The joy of dancing

A Beyoncé rave in a sweaty shed near a tip in Lewisham

The crowd at the club in Deptford, London, last night.

Hello! And thank you for reading The Honesty Box today.

It’s a short one, and I’m publishing this about 12 hours later than usual because I had a Big Night Out last night. I went to a Beyoncé-themed night in an industrial building next to an MOT garage in Deptford, south east London.

The last time I danced to Beyoncé, I was in New Orleans, Louisiana, in a crowd of about 65,000 in rhinestone cowboy hats.

This time, I was in a sweaty shed near Lewisham Reuse and Recycling Centre with about 200 people in sparkly bikini tops with matching skirts, diamante vests or silver leather trousers, all dancing together under a giant disco ball.

I think this is the kind of event Beyoncé wrote her Renaissance album for, with its celebration of black queer culture, disco and house music.

Last night was the first time I saw voguing up close, a type of dance that became popular in Harlem in the 1980s, with a mixture of fashion-type poses as well as spins and dips, sometimes with the dancers jumping into the splits on the floor, watched by a delighted crowd. (This video explains it much better than I can.)

At Beyoncé’s show, the dancer Honey Balenciaga and ‘voguing diva, per her Instagram, was the standout performer (apart from B herself).

I know this is going to sound pretentious, but I feel like we’re in the middle of a defining cultural moment right now.

You don’t really realise how things are, or were, until you look back on them. I can now see that the late 1990s was a time of strappy dresses, crop tops, lad/ladette culture mixed up with Britney Spears, Brit pop, New Labour and Bill Clinton’s affair.

I was at Birmingham University during that time, where I might find myself sending a few emails from a computer at the library at the end of the day, then going to a step aerobics class and afterwards to see Boy George play a house music set at the Sanctuary nightclub.

Half my degree was in ‘media, culture and society,’ and I didn’t really realise I was living in a time where all three were taking off in their own way.

I remember attempting some kind of highfalutin’ academic project on how we used our landline phones, and how we’d let them interrupt in-person conversations when we answered them (it wasn’t my best piece of work) – little did we know that mobiles were about to change the world.

In the year 2000, I wrote my degree dissertation on ‘surveillance societies,’ just as TV show Big Brother had launched in the Netherlands. (Mobile phones now monitor what we’re doing like nothing else can, and I’m one of those people who always declines cookies, in an attempt to control the way in which details of my life are being collected.)

The 1990s feels like it was a kind of ‘peak pop’ era, where I was fortunate to be having a great time, but looking back I also see how objectified women were, especially those followed by the tabloid press.

It was also a time when there was a huge cut off point: the end of a millennium and the start of a new one.

It will be hundreds of years before anyone experiences that ever again, and now I can see that those late 90s years had a ‘party like it’s 1999’ sensibility, because we didn’t really know what was going to happen when the clock struck midnight.

Now, we’re in a massive social media age, a blend of slick imagery on Instagram and ‘real’ life on TikTok.

In the 1990s, clubbing was made up of moments that you only experienced right then, in that second, and then they were gone forever. But now, those moments are now available indefinitely online.

In 2023, dancing is still ‘real,’ and while you can film it all you like, the dancers are using their bodies in the same way they did before smartphones meant you could send videos to get validation - and instant gratification - from your friends’ ‘likes’.

Last night felt like it had the vibe of a club in the 1990s and watching those dancers voguing in the bright lights of dozens of phone cameras kind of added to the excitement of it all.

And while mainstream clubs are closing, we’re seeing the rise of other kinds of collective event like concert films (see Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, who both made gazillions from their live tours and will now earn even more from the documentaries of their shows) and festivals, where all those ‘90s DJs are reappearing.

I’m also having my own kind of cultural moment. It’s taken a while, but I’ve found the things I like, and I’ve even been to dance events by myself this year (the Beyoncé concert, a disco night in the style of a 1970s New York loft party, an event with house DJ Honey Dijon and a freestyle 5Rhythms night in a freezing church), as well as quite a few Annie Mac club nights with friends, plus a festival, and I’ve loved them all.

There’s a kind of group escapism in dancing, a joy when I recognise a beat or a tune, and a power in feeling that I can ‘still’ do this.

The dancefloor is a place for me, a middle-aged childfree woman, to feel like herself, and I know there’s more to explore…

Are you loving the dancefloor right now? Or are there any other 1990s habits or fashions you’re leaning back (or leaning forward) into? Let me know!