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This paper describes a robotic system that uses dance as aform of social interaction to explore the properties and im-portance of rhythmic movement in general social interaction.The system consists of a small creature-like robot whosemovement is controlled by a rhythm-based software system.Environmental rhythms can be extracted from auditory orvisual sensory stimuli, and the robot synchronizes its move-ment to a dominant rhythm. The system was demonstrated,and an exploratory study conducted, with children interact-ing with the robot in a generalized dance task. Througha behavioral analysis of videotaped interactions, we foundthat the robot’s synchronization with the background musichad an effect on children’s interactive involvement with therobot. Furthermore, we observed a number of expected andunexpected styles and modalities of interactive explorationand play that inform our discussion on the next steps in thedesign of a socially rhythmic robotic system.