Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor

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For the last week, I have been immersed in a brilliant new book called Dance Your Way Home, by the music and culture writer Emma Warren, which throws all this into sharp relief. Weaving together memoir and social history, it explores dancing through stories that include her memories of 1980s school discos, moral panics in 1930s Ireland, and the grime and dubstep milieus of London in the early 21st century. The writing is often subtly political, but what really burns through is a sense of dancing not just being redemptive and restorative, but an underrated means of communication. When Blanca finds out she is HIV-positive, she tells ballroom MC, Pray Tell, “At least now something in my life is for sure.” He replies, “You ain’t dead yet.” Among age groups who would once have been on the cusp of getting into clubbing, there is also increasing evidence of a tendency to social withdrawal and introversion. Recent research from the US suggests that an increasing share of teenagers meet up with friends less than once a month. In a recent Prince’s Trust survey, 40% of young people in the UK reported being worried about socialising with others. On top of the personal anxieties sown online, Covid left a huge legacy of fears of infection, and a general sense that mixing with others risked harm and trouble. When people do get together, moreover, the possibilities of basic interaction sometimes come second to screentime. The observation of one London youth worker, reported last year in a Guardian news story, speaks volumes: “There are great hugs and shrieks when they get together, but then everyone goes on their phone.”

As someone who has been on the dance floor for decades, Iwas in agood position to be able to share some of the things that those of us that have spent some time at the dance truly know and believe,” she says. ​ “We know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”

Generously and warmly written, Warren’s book encourages us all to unabashedly express ourselves, to feel the rhythm as best we can, and work alongside one another to make sure there are always spaces for us to keep dancing, resisting, and be in community. As she puts it: ‘To dance you must let go of self-consciousness, embarrassment, pride and prejudice, and embrace what you actually have. […] We’re dancers because we’re human and we’re more human – or perhaps more humane – if we dance together, especially when we make it up on the spot. The point of this book, or what I took from the book in the main, is we are all dancers. We inform our cultures by our dance and continue, for me anyway, our love affair with music by sometimes finding a dark corner near a speaker in a club or letting off a dance in the kitchen. The book ends with young people dancing their stories. A fitting place for a new beginning. You uncovered a few DJs with professional dance pasts. I didn’t realise that Fabio had actually been a pro dancer. And Gerald. Emma also makes strong stands against injustice, both in the removal of spaces and to people in general (see the writing in the book on David Emmanuel aka Smiley Culture). She is cautious to not stand where her shadow hasn't been so uses Lewisham at one point, home borough to Emma, to tell the story of reggae and reggae dance in the area and London's wider whole. The author sketches out a case that “it is still considered broadly unbecoming for ‘persons of prominence’ to dance”, and quotes a British academic, Caspar Melville, who says that resisting dancing is “the burden of the powerful”. A refusal to dance sends a message that “I have mastered my body and my base nature,” Mr Melville suggests. This explains why the privileged can be awkward dancers, Ms Warren adds.

She also says the association of dance culture and wantonness is why clubs are often in the cross-hairs of the authorities. The dance-lovers she writes about are almost always at risk of losing places to boogie. Some dancers are siloed due to prejudice: the party in Mr McQueen’s film takes place in a house because there are few spaces for such a gathering. From here we move through the electric slide, onto how jazz brought about a ban on dancing in Ireland in the 1930s and then into the youth club. Not sure about you but when we were still in primary school aged 11 the youth club was where we went to do (admittedly pretty terrible) breakdancing to the sound of Streetsounds Electro compilations whilst eating crisps. It was ace. We had a lino and a place to go… Swedish researchers studied more than 100 teenage girls who were struggling with issues such as depression and anxiety. Half of the girls attended weekly dance classes, while the other half didn’t. The results? Girls who participated in dance classes improved their mental health and reported a boost in their mood. These positive effects lasted up to eight months after the dance classes ended. Researchers concluded dance can result in increased self-esteem for participants and potentially contribute to sustained new healthy habits. Emma Warren’s Dance Your Way Home is a beautiful and timely defence of dancing. Whether it’s at home or with friends, professionally or for fun, dance is one of our most natural outlets for creativity and connection. Warren’s book focuses on dance in community and culture.The dancefloor can be aplace in which people who have different life experiences, who walk through the world in away that brings different responses from the state, can have acommunal experience,” Warren says. Pose treats with respect, pathos and love both the glamour of the ballroom and the guts of the Aids crisis, transphobia, sexism and racism. It’s a charismatic dance-off between appearance and reality, in which both sides are equally matched. Pray Tell might say “the category is … paramount realness!” The pose, in other words, is the realness. Publisher Faber's blurb about 'Dance Your Way Home' reads: "This book is about the kind of ordinary dancing you and I might do in our kitchens when a favourite tune comes on. It's more than a social history: it's a set of interconnected histories of the overlooked places where dancing happens... Why do we dance? What does dancing tells us about ourselves, individually and collectively? And what can it do for us?

