This article shouldn't have been written this way.
No, it's nothing about the arguments I make or the way I structured it or the way I crafted the prose (in its current context I think it turned out pretty well). It's none of that.
It's that this article
should have come out as the dance halls of the world enter their holiday seasons. It should have been walls bedecked in tinsel and baubles and cut-out paper snowflakes. It should have been syncopated Christmas carols and
Jingle Bell Rock and
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree flowing from the horns of swing bands.
(You can tell I have fun with these descriptive passages)
But the Savoy shouldn't have been demolished in 1958 to build a housing complex. The world tends not to give a damn about what we dancers think.
For this piece, I was going for that sort of nonfiction writing that Erik Larson or Simon Winchester or Neil Sheehan are great at, the sort where if there's a digression with an interesting story to it, they will absolutely digress if it's worth telling. More generally I think the world of this sort of dancing deserves a big tell-all book about it filled with interesting anecdotes; I'd love to write it, if money, time, and plague were no objects. I'd go to
Blackpool and to Vienna's ball season and to the few remaining juke joints and to the Mississippi Blues Trail and to Salsa and Bachata and Mambo hot spots in the Caribbean, all to answer the question of "why do human beings do this?"
Topical for the UK given the climax of Strictly is coming up, though I assume that's a coincidence.
As I said in the article, it's the sort of show that teaches you how to dance
poorly. There's a marked difference between learning showy routines and learning how to dance organically.
It's the sort of thing we dancers tend to have
opinions about.
That's some very intense stuff,
@SpanishSpy
It was intense to write. Firstly, this sort of dancing really taught me how to be a human being, and so I have a very strong emotional relationship with it, and it legitimately feels like lockdown ripped out a part of my soul. Secondly, it's dealing with some very unpleasant history and some even less pleasant alternate history (the media is good, but the subject matter is brutal), of trauma that isn't my own. I agonized about getting it right. Thirdly, there was the massive sense of social responsibility I felt to avoid misrepresenting things (the role of sexuality in blues was the big one, and I may have some masculine blinders - I tried to be fair), and to dehumanizing. A lot of how I write about dance in this article is taking that principle from fiction writing "your characters become relatable through their flaws" and applying it to a living, breathing thing that real people still do when there isn't a pandemic going on. I was trying to take these dances out of the museum in the eyes of the non-initiated reader.
For those of us entirely unacquainted with the world of social dancing, that was very informative. You also brilliantly managed to get your enthusiasm across to the non-initiated.
Some caveats to that: I gave you a very detailed look into swing and blues circles, and a foray into ballroom circles (those are the three sorts of dance circles I'm intimately familiar with). I have less experience with the various Latin dances or other sorts of dance spheres, and not everything I say here would apply to those in toto.
When I was messaging Gary over the months it took me to write it (I started in late September or early October) I said that I was ultimately trying to paint a portrait of a culture that is often portrayed incorrectly. More than anything else, that's what this piece is.
It's a subject I've really struggled to do justice to in LTTW (see also fashion and sport), the danger of writing articles like this is that you mark yourself out as an expert to passing TL writers like me...
I'm no expert; in any case I'm not sure I'm familiar with the sort of dance you write about (and I'm afraid I've not read
Look to the West) - my area of knowledge is mostly African-American dance, as those are the dances I regularly partake in. I'm totally off base with Latin American or European stuff.
More general comments:
In terms of writing, it's still very much an SLP piece; my biggest influences from this site were
@Thande and
@David Flin for writing, and
@SenatorChickpea for how I addressed the consequences of empire near the end.
I had a very fruitful discussion with
@Ciclavex and
@Makemakean in one of the Zoom calls that also influenced this strongly.
I owe
@Gary Oswald a thank you for putting up with the sheer amount of nonsense (like a thirty-one page article!) I subjected him to.
I also owe several of my old dancer friends who looked over this and provided useful comments.
I also read a great piece on
Soviet Jewish ballroom culture that I couldn't quite fit in there in an elegant manner.
