In my PhD thesis I hypothesise that there exists personnel, structural, choreographical and aesthetic relations between the European court ballet of the 19th century and the modern ‚entertainment dance’ arising around 1900. This hypothesis is based on recognizable parallels between choreographic sketchbooks, dance notations, and pictures from the 19th century and the first photography of popular dances (order of the dancers, stage design, architectural structures in especially dance groups) as well as on the results of my master thesis, which showed that the ballet at the Munich court in the middle of the 19th century did a lot of dancing in entertaining events like balls, divertissements, and breaks between drama and opera. With this I will open up two main research areas: first the distinction between high and low/popular art and second the relation between the U.S. and Europe in the arising of ‚entertainment dance’. In my presentation I want to focus on the theoretical approach with the question how I could come closer to the specific aspects of ‚entertainment dance’. Not only specific theories of entertainment from communication studies or cultural studies could be used, there are also some interesting ideas in the field of theories of perception.