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. 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.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. You uncovered a few DJs with professional dance pasts. I didn’t realise that Fabio had actually been a pro dancer. And Gerald.A landmark social history of the dancefloor that gets to the heart of what it is that makes us move. UK music journalist and writer Emma Warren has penned a new book that looks at the history of why we dance. 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. 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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

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”. Teens aren’t the only ones who can dance their way to better mental health. Senior citizens (and adults of all ages) can reap the benefits too. A small group of seniors, ages 65-91, was studied in North Dakota. After taking 12 weeks of Zumba (a dance fitness class), the seniors reported improved moods and cognitive skills- not to mention increased strength and agility.

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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.