Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor

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This book is an intertwining of cultural and personal history. Brimming with memory alongside thorough research and thoughtful interviews, and examinations of how music informs dance and vice versa, the importance of dance as a political act – as a place for resistance and, simultaneously, something often clamped down upon by authority (be that over-policing by church or state) – is a throughline in the book. On some level, it is a consideration of who is valued by those who are in power. For example, questions about trying to understand where you fit into dance as you get older (‘There aren’t many places for middle-aged women to take up space […] and it’s good for middle-aged women to take up space,’ her friend Kate Ling tells her late into the book) sit alongside the closure of youth clubs and spaces for young people to congregate. Tacitly, Warren asks us: which bodies get access to the dance? She weaves together the possibilities of intergenerational dance, of cross-cultural dance (at one point, she shows a couple at the English folk music and dance centre Cecil Sharp House videos of Chicago footwork dancers), asks questions about class, and seeks to imagine something more unified and accessible than the current situation in this country allows for. Over the last 10 years, the UK has suffered a huge cultural loss. To some extent, it is part of the great shrinking of shared and collective space, which takes in everything from pubs and bars to community centres and libraries. But this particular change stands alone: a striking example of how something that was once thriving and important can hit the skids, and precious few people in positions of power and influence will even notice. Emma Warren’s ‘Dance your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor’ — our Book of the Month for March — is an ode to the power and necessity of movement, writes Tara Joshi. Part of the beauty of this evening, and of Emma’s book, is that it is not genre exclusive. Every type of music – from Jungle to R&B, from Disco to Dubstep – is mentioned, truly asserting the power of the all encompassing dancefloor as a sacred space above bpm definition Emma moves on to learn contemporary dance to get a further understanding of what this all means and to generally take herself into new spaces. Emma is all about the now. As she says, ‘I am set firmly against anything which veers into ‘it was better in the olden days’ territory, and generally, I’m with Gil Scott-Heron, who enunciated the ‘no’ at the start of nostalgia.’ She tells a poignant lovely story about a lady dancing her grandad into the next life (I’ll leave this for the book).

UK music journalist and writer Emma Warren has penned a new book that looks at the history of why we dance. 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. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. I found Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton impossible to put down. It contains wonderful characters and a fascinating political commentary on New Zealand’s political failings, as well as an ultimate moral question around how power is shared in society. Brilliant – 10/10!

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This is not just a book for devoted clubbers and professional dancers: Warren also explores the importance of dancing round the living room as a new parent, taking up space as a middle-aged woman and making sense of dyspraxia through movement. The depth of research is fascinating, but it’s written by a fan as much as an expert. Statistics and laws are bolstered by Warren’s own feelings and stories, offering a warmth and authenticity that could only be achieved by someone who has spent many hours on various dancefloors.

In the first of a new series 'Narcissistic Mothers' Ena Miller meets 'Charlotte' who had a revelation in therapy - she now believes her late mother was a narcissist. How did that shape her life? 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. 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 asked for one record that ignites the dancefloor for them, Emma answers with ‘ Salsa House‘ by Richie Rich and describes that indescribable feeling of being “just gone” whenever she hears it. When a tune you’ve been bumping in your headphones is mixed in by the DJ in the club you’re in, or screaming along with thousands of others at a festival, it’s bliss. I recently experienced this feeling afresh at the newly renovated club Koko in Camden, and felt like the 13 year old dancer in me could sleep easy. I think It’s crucial we pass on the opportunity to have that feeling to the next generation of dancefloor fillers. When it comes to the dancefloor, its greatest strength is bringing people together. It’s something we missed during the pandemic, when there was genuine fear that clubs would never open again, or that gigs were arelic of the past. It’s arelease from the 9 – 5, aplace where lovers meet for the first time, where sartorial styles are invented, where new friendships are formed and where youth take their first steps into adulthood.Jojo Jones went down to the launch of Emma Warren’s new publication, Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor, a book covering the social history of global dancefloors. For the launch event in March, Emma Warren appeared in conversation with Fitzroy “Da Buzzboy” Facey (Soul Survivors Magazine) and Marsha Marshmello (NTS) hosted by Haseeb Iqbal (Worldwide FM) at Spiritland Kings Cross… She talks to dance historian Toni Basil (whose CV includes choreographing the video for Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime) and hip-hop dancer Henry Link. She meets Dr Peter Michael Nielsen, whose office has “a bass chair which he helped invent because he believes applied bass can improve the symptoms of a number of ailments”. She cites scholars like Edwin Denby, who discusses ballet’s origins in the classical world, and Egil Bakka, a professor emeritus of dance studies who says that, at the evolutionary level, interaction is dance’s “core value”. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Among young’uns “simple dance moves such as swinging arms or stepping from side to side drew children together emotionally, with participants reporting that afterwards they felt closer to the groups they’d danced with”, But as in many other areas, our creative impulse in dance is stymied by the adult mania for competition. “Dance classes for tots often involve examination, as if learning to dance, even for fun, and even if you’re only five years old, requires the imposition of quality control,” Warren says. My book of the month is easily Emma Warren’s Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor. Part social history, part love letter, it digs through the individual and collective powers of dancing via the lens of different subcultures and scenes. We’re transported from Anglo-Saxon churchyards up to late 2010s jazz jams in Deptford via reggae dancehalls, Chicago house sets, New York’s ballroom scene and grime and dubstep nights. There are detailed descriptions of dance moves, music styles and soundsystems, as well as the wider political contexts, from gentrification and ever-increasing club closures to hostile policing and door policies. Here, dance is taken seriously; it’s about more than just hedonism and letting loose, but also community, self discovery, health and history.

I am often an enthusiastic presence on a dance floor. There are photographs and videos of me as a chubby toddler wriggling to my parents’ Bollywood tapes, I did standard sparkly childhood ballet, I was a huge fan of making up dubious choreographed routines at school discos; and, even now, I love being in the club with the bass reverberating in my chest, laughing with friends as they catch wines in a humid crowd at carnival, or else dancing alone, swaying my hips in the company of my reflection in my bedroom mirror. 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. 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. The woods were lovely, but it wasn’t enough. I needed other people, and I needed more music. It took a few attempts to find the right location. First, I tried a class at Pineapple Studios in central London. I’d been there once before, in the late 1990s, when publicity averse Detroit techno originators Underground Resistance used it as a location for a press conference. They walked in in a line wearing balaclavas and sat down behind a long desk, answering questions from us one by one.

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.