Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor

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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”. Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Librarians Group is the official group for requesting additions or updates to the catalog, including: Us club regulars need no convincing. But throughout Warren’s book, the police are aforeboding presence, poking their beaks into almost every chapter. They’re either closing down aparty, attempting to end the fun, or at least moaning about it. ​ “I wasn’t expecting to be writing abook with so much police in it,” Warren says. ​ “We know the Met have troubles and need to do some radical fixing up of the systems of accountability around policing, generally, in this country. Iwonder if they just need some dancing culture-ation?” At the intersection of memoir, social and cultural history, 'Dance Your Way Home' is an intimate foray onto the dancefloor – wherever and whenever it may be – that speaks to the heart of what it is that makes us move." The idea for the book, called 'Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through The Dancefloor', emerged after Warren focused on some specific lines from her last book, 'Make Some Space', which was about the community around London venue Total Refreshment Centre. The lines, which Warren said "a few people honed in on" was that "dancing in the dark is a human need, that we've been doing this forever, and that it's a kind of medicine".

Publisher Faber's blurb about 'Dance Your Way Home' reads: "This book is about the kind of ordinary dancing you and I might do in our kitchens when a favourite tune comes on. It's more than a social history: it's a set of interconnected histories of the overlooked places where dancing happens... Why do we dance? What does dancing tells us about ourselves, individually and collectively? And what can it do for us?At a conference on folk dance, Warren learns how, in pre-industrial times, dance was more common and spontaneous than it is now. Modernity has alienated us from ourselves. Men weren’t always coy about throwing shapes in public; it’s a culturally determined hang-up that can, of course, magically dissolve after a few drinks.

This book is about the kind of ordinary dancing you and I might do in our kitchens when a favourite tune comes on. It's more than a social history: it's a set of interconnected histories of the overlooked places where dancing happens . . . Emma Warren’s Dance Your Way Home is a beautiful and timely defence of dancing. Whether it’s at home or with friends, professionally or for fun, dance is one of our most natural outlets for creativity and connection. Warren’s book focuses on dance in community and culture. A landmark social history of the dancefloor that gets to the heart of what it is that makes us move. The dancefloor can be aplace in which people who have different life experiences, who walk through the world in away that brings different responses from the state, can have acommunal experience,” Warren says.

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As someone who has been on the dance floor for decades, Iwas in agood position to be able to share some of the things that those of us that have spent some time at the dance truly know and believe,” she says. ​ “We know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”