Moving Together, Sharing Space in Dance Your Way Home by Emma Warren

Italian has two words for dancing, ballare and danzare. The former refers to the informal, everyday dancing one does with family and friends; the latter means dancing of a high level, the kind that usually requires years of formal training. British author Emma Warren observes that the conflation of both these meanings into the single English verb ‘dance’ comes at the cost of nuance; for one to be defined as a dancer, the assumption follows that one is good at dancing. In her vibrant non-fiction book Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor, she seeks to decouple these meanings: if one dances, she argues, then one is a dancer, no matter how excellently or terribly one dances. Her book is concerned not with professional dance but with the ordinary movement of bodies together to music, the spaces this shapes, and the communities this creates. She writes: ‘Moving together to music, I realised, allows us to form new relationships with ourselves and with the wider world’ (7).