How do you feel when you dance? A little more alive or dead with embarrassment? It took me a good few years into adulthood to cast aside self-consciousness and submit to the energy of the music around me. But when I did, there was a newfound sense of liberation that didn’t depend on downing a stupid amount of alcohol. I cared less about how I should be moving or who’s watching. Instead, I let the rhythm be my guide and surrendered to it.
At best, this progressive casting off of my inhibitions became a rite of passage. It led to memorable moments of communion, feeling the exchange between performer and audience, and dancer to dancer. There is personal space, however minute, to express oneself in that moment and yet simultaneously we are moving as one. The collective life force we experience can be restorative, invigorating, transformative.
Consider this quote by Agnes De Mille, one of the great choreographers of the 20th Century who helped revolutionise dance in ballet and musical theatre. “To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful…” said De Mille who also published 11 books. “This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.'“
This state has no set genre. I can close my eyes now and instantly transport myself to a school disco as we headbang to Nirvana, arms interlocked. Then to a field in Malvern as I ride the syncopation of Inner Life’s ‘Make It Last Forever’ into the night.
In a field in Malvern … alright
Arms outstretched, swimming through an imaginary haze as the sensual throb of Frankie Knuckles’ and Jamie Principle’s ‘Your Love’ takes hold for the first time in my hometown of Brighton.
Rockin’ steady with a little skank as the speaker stacks shake us and sweat drips to the curb during my first Notting Hill Carnival. Spinning around to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Another Star’ at Dingwalls, the hard Latin percussion in the groove making a jubilant crowd of all ages effervesce as Bobby Humphrey’s flute takes us higher.
Discovering new ways to flex during Co-Op bruk-ups at Plastic People, accenting my movements on the two and four. The darkness cut through only by intermittent beams from the laser crew. The list goes on.
Put simply, on a pure enjoyment level, dancing can make us feel good/better. The science on this is near indisputable and should be common knowledge by now. Dancer-turned-neuroscientist Dr Julia Christensen stated the key points succinctly at the British Science Festival in 2019 during her talk Dance is the Best Medicine.
It reduces levels of cortisol produced by chronic stress, she explained. It also causes the brain to release mood-boosting dopamine, as well as endorphins, a natural painkiller. If that isn’t enough, being closer to others in happy settings encourages the release of bonding chemical oxytocin, which makes us feel more connected and more likely to empathise with others in some way. In a word, synchrony.
A quick trawl online delivers two other bits of research. Townsville Academy of Performing Arts notes an experiment by psychologists at the University of Örebro where half a group of teenagers who suffered from anxiety, depression and stress were asked to attend two dance classes a week, while the rest continued with their daily routine.
“After two years, those who continued to attend the dance classes (where the emphasis was on the pleasure of the movement rather than the performance), not only showed a significant improvement in psychosomatic symptoms, but also reported feeling happier,” their website reads.
“Dancing even forms neural connections in our brain, which help us to reduce our chances of sickness and disease,” Arkasha Keysers wrote in Vice. “A study at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, compared the influence of several physical activities such as walking, swimming, cycling and dancing on dementia. It turned out dancing was the most beneficial by far, and could reduce the risk of dementia by 76 per cent.”
But there is a deeper significance to the dance that research papers might be able to convey so well. The notion of movement, both personal and collective, as resistance. A political act. Radical. And appreciating what can be cultivated when bodies congregate and move in unison. For that, we need to turn to writers such as Emma Warren.
Earlier this year, the former Jockey Slut founding contributor, broadcaster and mentor delivered her second book Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor. Part personal memoir, part social history, the idea evolved from a few lines in Make Some Space, her debut long-form offering that explored the ongoing influence of East London’s Total Refreshment Centre as an incubator for new music while also making important connections to the site’s past.
In essence, dancing is medicine. “[It’s] the idea … that dancing in the dark is a human need, that we’ve been doing this forever,” as Warren wrote on Instagram. The author wanted to investigate this phenomenon in greater depth and the notion of dancefloor is “a technology of togetherness”.
