"The
dance revival: one nation under a groove"
(The Times - T2 + Times Online issue - www.timesonline.co.uk)
January 12th 2010 by Jane Mulkerrins.
We may be only 12 days into a new year but one prediction
seems safe to make: 2010 is limbering up to be the Year of
the Legwarmer. Five million Britons of every age and class,
and both genders, are now shimmying, shaking and strutting
their stuff every week at dance classes in gyms, salsa nights
in church halls and other styles in other venues. Even dances
popular with the wartime generation are enjoying a resurgence
among London’s young dance set, with regular swing and
lindy hop nights in clubs across the capital.
“What worked in the past still works well now,”
says Benoit Viellefon, a 36-year-old musician who attracts
more than 250 dapper vintage enthusiasts to his midweek Swing
Mon Amour nights at the fashionable pub-cum-club Paradise
By Way Of Kensal Green, in West London. “It’s
like cooking. A Sunday roast still works, just like swing
music still works.”
The fitness industry offers a dizzying range of dance-based
classes including street, salsa, Middle Eastern, burlesque,
Latin and even pole dancing. One group has even launched a
fitness programme based on zumba, a Colombian dance form.
“People used to go to dance classes, be unable to follow
the complicated moves and never come back,” says Carl
McCartney, of Virgin Active. “Now we cater for all abilities.
Dance classes release endorphins and encourage interaction
— and that social aspect keeps people coming back.”
For those who prefer to enjoy dance vicariously, the January
weekend TV schedules include two new prime-time X Factor-style
dance shows, with So You Think You Can Dance? on BBC One on
Saturday nights and Got to Dance on Sky1 on Sunday nights.
The BBC show, produced by Simon Fuller and hosted by Cat Deeley,
attracted more than eight million viewers in its first week,
who witnessed classical ballerinas attempting to “lock”
(a very tricky hip-hop move) and judge “Nasty”
Nigel Lythgoe gazing lasciviously through his reading glasses
at the nubile Lycra-clad dancers. The sweatbands-and-tears
format will whittle down thousands of wannabes to 14 finalists,
who slug it out for £100,000 in cash and the chance
to perform on the US version of the show.
“It’s exactly the same as the British version,
just with more screaming,” explains the former Strictly
Come Dancing judge Arlene Phillips, who sits alongside the
former Popstars panellist Lythgoe and the former Eternal singer
Louise Redknapp. Sky1’s crack judges, meanwhile, are
the tap-dancing West End and Hollywood hottie Adam Garcia,
Pussycat Doll Kimberly Wyatt and street dancer Ashley Banjo,
of the dance troupe Diversity, Britain’s Got Talent
champions in 2009.
“Somehow I’ve become the sternest,” says
Wyatt, “but all my comments come from honesty. I see
so much potential in so many of them. I was once in their
shoes and now that I’m on the other side of the judging
table, there’s a standard I’m looking for. If
I don’t see it, I don’t put them through.”
Garcia and Banjo tend to employ more twinkles and grins as
they hold the dreams of a nation’s hoofers in their
hands.
“There is definitely a huge revival going on right
now,” says Phillips. “In the 1970s and early 1980s
dancers were on television almost every night, with troupes
such as Young Generation, Pan’s People and my group,
Hot Gossip. Then budgets got smaller and the only dancing
on TV was in music videos. That remained so until the first
series of Strictly Come Dancing in 2004, when people who had
never been interested in dance before tuned in.”
There may have been a hiatus in home-grown productions but
it would be disingenuous to say that the nation lost its interest
in televised dancing in the interim. Three American imports
of the early 1980s, Fame, Flashdance and Footloose, have left
their legacy, as did the film Dirty Dancing, which spawned
the fastest-selling show in the West End, taking more than
£12 million in advance ticket sales when it opened in
2006.
