Just as a music teacher would typically come to your home, if you were aspiring to be genteel, so also would a dancing master. You can see one here, in the front- along with various other "artists and professors" who have come to Hogarth's rake Tom as he rises .. The dancing master has a kit fiddle, or pochette, that he'll use to play the tune for each dance. There's some pretty fancy footwork in some Baroque dances, as well as arm movements to accompany them, so a dancing master would be rather useful if you wanted to execute a minuet, bourrée or tambourin and look OK.

But there were also dancing manuals. Not everyone lived in the city, and not everyone could get a dancing master. And Self-Improvement is not a new thing. A very nice online collection of them is at the Library of Congress, which has a good page introducing them.. Because of the fancy footwork and other complexities, as you can see in the 18th c. some dancing masters had worked out a way to notate their choreography and print it.. There were also quite a lot of dances that varied, like contredanses and country dances. Sometimes with names like Scotch Cap and Mad Robin, but sometimes more topical ones. A small dancing master's book in Quebec can be precisely dated to 1756, because it has dances named after some of the French victories early in the Seven Years War. You can still see contradancing and English country dancing done in the US and the UK.

Last, some Baroque dances were below notice of the choreographers. The manuals and literature in general is quite silent about jiggs and hornpipes ( in 6 or 3), to the point where there's some speculation now as to precisely how they were danced , as the people who danced them were considered low, and of little importance.