Do we first have to define home, to define whether dance is or isn’t synonymous with it? One thinks of home as something we reside in, we leave, and most sentimentally, return to. Dance feels like a home to me in the sense that I don’t remember not dancing, but that doesn’t mean dance and I have always been friends. Emma Warren’s trailblazing 2023 book Dance Your Way Home, the springboard for a month-long season of events at London’s Southbank Centre, curated by Warren herself, doesn’t take things quite so literally. Instead, it traverses dancefloors in the UK and beyond to explore what movement, and the spaces in which we move, have meant to people at various points in time.
Warren quotes choreographer, dancer and dance historian Toni Basil: ‘dance your history’. To Warren, this ‘indicates community, because history is collective’. The Southbank Centre carries a history of collective movement since its opening in 1951 and continues to be a proud, inclusive, multidisciplinary hub for the arts. Described as an ‘ode to the dancefloor’, the festival culminates in parties and performances, jams and raves, talks and exhibitions, evoking all of the places dance can and does happen, not only in clubs or on stages, but in front rooms, down side alleys, and all on our own.
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My relationship to dance remained in flux. That is, I felt myself leaving.
Though late to the party, I found reading Dance Your Way Home to be cathartic, especially at a time of confusion about where I stood with dance. After over a decade of professional dance training and performing, of feeling utterly at home in the dance studio, I found myself drifting from the path I thought I’d always wanted. The pandemic erupted, studios closed and though writing about dance relit the spark, my relationship to it remained in flux. That is, I felt myself leaving.
For Annie Frost Nicholson, one of three leaders of the Grief Rave event (alongside Carly Attridge and Linett Kamala), dance is a sanctuary – a word that goes beyond home into softer, even symbolic realms. Grief Rave is a space for people to dance out all of the intersections of loss. Dance, and the music tied up with it have been a part of Nicholson’s life and her relationship with her late sister for as long as she can remember. Speaking to Nicholson, I soon sensed the paradox; grief is universally experienced yet painfully isolating. A piece of music can be enjoyed by all, and yet trigger uniquely personal memories. Grief Rave unites people to dance through pain, alone but together. To Nicholson, the best dance floors are the ones where ‘you can take all of your woes, and heartache and joy…. and you can dance them out alongside somebody who maybe thinks something totally different.’
‘Thinks differently’ may refer to the different griefs people bring, personal loss, climate angst or political rage, but it also refers to contrasted viewpoints held together in a shared space. The right kind of dancefloor may even inspire healthy, respectful debate, a depolarisation of binaries. Dance has the power to better people. Sharing the dancefloor invites respect and empathy, to negotiate space, to move without fight. Disagreements, at least the arbitrary kind, are often disintegrated by collective, durational movement.
Grief Rave confronts grief head on and collectively. When I arrive, it is clear that this is not a rave as we know it traditionally. Families gather before Linett Kamala on DJ, individuals bob gently on the side-lines, others simply observe. In keeping with the festival, there is no criteria for the kind of grief you must bring to take part, and you do not need to explain your reason for moving.
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The raison d’être of Warren’s Dance Your Way Home is that if you dance, you’re a dancer. I wish my relationship to movement was this simple and unconditional. I am conflicted with identifying as a dancer when I no longer dance professionally. This dissonance is reflected in a cultural disconnect, to quote Warren, ‘Asking someone if they dance contains a suggestion that the question relates to “Do you dance?” is the same as asking, “Are you a good dancer?”.’
When referred to as a dancer, I feel guilty and fraudulent because dance is no longer my entire identity. Maybe stripping the connotations of skill from the term ‘dancer’ would free me, especially because calling everyone who dances a dancer is not an erasure of professional dancers, but rather an embracing of the movement that lives in all of us.
Icelandic choreographer Ásrún Magnúsdóttir remembers finishing her classical ballet training only to realise that actually, everybody can dance, and importantly, has permission to do so. She spoke to me of always finding her way back ‘in’ to dance, implying periods of time outside of it.
Magnúsdóttir’s work The Listening Party hinges on the dancers involved – all local teenagers – being granted permission to move as they please, to the music they choose. The young people invite us, not the other way round. The freedom that comes from this autonomy seems simple, and yet is so powerful considering teenagers often must be allowed into spaces, and even then must follow the rules within them.
Magnúsdóttir chooses not only to work with people who have ‘not given dance much thought’ but with youth, who as a collective are often not taken seriously. The Listening Partyspeaks to the listening of each dancer’s song of choice by both audience and cast, and the wider listening taking place societally when young people are able to express themselves without judgment and shunning.
‘Youth clubs aren’t a sub-sector of charity. They’re culture machines,’ says Warren, an often democratic, empathetic culture at that. The cast take turns to dance to the favourite song of their peers, to attempt to see its merit, and there is care in knowing that this attention will be reciprocated.
