If you love to dance, then this book is for you
puts on “Silly Games”, Janet Kay’s hit song, and the characters dance and sway for ten minutes, entirely lost in the music. The record finishes, but the partygoers keep the song going a cappella: no one wants the moment to end. It is a perfect expression of how dancing and music bring people together in a joyous shared experience.
The scene is mentioned only fleetingly in “Dance Your Way Home”, a fascinating social history of dancing by Emma Warren, even though it encapsulates all the book’s major themes. Ms Warren believes that “dancing is a basic need which has somehow been hived off from everyday life”. Her focus is on Britain, but she cites academic evidence that the urge to move is universal.
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.and wantonness is why clubs are often in the cross-hairs of the authorities.
“Dance Your Way Home” is full of interesting details about genres and styles that have emerged from the shadows. She notes the influence of a school, Mendel Catholic High, on the creation of Chicago house music. In the late 1970s the school was in penury until one student, Kirkland Townsend, persuaded the friars to let him host parties to raise funds.
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