The dance floor of my life goes deep

Can you 'jump the needle' too?

I think I got my love of dancing from my grandmother, Jean. Here is a photo of my grandparents’ gravestone, surrounded by snowdrops, taken yesterday

My earliest memory of any kind of dance floor is jumping around in a home-made pink and purple fairy costume to The Rolling Stones’ Get Off Of My Cloud at about the age of five in my parents’ living room. The record belonged to my dad, Roger, and I would jump up and down so hard it would skip – something I now like to call jumping the needle.

Then there was the primary school disco where the theme tune to the Ghostbusters movie was what got me going. Sometime later, at 15, I had my first snog - a spin cycle of tongues in the middle of a school-hall turned dance floor. I don’t know what song was playing but I remember what I was wearing: a high-necked red velvet body suit borrowed from a friend and a headband that made me look like Bronwyn from Neighbours.

At university in Birmingham I wore orange flares and my mum’s black and red sequin boob tube to 1970s-themed nights and something cooler and more cleavagey to clubs that played house music.

On the dance floors of my life, I have celebrated, and I have grieved. I have been hopeful of finding a partner at salsa lessons and felt euphoric at power ballad nights (hands in the air and belting out Whitney or Meatloaf at midnight). I have cried with laughter while attempting to learn the steps to Madonna’s Like a Prayer at my friend G’s hen do and I have marvelled at dancers vogueing to Beyonce in an underground London club.

I think my love of dancing comes from my grandmother, Jean, who met my grandfather, Roy, on an Oxfordshire dance floor during World War II. My grandfather, a handsome farmer with his father’s car at his disposal for the evening, lightly boasted of its built-in radio.

My grandmother, newly arrived from London where bombs made it unsafe to stay, adored dancing and accepted a lift home with this dashing chap, sensing his kindness and overlooking his two left feet. (The dance floors of wartime Britain were “booming exceptionally” as people tried to keep their morale up.) Less than two years later, my grandparents were married.

Recently, my love of dancing has emerged again, after finding nightclub dance floors that felt welcoming to me as a middle-aged woman over the past couple of years, and helping out at The Loft London, a beautiful event that has its heritage in David Mancuso’s 1970s New York loft parties (tickets for the next one on 9 March here).

And since I went on a very deep, spiritual retreat over the new year (that reached parts of me I didn’t even know were there), dancing now has a new kind of calling for me. There was music about three times a day on the retreat, and we moved to it however we wanted to.

I was resistant at first - I mean who are these people who I don’t know moving around in this ancient room with a dragon at one end, what is this music, who chose it? Why is that tall man with long hair in a bun skipping around sideways? And why do I have to ‘lean in to my longings’ during this dancing time? Surely, these longings are best kept buried in the recesses of my mind, under the compost heap at the back of my brain?

And so at first I would sway, standing close to a wall so my lolling arms wouldn’t loll into anyone else’s, jigging my knees gently, eyes closed so no-one could “see” me.

But there on the retreat I learned that dancing for me goes deeper than fun, deeper than the joy I’d found on the nightclub dance floor. I met S, who told me about the tragic loss of his son, J, who died when he was a baby. S told me about how he had been an alcoholic before his son had died, and his death helped him to give up drinking.

Later that evening, I found myself in a group of people dancing to a song that had guitar solos, drum solos, a sax solo, and as you do when you really get into the music, we started miming playing our instruments (my keyboard was pretty good). I realised I was dancing next to S who had talked of his loss, and my tears started again. I had a strong sense that we were dancing for the people who can’t dance any more – or perhaps never had the chance to try.

I thought of my dad, who died in 2009, and who loved the uplifting power of music, and who, at my 21st birthday party, had danced with me in the same living room in which I had jumped the needle as a little girl.

Since the retreat, I’ve been going to ecstatic dance events as much as I can - I say ‘dance,’ but for me it is moving to music in whatever way feels natural. I thought going to a nightclub was the only way to dance in the dark, with swaying bodies and sweating faces and flashing lights and bass and beats and drops and yells and smiling eyes and drumming with my fists in the air. And it turns out ecstatic dance has all these things too - but sober, barefoot and with no chat on the dance floor, which makes me feel freer somehow.

The other week, moving how I wanted to at an ecstatic dance night meant closing my eyes and swaying and letting my imagination picture whatever it wanted to, and at first, I saw walls around me, sheet metal barriers that helped me feel protected but strong.

I moved my hands against these walls, exploring with my mind. Then the walls fell away, and I saw a candyflossy cloudy white haze going around my head, then in my mind I became the leader of the dance, and I could throw nets over the dancers and collect them around me. And then, in my imagination, I had huge sparky balls in my hands that I could throw anywhere I wanted, to light up the room.

For me that night (there was a full moon) was a way of expressing myself exactly as I wanted to, and sometimes that meant making my hands into claws and sliding along the floor. Some of the music was dark – think Nine Inch Nails x Rage Against the Machine – but instead of it feeling overwhelming, it allowed me to scream and yell and pummel my fists on the floor. I mean when and where else can you express yourself like that and it be perfectly acceptable? It was pure and total catharsis. (The set was by DJ Bill Tribble and you can listen to it here. Bill is a DJ with Ecstatic Dance UK.)

If you had told me even a year ago that I would be dancing like no-one is watching on a regular basis and not feeling self-conscious AT ALL, I would have laughed. But I am someone who often lives in my head, and I’ve found that dancing gets me into my body and helps to bring me back to life (and there is research to show that dancing can have mental health benefits).

Putting my hands in the air like I just don’t care is probably quite a long way from the kind of dancing my grandparents did. But I like to think we were moving our bodies for similar reasons - for the sense of fun, freedom, expression, an escape from reality, for the spiritual, sparky connection with life and each other.

Yesterday, my mum and I visited my grandparents’ grave. It sits in the cemetery of the Cotswolds town where they farmed, and the stone is surrounded by snowdrops. It reads: “Dance then, wherever you may be.” I hope they are on the dance floor of their dreams.