Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor

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At the intersection of memoir, social and cultural history,Dance Your Way Homeis 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. 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. Funk music and dancing are more than simple self-expression, but are instead a “way out of our constrictions. In the ​ ’90s, she was THE FACE’s clubs editor, under then-editor Johnny Davis, when hedonism, optimism and the clubland youth explosion of the time was as paramount to the magazine’s pages as bagging the biggest celeb for its cover.

Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. 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. A DJ puts on “Silly Games”, Janet Kay’s hit song, and the characters dance and sway for ten minutes, entirely lost in the music. In a society where venue closures have become part of the norm – and particularly one where Black music is often venerated and vilified in the same breath – Warren’s documenting of these community spaces and stories is essential so the specifics are not erased (she also holds space for dubstep parties and the more recent euphoria of jazz night Steam Down).A refusal to dance sends a message that “I have mastered my body and my base nature,” Mr Melville suggests. Dancing freestyle is all about moving in a way that feels right for you in time to the music, rather than following specific steps of routines.

There’s evidence that shows when people move in synchrony together, they rate each other more highly, after swinging their arms about together in the same way.And all of that is condensed in the Theo Parrish quote at the very beginning: ‘People say that the dance is all about escapism, but really, it’s about solidarity.

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. There just came a point where you didn’t have to be very specialist to have gone to some kind of rave or warehouse party or specialist music night. And it was for people who just feel really, really, really hesitant about dancing, who are like, you know, those ones who just clam up, quite literally, when a dancing situation comes up.We were hugely lucky, though it should just be the norm, to have these 'youth' spaces when we were young to attend and hang out and to also just learn to interact with people that weren’t your mates or who might be a bit different to you. 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. Learning how to dance from your own home is a great way to get some exercise and learn some cool moves all at once!