It says a lot about her practice and philosophy that the companion piece to Make Some Space wasn’t just a recorded history of Stream Down, the riotous weekly jam session in Deptford. Her pamphlet (now sold out but available as an audiobook) was both manual and manifesto, encouraging others to document their culture.
That came via Warren’s own imprint by the way. No waiting around for permission to be published. Early copies of Make Some Space were shopped around door to door, like white label pressings out of Wiley’s car boot. Her book was made and realised in the spirit of its subject matter. And heeding words of people like Dr Mykaell Riley who said “if it’s not in the archive, it didn’t happen.” That comment became her instruction. And one to pass on.
Dance Your Way Home is written with great respect for people’s individual experiences and manifestations of personal expression. This is not a definitive history of the dancefloor. This is “a” history. So Warren takes us from bedroom and kitchen bops, to dancehalls and school discos, to coming-of-age raves in Chislehurst Caves and The Civic in Orpington, to seminal club nights at the Hacienda and Sankeys Soap in Manchester, Heaven and Plastic People in London. Cultural touchpoints may differ but you might recognise the formative feelings that Warren and her interviewees are relaying.
Although written with candour and humility, there is also great generosity and optimism in these pages, right from the first line. We are told, unequivocally, that,” If you dance, you’re a dancer. This is where we begin.” It’s a mighty statement of intent in one of the best introductions I have read. These words are like an invitation to commune and find common ground.
You see, we all have the capacity to feel sound in some way. Whether that’s through our ears or some other part of our body. So many of us come to the dancefloor with some element of worry, anxiety or trauma – a weight that we need to shake off. At its best, the dancefloor becomes a sanctuary from the strife we experience at work or back home. In Warren’s case it was her father’s genetic condition that left him wheelchair-bound and made her a carer from a young age. But for the half-curious, and the writer is certainly that, it’s also a beacon.
The book is so well researched, always fascinating in its many tributaries and rarely overwhelming. Warren places movement in its socio-political context, which amplifies its value. A good example is the arrival of the Public Dance Halls Act, which “followed a sustained moral panic about jazz dancing that had spread across multiple Eurocentric countries in the early decades of the 20th Century”. (Police, as she explained to Ross Allen on NTS Radio, have a greater presence in this story than expected. Togetherness can be threatening to the state, particularly when it happens in Black British music spaces.)
Then there’s the sufferation inner city youth experienced decades later ‘Inna Inglan’, to channel Linton Kwesi Johnson, which made sound system culture so crucial. “‘A dancer, [NME scribe Vivien Goldman] wrote, ‘cuts a complicated caper, freezing on the offbeat.’ Jah Shaka inspired the dancers in specific and notable ways, she added. ‘When his [Shaka's] turn comes round, the music hits a new intensity and the youths launch into gymnastic feats. As much mime as dance. The motions of stepping on stones over currents … of finding your way from a fortress to freedom. These are guerrilla movements to complement Shaka's warrior style.’
“The idea of moving from 'fortress to freedom' explains so much about the power of moving to music for everybody, not just the teenagers who found that Shaka's 'warrior style' allowed them to express themselves. Your body might be a fortress, holding stresses caused by hostile or traumatic experiences, in which case dancing can allow you to shake off at least some of the armour."
Want sobering critical analysis? Then look no further than a chapter called Up the Youth Club, which highlights the importance of these spaces as not only the bedrock of a dance music culture but a dance-related and undervalued economy. “They nurtured the early forward motion of grime, allowing young MCs and DJs to spit bars and spin tunes for people their age,” she explains.
“Dizzee Rascal once told me that he played his first set at his local youth club, under the name DJ Dizzy D. He wasn’t alone: in 2013 nearly 29 per cent of the UK’s 10-to-15-year-olds were using a youth club at least once a week, according to youth-work historian Bernard Davies.” Warren goes on to quote a 2019 YMCA report saying that austerity policies resulted in the closure of 760 youth centres and the loss of more than 4,500 youth workers.
