Ever wanted to do the Lindy Hop as it was swung at the Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s? To rock your hips through the mambo like dancers at the Palladium Ballroom in the ’50s? To pose as if in a vogue battle of the ’80s? All in a museum? Now’s your chance. Need a lesson? The Museum of the City of New York has you covered there, too.

In “Urban Stomp: Dreams & Defiance on the Dance Floor,” you can choose a record and put it on a turntable. So far, so ordinary. But wait. Here, spinning the record doesn’t just cue music. People — in video form — appear all around you, dancing and inviting you to join them.

The exhibition, which guides visitors through some 200 years of social dance in New York City, includes all the artifacts, photographs, wall text and video footage that you might expect in a museum show. But scattered throughout are also video monitors featuring friendly experts who teach the basics of various dance styles. The video-interactive dance floor comes at the end of the show, and the idea is that by the time you arrive there, you know a little something.

This unusual approach derives from the show’s subject. On the surface, “Urban Stomp” is about New York City as an incubator — “for either the creation of new dances or borrowing dances from other places and creating something new,” said Sarah Henry, the museum’s chief curator. But at a deeper level, it’s about what Henry called “the constant churn and creativity of New York.”

“The remixing, mashing up, a conversation of mutual influence that goes back to the 19th century, the promise of the city — all that is embodied on the dance floor,” Henry said.

Sarah Henry, a curator of the show, said of its inherent challenges: “One of the things we’re trying to solve is how to do justice to dancing in an exhibition. It doesn’t stay still. You can’t just put it in a box.”