However, when you hear 'dance based martial arts' what people are referring to are flowery styles that look nice but are not effective on the street. For example, and I am not trying to offend any practitioners here, Tae Kwon Do. Beautiful martial art, nice high kicks that include some 360 degree spinning kicks, but it has a reputation of not being that effective on the street. There are many styles of KungFu that also fall into the same category ...real pretty, but try them in the street and you're likely to get your behind handed to you. A lot of 'point fighting' Karate styles also get thrown into the 'dance' martial art bucket, with the only Karate style I know that regularly gets maximum respect being the Kyukinshin style.
This is not to say that those styles are ineffective. There are people who are sufficiently trained to be able to pull off some of those complicated fine-motor-skill moves, but for the average person they will not work. I have seen people with only 6 months training of BJJ, Boxing or Muay Thai defeat Tae Kwon Do black belts. Styles like Muay Thai and Boxing have real fighting almost from week one, and I don't mean point fighting where people look like they are play fighting (YouTube Olympic Tae Kwon Do or American Sport Karate to see what point fighting is, and then YouTube Muay Thai to see the difference).
Again I am generalizing as there are people I know who have done styles like Shotokan Karate, GoJuRyu Karate and even Tae Kwon Do who I have MAXIMUM respect for and can really do an honor to their style. It's just that most people cannot. And even then it is not to say it is useless. Tae Kwon Do is nice for teaching discipline to kids (although any dojang or dojo that you see giving black belts to kids is suspect ...and likely to be what is known as a McDojo. McDojo is an insulting word).
Anyway, there are many styles that were hidden as dance. But what the person was referring to here is 'useless' martial arts that, to quote Bruce Les, have 'flowery fists and kicks' but are basically useless in the real world.
We used to refer to the Tae Kwon Do schools as “Take Your Do” because the more you paid the faster you received your rank.