The Listening Party is infectious. Shyer characters are instantly distinguishable from those comfortable being watched, but this doesn’t matter. Twelve teenagers show us how the right kind of dance floor is created, the kind where there is room for all differences and time for all voices. Each explains why their song matters to them, and so the party proceeds. Many of these teenagers have never learnt dance before; we therefore meet them as people, not performers.
Despite a changing cast and changing times, Magnúsdóttir believes there is activism in the unchanging structure of an event that has toured Europe since 2017: ‘There’s lots of different people coming from different places with different ideas, but they are still sharing the stage, and they’re respectful of each other and take care of each other.’
Classical dance training is inherently competitive, but this isn’t the only reason Magnúsdóttir and I both feel we lacked spaces like The Listening Party growing up; high rises and rent hikes continue to threaten community centres in which healthy dance floors like this sprout. The teenagers move like themselves, because they have been granted the space to learn what moves them. And authentic movement as a theme continues throughout the festival, with Move Like You events, such as the Sensory Cypher for chronically ill, disabled and neurodiverse dancers, and Bring The Dance You Have parties scattered throughout the programme.
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The spaces where I have learned not to love dance again, but to love myself dancing again
In the process of making dance my hobby when it was once my job, I am still learning to move like me, rather than moving how I think I should. Training in dance left me absorbed in technique and virtuosity, at the mercy of markers of success; but not – to quote dancer Armanah Osajivbe-Amuludun from Warren’s book – how to ‘connect to something that’s more than just form and shape, which is what I normally think of when I’m performing as a professional dancer.’,
The Listening Party, and many of the dancefloors I stick to today, the ones in which everyone is embraced regardless of experience, are the spaces where I have learned not to love dance again, but to love myself dancing again. The festival proves that if the conditions of a dancefloor are right, as well as inclusive, it should require no thought or criteria; it should feel like the easiest thing in the world to move like you.
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Epitomising a return of sorts comes Untitled: Holding Horizon, a 3-hour, durational piece based around the timeless box step by acclaimed choreographer Alex Baczyński-Jenkins.
The box step is common. Those who haven’t learn it can at least recognise it. Yet Baczyński-Jenkins’ decision to centre the box step is less about accessibility and more a fascination with minimal forms that connect social dances, that host multitudes. Relationality between the five dancers is delicate and elusive, yet tethered to this familiar shape, a structure ever-present despite oscillating sequences.
Baczyński-Jenkins is inspired too by the restrictions of the box step. The piece ‘works through repetition, but it’s also going beyond that form.’ The words of a remixed track by Aaliya – ‘If you make this promise to me. You make it back in one piece’ – repeat in a loop, sometimes obsessing on one word, creating purgatorial tension. Unpacking this, Baczyński-Jenkins explains that ‘there’s something about that feeling of returning… that is present in the work… moving through a hostile environment but with others in the hope to arrive to somewhere or someone.’
For a while, the performers dance in the dark, barely discernible in their slinky black outfits. Reminded no doubt by Warren’s words, and of Baczyński-Jenkins’ reflections, I reflect on how shadowy dancefloors have been and can be safe spaces for marginalised groups who feel threatened elsewhere. Queer embodiment is central to the piece, to the desire that quietly emanates from its removed qualities. To Baczyński-Jenkins, a queer commons involves finding ways to ‘make a home in a hostile environment’.
The performers are subtle; not sexual but sensual. I feel alienated and yet moved by an intimacy conjured despite the elegant avoidance of touch. The arm gestures evoke a place, voguing in a club perhaps, but are stripped of context as they repeat and morph, and the dancers move through something to reach that horizon. I never find out if they get there, but I have a feeling this isn’t the point.
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Dance Your Way Home is for introverts and dads with babies and people who want to dance alone with dozens of others. Grief Rave demonstrates dance’s ability to wordlessly bring people together, the vivacious allure of spontaneous movement. On another night, I tumble onto the Southbank terrace into Deptford Northern Soul’s DJ set – one of the festival’s many free events. An outdoor dancefloor eradicates borderlines, and the anxiety many feel about entering closed doors. The festival therefore is in the hands of the public – an idea articulated perfectly by Femi Koleoso of Ezra Collective in a talk with Warren entitled Out to the Dancers: ‘Dance is the human expression of feeling welcomed.’ When detached from the highbrow ‘arts’, dance genuinely is for anyone and everyone, and for those elitists who challenge this, I ask: why would dance as an art form be either threatened or lessened by a community coming together in movement. Can’t there be room for both?
Though dance itself never pushed me way, chasing it, and depending on it for success, only left me feeling more distant to all of the reasons I love to move. I am confident that movement should set you free. Dance will never be for me what it once was, but in forging new movement memories in pressure-free spaces and purely for the joy of it, I sense some sort of return in process. Or maybe, I never left at all. ●
Southbank Centre, London, UK