By the end of the Eighties dance
really had become a dirty word, with the Ecstasy-fuelled culture
of rave music. “Repetitive beats” were even criminalised
in 1994 under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Ironically,
Benoit Viellefon thinks that the current interest in swing
reflects a rejection of the very music that once made Middle
England so fearful for its children’s health and safety
.“Young people never want to
be like their parents,” he says. “Kids who are
20 today were born in 1990, at the height of techno and house
music, so they don’t want anything to do with the sort
of rave music their parents were dancing to.” Instead,
he says, they are dressing in furs that could have come from
their grandparents’ attics. “Everything is cyclical,”
says Viellefon.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise
that a remake of the 1984 dance blockbuster Footloose is scheduled
for release in June. It is directed by Kenny Ortega, who came
to fame as the choreographer of Dirty Dancing, went on to
milk the tears being shed for Michael Jackson with This Is
It, and in 2006 was at the helm of High School Musical, the
movie that introduced a new generation of pre-teens to the
joys of the high-school hop.
Dance is now second only to football as the most popular
activity among schoolchildren, and ranks first among girls.
The number of pupils taking dance at GCSE has risen by 83
per cent in four years — and a third of the entrants
are boys. The number of people taking dance in higher and
further education is up by 97 per cent in five years, to 10,000
students each year.
“You get a sense of when the moment is right for something
— and for dance, this is that moment,” says Duncan
Gray, commissioning editor of entertainment for Sky1 and the
man behind Got To Dance. “Kids will watch this show
in a way they wouldn’t have done five years ago.”
Gray has a reliable focus group with whom to consult on this.
“My 12-year-old son is captain of his football team,
a tough-as-nails rugby player and spends his lunchtimes breakdancing,”
he says. “When I was his age I wouldn’t have been
seen dead dancing, but now it’s de rigueur for all young
people to be good at dancing. It’s part of their social
armour.”
Even the Department of Health has cottoned on and this month
launches its Let’s Dance campaign, part of the Change4Life
initiative to tackle obesity. A laudable motive, of course,
although surely nothing could be more certain to deter young
people from a hobby than an endorsement from Whitehall.
Strictly Come Dancing attracts audiences of more than ten
million, yet both Gray and Phillips credit another show with
focusing the nation’s attention on dance: Britain’s
Got Talent on ITV. “With dancers George Sampson and
Diversity winning the show in two consecutive years, you suddenly
have these new icons for kids,” says Gray. “If
you walk past any community centre in the country, the rooms
are packed with young people dancing.”
Auditions for the forthcoming series of BGT in April have
borne this out. “An enormous proportion of those auditioning
are kids who want to be dancers,” says a show insider.
The standard, apparently, is impressively high and the hopefuls
are a mix of ballroom, jazz and contemporary dancers as well
as George Sampson-style street dancers and Diversity-esque
troupes.
Pineapple Studios dance centre in Covent Garden, Central London,
which is capitalison the phenomenon, will feature in an eight-part
documentary starting on Sky1 in February. “In the past
couple of years dancing has really taken off,” says
Laura Pye, Pineapple’s studio manager. She has also
noted a marked rise in requests from brides and grooms for
tuition for that all-important first dance.
Village halls throughout the land are swinging to the sounds
of samba. Paula Clark has been teaching ballroom and Latin
to adult “social dancers” in village halls and
community centres around West Yorkshire for 20 years.
“A couple of years ago, if you got half a dozen to
your class you were doing well. Now we have full halls for
every class,” she says. “I teach a mixed bunch,
from young couples who are getting married to retired people.
I also work with elderly action groups who encourage older
people to get out and exercise, and those groups are really
growing in number because it’s an incredibly social
activity. The classes become a community within a community
and if someone doesn’t turn up for a class, the others
wonder where they are.”
Caroline Miller is director of Dance UK, which has helped
to lobby for dance to receive the same recognition and funding
as opera and other branches of the performing arts. The seeds
of dance’s newfound popularity, she believes, were sown
in the mid-1990s, after an injection of National Lottery funding.
Since Sadler’s Wells was rebuilt, audiences at the
dance theatre have risen by 56 per cent in six years, with
half a million visitors attending 580 performances in 2009.
