Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor
University of Liverpool (UK)
At the time of writing, in August 2025, London’s Southbank Centre, which is arguably the epitome of UK “High Culture” is running a month-long summer programme of free events inspired by Emma Warren’s book Dance Your Way Home. Depending upon one’s perspective this can be seen as an act of “gallerification”, in which folk/popular/working class cultures are recuperated into a canonical presentation within elitist institutions, or part of an evolving movement of genuine recognition of social dance as an inclusive expression of human joy. Either way, the Southbank’s programme represents a hugely significant impact for a contemporary written word text.
Dance Your Way Home is not an academic treatise on the act of dancing, but a very accessible, and at times deeply personal autobiography outlining the vital importance of moving to music for oneself and for societies. Structured in three parts, the book is steeped in UK dancefloor history. In part one, Warren traces the initial foundations her dancing is built on. From domestic bopping to television music show Top of the Pops, to her Irish heritage and late seventies UK sound system cultures from whose roots blossomed much of what Dancecult examines. The second part highlights Warren’s progression onto dancefloors from school discos, her underage clubbing in London, to her right-place, right-time at Manchester university in the early nineties. Through these back drops, the story of dance’s cultural global explosion is set and illuminated with personal reminiscences, interviews with contemporary luminaries and scattered with explanations of academic studies from a breadth of disciplines which support the range of arguments Warren lays forth on dancing’s importance.
Dancing is lovingly set, not as subservient to, or a side effect of music and musical styles, but as having its own primacy. Hence dancing threads its way throughout the book, in various locations and spaces, and in different social and racial cultures, functioning as cross-generational ever-presence in twentieth and twenty-first century eras.
The part memoir nature of the text acts as a constraint to the potential span of the subject matter. The book’s focus on social dance as presented in the Global North, most specifically in the British Isles predominately in the last fifty years could be considered a limitation. However, in adopting this position, Warren recounts dance movement emergences with a lived experience sincerity. In telling her tales of house, techno, drum‘n’bass, and later grime histories, she includes reference to so-called legendary UK clubs such as Shroom, the Hacienda, Phenomenon One and Plastic People, not because these were definitive, but because she danced there herself at those times. She clearly articulates the legacies of numerous less renowned but no less significant nights and venues from her past and recognises many other “nerve centres” (181) operating beyond those she attended, of having parallel prominence and vitality.
When the book does narrate histories that are not her own, Warren ensures she does so with care, placing these as part of a lineage her own dancing is scaffolded on. This is especially evident within the important chapters on the hitherto neglected spaces of the school disco and youth club, where so many British adolescents, to varying degrees, learnt how to dance. The latter aspect is expanded on in Warren’s (2025) latest work, Up the Youth Club. Chapter Three’s detailed account of strangling church repression of dancing in Ireland which contributed to an exodus of young women from the country, including her own grandmother; and eighties Chicago gymnasiums recounted through interviews in Chapter Seven are similarly approached with recognition that these are not Warren’s direct experiences.
Like walking, dancing is presented throughout as a fundamentally human activity, if you dance, you are a dancer (33), and dancefloors are situated wherever we make them (307). In this sense the book stands alongside the equally brilliant but more historically comprehensive Dancing in the Streets by the late Barbara Ehrenreich (2006). In both books, social dance finds a voice celebrating non-specialist everyday dancing, joining the still surprisingly recent emergence of social dance texts within the dance academy. There is much resonance here with the historically situated concepts of dancing as community expression found in Malnig’s (2009), and Dodds and Cook’s (2013) collected works. What is fresh in Dance Your Way Home is the drawing of more personal connectivity between the performative club dancing, by crews and individuals in the eighties, to direct involvement in DJing, and promoting club nights such as A Guy Called Gerald’s recollections of their professional dancing lessons and aspirations (225–26).
In the final part of the book, Warren herself participates in a studio dance class, with the academy setting transformed into a place of therapy as she becomes aware of her dyspraxia. The restorative and healing power of dancing is a recurrent theme throughout the text. Warren employs a meticulously researched array of scientific study findings to describe everyday dance’s benefits for physical and mental health. Another of the book’s themes Warren is at pains to point out is that dancing is always historically situated, and many of the dance movements she has experienced have emerged as a response to specific, frequently harsh, social circumstances. She encapsulates this most succinctly in quoting the title of Alice Walker’s (2013) collection, Hard times Require Furious Dancing (223). The sense of community and resilience in the face of repressions, that finds expression through collective everyday dancing and a sense of temporary belonging or embraced by what Mary Fogarty described as a sense of an alternative “family” (2015: 247), is at the core of Dance Your Way Home’s message and that we can all dance our own histories.
Dodds, Sherril and Susan Cook. 2013. Bodies of sound: studies across popular music and dance. Farnham: Ashgate.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2006. Dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy. London: Granta Publications.
Fogarty, Mary. 2015. “The body and dance”. In The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music, ed. John Shepherd and Kyle Devine, 245–54. New York: Routledge.
Malnig, Julie. 2009. Ballroom, boogie, shimmy sham, shake: a social and popular dance reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Walker, Alice and Shiloh McCloud. 2013. Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems. Novato: New World Library.
Warren, Emma. 2025. Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History. London: Faber & Faber.