The truth: it's murder on the dancefloor
Do you know your foxtrot from your jitterbug? Our correspondent doesn't, and will stay firmly seated during the party season. Here, she and three other writers reflect on the purgatory of dance for non-dancers. By ANN TRENEMAN and others for The Times.


TO DANCE or not to dance? As the party season looms (and on Sainsbury’s shelves it is already here), that is the question. Not that we ever admit it. In fact, I can see you shrugging your shoulders. But that will never do. It is time that we faced the truth about dancing, and particularly about drinking and dancing. We can’t dance. We do dance, particularly to Hi Ho Silver Lining and I Will Survive. We shouldn’t dance again. This season, then, we must learn to - Just Say No.

OK, so there are exceptions. If you are old (anyone over 65), you probably think that dancing is something you do in the arms of another person, swirling and twirling or trotting round a room to twinkly music. If you are young (anyone under 24), then you will think that dancing involves standing in a group until, amoeba-like, you start to sway as one.

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This is a really interesting article - it did capture the several aspects of social dance and it's attendant connotations. But it left two out, in my opinion.

Before I was married I adored social dancing and used to go often. Either with a date or with a girlfriend we would go and have a great time. Perhaps meet someone of the opposite sex (or not), it was not only fun to dance but fun to just get to talk to different people my age.

Several years ago I accompanied several women to a club - a 'scene' I hadn't visited for decades. I didn't go to dance, just to accompany these female friends. Two things struck me. First of all, as one looked out onto the dance floor it was impossible to tell who was dancing with whom. No one dancer seemed to be focused on a partner. And they didn't seem to care.

The second thing was the volume level. Speech was impossible. Utterly impossible. I couldn't have held a conversation with myself and heard myself talking. This puzzled me. So, after getting home I had a conversation with my son, who at the time was 'club scene age.' The conversation went something like this:

Me: "When you go to a club, isn't meeting someone one of your goals?"

Him: "Yes."

Me: "How can you possibly hold even a simple conversation like 'what's your name?' with that level of noise?"

Him: "You can't."

Me: "If you see a pretty girl and you ask (it would have to be mime) her to dance...don't you want to know her name?"

Him: "Yes."

Me: "Doesn't it bother you that the music is to loud to speak to her?"

Him: "No."

Go figure.

(he wasn't always this monosyllabic)

My S.O. is from Mexico, and loves to dance (that's how we met). Like me, he really only likes couple dancing. Yet he told me that he always had a great time dancing at parties when he was a teenager, which was in the '60s. He explained that in Mexico City, where he grew up, lots of kids would do couple dancing, sort of Latin style, even to American rock music. I think if I'd grown up in Mexico, I might actually have gone to school dances.

An interesting exception to the above may be country bars. Back in the olden days when I lived in Dallas, at a country night club one could talk and dance, and meet people etc. I suspect that Texas is still like that!
In Seattle, however, I would prefer going to a dentist than some of the dance clubs. Between the alcohol, the volume, and the mass of people they are just too much for me.
Whoever can crack the relationship meeting place dilemma will make Starbucks and Microsoft look like tiny little mom and pop shops, so let me in on the IPO, but i suspect that it isn't a dance club.