitly drawing upon combat moves and the situation has nothing to do with combat.
This can be a subtrope of Martial Arts and Crafts.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Apama - The Undiscovered Animal, all of the combat moves that Illyia learned when he became Apama come in handy when his new girlfriend enlists him to try out for her play. While he can't sing to save his life, he is able to impress the casting director with his agility and flexibility and thus gets a major role.
Films — Live-Action
- Kick-Ass 2: When she has to do some acrobatics in front of the Cheerleading squad, Mindy uses her combat skills while imagining herself fighting some bad guys. It works.
Live-Action TV
- Parodied in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: When the gang competes in a dance competition where the last person dancing wins, wannabe tough guy Mac's dance moves largely consist of a series of chops and kicks at the air that he thinks looks cool and frightens the other dancers who think his flailing will hit them.
Tabletop Games
- Earthdawn: In this setting, people tainted by the Horrors suffer from Creative Sterility. In the opening fiction, an official is investigated for corruption and uses an elaborate dance to prove their artistic ability and thus their lack of Horror corruption. However, the protagonist of the story notices that the dance is actually an elaborate martial form and that "each strike would be a killing blow". Demonstrating that it was not actually art, but choreographed death that the official was displaying, thus outing him as a servant of the Horrors.
Video Games
- The dancing minigame from Lost Judgment sees Yagami teaching modified versions of his kung-fu moves to a high school dancing team to help them get an edge against their rivals in the upcoming Regional Dance Competition.
- Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight: Having little practice in dancing, Makoto Niijima uses her Aikido training to perform in the Velvet Room while relying on the Your Mind Makes It Real nature of the cognitive realm fill in the gaps.
- In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords, you can ask the Handmaiden to dance for Vogga the Hutt to distract him, and out of the available candidates, she's the one with the fewest objections to it*. While she doesn't know much about dancing persay (having spent most of her life as a shut-in serving Atris on Telos), she figures some of her Echani combat exercises are close enough.
Webcomics
- Nahast: Lands of Strife: Some of the formal dances in the story evolved from fighting styles.
Western Animation
- Avatar: The Last Airbender: In the Fire Nation school cave party, Aang and Katara use waterbending forms to impress the other students as if it were a normal dance.
- The Legend of Korra: The Metal Clan uses Metalbending techniques, typically used in fighting, to perform theatrical dances. Korra even initially guesses they are doing combat training until Aiwei corrects her.
- Samurai Jack: "Jack and the Rave" has Jack using martial arts kata when other rave-goers start suspecting he might not belong there. It works, and soon half the studio is imitating him, making it an Accidental Dance Craze.
Real Life
- Capoeira is a martial art with a performance focus. However whilst there is combat-focused capoeira, it is often played as a game, and in some styles, there are Roda (circles) which feature singing, musical instruments, and clapping. It may be a rare case of a synthesis of dance, martial skill, and game in which neither came before the other, making this perhaps an aversion of both tropes.