Just over 30 years ago, that inclusive vision was pushed into the cultural mainstream by the upsurge known as acid house, which decoupled dancing and clubs from the cliches that still dominate some people’s understanding of them – drinking, “pulling”, fighting – and was all about shared transcendence and self-discovery. “I was in jeans and T-shirt, recognising how my body liked to move, how it could stretch and contract on its own terms without having to consider how this affected my status as it related to being fanciable, as it had at school,” Warren says. “I was there to dance, and I would dance for hours and hours.” This was circa 1990. By 1994, she points out, there were more than 200 million separate admissions to UK nightclubs, which outstripped those for sport, cinemagoing and the other remaining “live arts”. In that context, what has happened since seems even more tragic. Warren learns how, in pre-industrial times, dance was more common and spontaneous than it is now. Modernity has alienated us from ourselves Why do we dance together? What does dancing tells us about ourselves, individually and collectively? And what can it do for us? Whether it be at home, ’80s club nights, Irish dancehalls or reggae dances, jungle raves or volunteer-run spaces and youth centres, Emma Warren has sought the answers to these questions her entire life. Us club regulars need no convincing. But throughout Warren’s book, the police are aforeboding presence, poking their beaks into almost every chapter. They’re either closing down aparty, attempting to end the fun, or at least moaning about it. ​ “I wasn’t expecting to be writing abook with so much police in it,” Warren says. ​ “We know the Met have troubles and need to do some radical fixing up of the systems of accountability around policing, generally, in this country. Iwonder if they just need some dancing culture-ation?”

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Research shows there are many benefits to dance. Dance improves your heart health, overall muscle strength, balance and coordination, and reduces depression. These benefits are noticeable across a variety of ages and demographics. The stories of spaces and dances and culture are all fed through her bones and the bones of others into the dancefloor to dance our culture meeting familiar names and faces along the way. We meet Tony Basil, Winston Hazel, Ron Trent and Ade Fakile (founder of London’s seminal space Plastic People) and many more. We get an understanding on what spaces need to make the dance happen and much of the time the requirement is people with stories to tell through their movements. Most of us are familiar with the great feeling we get from spending time on the dance floor. From weddings and holiday parties to aerobic classes or even dance lessons, moving our body often lifts our mood. Turns out dancing can improve our mental health, and there’s a scientific explanation behind those mood-boosting moves.

The idea for the book, called 'Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through The Dancefloor', emerged after Warren focused on some specific lines from her last book, 'Make Some Space', which was about the community around London venue Total Refreshment Centre. The lines, which Warren said "a few people honed in on" was that "dancing in the dark is a human need, that we've been doing this forever, and that it's a kind of medicine". At a conference on folk dance, Warren learns how, in pre-industrial times, dance was more common and spontaneous than it is now. Modernity has alienated us from ourselves. Men weren’t always coy about throwing shapes in public; it’s a culturally determined hang-up that can, of course, magically dissolve after a few drinks.There’s a monthly club party I go to in Berlin with the promo slogan “nothing matters when we’re dancing”. Contrary to what you’d expect, its demographic is not students and twentysomethings: it’s mainly thirty-plus and mixed in gender, occupation and race. In Berlin the dance floor’s been a democratiser since the Berlin Wall came down; it’s often said that it was on dance floors that German reunification first happened.