Dance City in Newcastle, the Lowry in Manchester and other
new spaces now regularly host world-renowned dance companies,
inspiring a new generation of fans.
“We are in the middle of a seven-week run of Matthew
Bourne’s Swan Lake and it is sold out, which is incredible,”
says Alistair Spalding, artistic director at Sadler’s
Wells. “Even the very biggest international companies
with huge shows such as The Nutcracker don’t sell out,
and they certainly don’t do runs of seven weeks.”
Under his energetic leadership, the Wells has become a showcase
for innovation both domestic and foreign. Just look at the
list of associate artists tied to the venue: Sylvie Guillem,
the Ballet Boyz, Matthew Bourne, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Akram
Khan, Russell Maliphant, Hofesh Shechter, Christopher Wheeldon.
Even classical ballet has been democratised. The English
National Ballet went down a storm on the main stages at last
summer’s Bestival and Camp Bestival festivals, while
Sadler’s Wells brought a dance showcase to Latitude.
This new accessibility is apparent in ticket sales, according
to Jim Fletcher, development manager of the Royal Ballet School.
“The audiences for classical ballet have changed significantly,”
he says. “When I look around at the Coliseum or the
Royal Opera House, there are many deal more people in the
25-to-40 age bracket and many younger than that, and from
a much wider social and economic background than ever before.”
Even at Covent Garden, the home of tradition and classical
propriety, a fierce wind is stirring things up. His name is
Wayne McGregor and, as resident choreographer of the Royal
Ballet, he has lit a fire under the dancers with his edgy,
skewed dances. There is nothing farther from a white tutu
than one of McGregor’s futuristic creations.
Our expectations of what dance is have changed beyond all
recognition. Take the breakthrough success of street dance,
a previously underground genre now spinning and backflipping
its way across the stages of our most “Establishment”
arts centres. The South Bank Centre’s Christmas show
was Into The Hoods by the ZooNation company, which finished
its run while across town, at the Barbican, Boy Blue’s
street dance show Pied Piper has been garnering glowing reviews.
If final proof were needed of dance’s leap into the
big time, it is provided by the most impossible section of
society to persuade out of their seats and on to their feet:
men. The ratio of boys to girls applying to the Royal Ballet
School used to be 20:80, according to Jim Fletcher; now it
is 50:50. Billy Elliot helped, of course, but more recently
the profile of the Cuban ballet hunk Carlos Acosta has, too.
“He has made ballet sexy and masculine,” says
Spalding.
“Our street dance and hip-hop classes are now equal
numbers of men and women,” says Laura Pye. And the “Darren
Gough” effect is credited with scores of men taking
up ballroom dancing, after the England cricketer won Strictly
Come Dancing in 2005. “Men come in thinking that if
a big, butch sportsman can do it, so can they,” says
Paula Clark. “Many years ago, men used to dance to impress
the ladies and that motivation is finally coming back. It
works — we really are impressed when a man can dance
well.” Just look at the national reaction to Robert
Webb’s leotarded Flashdance routine for Comic Relief!
Of course, not everybody is prepared, in the immortal words
of Kenny Loggins, to “cut loose and kick off their Sunday
shoes”. On The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, Webb’s
comedic ally David Mitchell gave short shrift to Jonathan
Ross’s attempts to goad him into an impromptu jig to
Lady Gaga’s Poker Face.
Mitchell’s quiz partner Charlie Brooker also demurred.
“I’ve probably spent about six months of my life
having people trying to get me on to the dancefloor,”
he said. “What’s fun about it? I’m like
a frightened horse on a frozen lake.”
Clearly, Brooker isn’t in touch with the zeitgeist:
amateur dancers are national heroes, and those prepared to
make fools of themselves doing it have become icons. How else
to explain David Brent’s infamous eye-watering monkey
dance in The Office, or John Sargeant’s popularity in
Strictly, or Peter Crouch and his celebratory robot dance?
We finally seem to have woken up to the fact that dancing
is fun.
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