dance attendance on

Idioms  

1. Wait on attentively and obsequiously, obey someone's every wish or whim. For example, He expected his secretary to dance attendance on him so she quit her job. This expression alludes to the old custom of making a bride dance with every wedding guest. In the 1500s it was used first to mean “await” an audience with someone, but by about 1600 it had acquired its present meaning. Also see at someone's beck and call.

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Example Sentences

Servants dance attendance on this obstreperous youngster, whose haughtiness is no doubt inflamed by her cold, aristocratic mother and distracted military captain father.

From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 28, 2023

It is also the most conjested wake in history: hundreds of fictional and historical characters dance attendance on poor Finnegan as he is laid out over 628 pages.

From Time Magazine Archive

The best scenes in the picture are those in which the two men dance attendance on their mutual wife to some pretty, witty choreography by Jack Cole.

From Time Magazine Archive

The people who dance attendance on him are all parodistically based on people who surrounded Coward when he was at the height of his fame in prewar London.

From Time Magazine Archive

Well, I heard after awhile that he too had gone into the country, to dance attendance on an old aunt, whose heir he had got the chance of being, through his cousin's death.

From Philip Winwood A Sketch of the Domestic History of an American Captain in the War of Independence; Embracing Events that Occurred between and during the Years 1763 and 1786, in New York and London: written by His Enemy in War, Herbert Russell, Lieutenant in the Loyalist Forces. by Stephens, Robert Neilson