Keep to the rhythm of the music as you are learning. When learning how to dance, listening to the beat and the rhythm of the music can help you to remember the sequence of the steps. [11] X Expert Source Yolanda Thomas So it is that a whole chunk of our shared culture is falling away. And as takings drop, premises close and people lose their jobs, we are losing something every bit as precious: spaces where people can gather to dance. This is a profoundly human pastime that we have indulged in for as long as our species has been around, but it is now in danger of being pushed to the social margins. 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.

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. This article was co-authored by Yolanda Thomas. Yolanda Thomas is a Hip Hop Dance Instructor based in Los Angeles, California and Sydney, Australia. Yolanda has taught hip hop at the Sydney Dance Company and is a two-time winner of the LA Music Award for singing and songwriting. She has won Choreographer of the Year by GROOVE, an Australian hip hop dance competition and was hired by Google to choreograph their Sydney Mardi Gras float. Use italics (lyric) and bold (lyric) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part It’s easy for history to write about the songs and the movements and the significance and the DJs. So it’s great to read the history from the floor, from the grassroots.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.

MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Here's a coincidence: On the day that a copy of the new Robert Macfarlane book arrived at the office, I... The book's cover features an iconic image taken by Georgina Cook, aka dubstep scene photographer Drumz Of The South, at an edition of FWD>> at London club Plastic People in 2006. It’s kind of different from the communal thing, though, isn’t it? It’s about learning something and being precise. Frank Broughton: It’s an amazing book. So personal and so deep. I was blown away by how great it is, and how emotional it made me. I guess it was a very personal book to write as well.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… 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.

I remember when my daughter was about six, seven, this is pre-TikTok, but ‘Gangnam Style’ was the thing, and that was the first communal craze of her dancing life, and it was so great to see her and all her friends suddenly just want to do this one thing together. I don’t see TikTok as negative, I just think it’s quite a different thing, because it’s talking about precision. And emulating. But you’re right. It’s just like watching Soul Train or Top of the Pops, or all those things that everyone’s always done. Faber Members have access to live and online events, special editions and book promotions, and articles and quizzes through our weekly e-newsletter. You describe dancing very beautifully as a personal language. That was a really nice thing running through the book. How distinct do you think that can be? 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. Learn to do the passe for a simple jazz position. Bend your right leg to the side and turn your knee out. Hold your right leg so that your baby toe is just below your left kneecap. Keep your arms by your sides. [21] X Research sourceYou may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. On a more serious note, there was a historical thing I wanted to ask you about – this fascinating story I’d never heard before about white men can’t dance being a kind of a learned, constructed thing that happened after the first world war. Your quote, ‘white middle-class men are rarely reduced to their bodies,’ I thought that was so powerful, because right there, you’ve got this economic and colonial understanding of why some people historically didn’t like dancing. 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.

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. Read about the Faber story, find out about our unique partnerships, and learn more about our publishing heritage, awards and present-day activity. 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.Remember that when you're watching dancers on a video, their moves will mirror yours. This means that you should match the side of the body that the instructor is moving with the same side of your own body. [7] X Expert Source Yolanda Thomas 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. So could you do a blind taste test – like a wine tasting – from the way people dance? Could you see what cultural input they’ve had over their lifetime? 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, in ’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. 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.