Historical origins of 8-count bars in dance vs 4-count bars in music?

Question

I'm a dancer, and one of my dancer friends recently posed a question which I thought musicians might be able to answer.In our particular style of dance (west coast swing) and in many others that dance to 4/4 music with 32 or 48 beat phrases, we count out bars/measures of 8, as opposed to the convention in music where those same beats are counted in bars of 4 beats.Is there any trace of the historical origins of this divergence in convention?(It is perhaps worth noting as an aside that west coast swing does not impose 8-beat patterns, but rather builds patterns from 2-beat units, resulting in patterns usually of 4, 6, 8, 10 or occasionally more beats. However, the origin of the convention may be from a dance form that did)

Answer 1

I would imagine that the distinction came from how the music was played and later interpreted by dancers. Yes, it's true that 4/4 music is written with 4 beats in a measure, but the composition is often formed as a sort of "musical sentence" with a call and response, or an AB feel to it. The odd-numbered measures generally hold more weight on the first beat and the even-numbered measures are not stressed as much on the first beat. The phrasing is what is important when listening to music and moving to it. Of course, there are many time signatures in which music can be notated, and maybe dancers without musical training throughout history just did their best to make sense of it! Perhaps this helps answer your question :)