“In 2010 there were an estimated 2,150 nightclubs in the UK, with approximately 49 million admissions reaping £1.4 billion in revenue according to Mintel – although one in five subsequently closed permanently during the pandemic. Youth clubs aren’t a sub-sector of charity. They’re culture machines [more on this in her B2B with Elijah].”
Elijah going ‘back to back’ with author Emma Warren during Document Your Ting at SOAS University earlier in 2023
The author manages also to vividly convey the excitement and anticipation of being on some of these floors, right down to what each limb is doing and how new encounters shifted her world view. It’s a tricky thing to pull off as she explained to writer Sanjiv Ahluwalia on Run Dem Radio. How about this from Rage at Heaven. Warren would have been 16 at the time. “Heaven was a queer club, but queerness wasn't particularly obvious at the acid-house nights it hosted, because there wasn't a lot of people getting off with each other – as far as I can remember anyway.
“Simply being in a venue that was known as a gay club meant that I was exposed to new ideas, and I doubt I was the only one, I hear the phrase 'sexuality is a spectrum' for the first time on the train up to the club, and this was mindblowing in the context of the Catholic binaries I'd grown up with.”
Elsewhere, having muscle memory of Phenomenon One back in 1995: “Onto the dancefloor, right-hand edge, tessellated by people-proximity so that dancing becomes adapted to the circumstances, hemmed in, taking up space only where it appears. I remember the stance required to get you off the dancefloor and the body language required to get back on: something in the centre of the body that had to tighten up – core control, tensile, an assertive body language combined with awareness.”
Great characters pop in to share epiphanies and insight, like vocalist and composer Cleveland Watkiss, who used to skank around reggae spots such as The Four Aces in Dalston during the 70s. He would go on to host Goldie’s Metalheadz sessions in 90’s Hoxton. When asked how people knew the way to dance to this music, almost instinctively, he replies: “Because it's in the sound. Because the dance is the music and the music is the dance. It's really that succinct. When you hear a sound it has a dance, it has steps, it has movement. There is a movement to that sound. When you see a dance it has a sound – and there's only a thin Rizla paper between the two."
Over on the South Side of Chicago, hip-hop dancer and producer Damon Frost blew my mind with the simplicity of his observation about a dancer entering the drumming circle by the beach on 63rd Street. “The circle is a zero. You add to it.”
In Baltimore, photographer, educator and freedom fighter Shan Wallace would join the dance as she shot at Lexington Market. “There are so many ways I started to find [out] who I was through dance. I didn’t even think about any of that shit before you asked, but it’s the real truth. I spent so much time dancing, being shy about dancing, finding myself through dance … I don’t think people value it. Body movement and dance is survival.”
One of my favourite passages occurs far away from any club or crowd, during Warren’s hiatus from nightlife as a new parent in the late 90s. Even then, the urge to move is clear, present and inherent. “The first time my boyfriend or I held a baby as adults was when we held our newborn and brought him home. We realised that you don't just sing a lullaby – you dance it too.
“You dance a lullaby with your baby in your arms as you move in circles around a small bedroom in the dark. I felt new parenthood through a dancefloor lens. It wasn't that dissimilar, in the sense of staying up all night and having a familiarity with the dawn hours. We bounced with this small person held tight to the shoulder. We rocked, swayed, shuffled, having switched amplified music for the song of newborn demands."
Dance Your Way Home is a joyful and enlightening celebration of music culture through the ages. The potential of a multiplicity of sounds to rouse body and soul. How they unite us as we collectively inhabit our here and now. Good things come from that.
Anyone can dance their (his)story*.
Cherish it. Support it. Stand up for it.
On to the next movement.
*As told to Warren by Henry Link of hip-hop crew MOPTOP. "I said to him, ‘Oh my god, I wish I could improvise like you. I wish I could dance like you.’ He looked at me and said, 'Dance your history,' and it was one of the best things anyone has ever said to me. It was incredible." Frankie Valentine also tells her to “dance your story”. I can’t resist Sun Ra’s take on this. “History is his story. Mystery is my story.”
Bonus: Here is a list of mixes on Mixcloud that inspired Emma while writing the book.