FACE THE MUSIC AND DANCE
Alan Judd has no
regrets at having taken ballroom dancing lessons
TOO many years ago I went out with a girl who had long wanted someone to take her ballroom dancing at Hammersmith Palais. I couldn't dance but I was in love. We went on a Wednesday. 'Wednesdays is for the over 25s, love,' said the lady in the box office. `Gentlemen don't 'ave to wear no jeans.' (They've stopped it now, even for the over 25s, thanks to Mecca.) There was a big band and a huge floor crowded with dancers. Some were superb, some competent and some, like ourselves, capable of no more than walking sideways. Not everyone took a partner; if you left yours while you got the drinks she'd be surrounded. Men clustered outside the ladies' loo, asking them as they came out. But there was no unpleasantness and the uncommon courtesies were recalled. A woman singer, her thighs as big as her voice, announced the football results be- tween numbers.
One couple stood out. They not only danced beautifully but they laughed and talked while doing it. At one point the band finished a waltz and changed to `Rock Around The Clock'. Everyone started rocking 'n' rolling, except this couple. He spoke, she laughed and they shot off in a lightning quickstep, circumnavigating the floor like an errant and playful planet. Her feet twinkled. How wonderful, I thought, to be able to play with the dance like that. Why not, I thought, learn.
My first two lessons were in Johannes- burg where I learned that the dance capital of the world was London. The teachers were husband and wife and I played truant from the British Consulate. On the first day I had the wife, which was fine, but on the second she wasn't there. Her husband, Arnold, was very fat and rather limp- wristed. 'You'll have to make do with me, I'm afraid,' he said, 'and you'll be thinking, "Don't shout at me, Arnold," but I must.' Arnold took the lady's part. He was a good teacher and, like many fat men, a good dancer. My catatonic self-consciousness was at last diminishing when I heard an unsuppressed giggle. Two black girls had arrived and stood gazing open-mouthed at the white men dancing. Back at the Consu- late my secretary had meanwhile told everyone where I was. She'd thought I couldn't have meant it.
It's a reaction people often have to ballroom dancing. They can't believe you're serious. There are four ballroom dances — waltz, quickstep, foxtrot, tango — and before the war most people learned them. The post-war decline is our loss. The point about those dances — and jive, rock 'n' roll and Latin American — is that you do them with someone. Disco-dancing you might as well do by yourself. It's boring. Look at the vacant faces. It's the difference between grunting and conversation.
Lessons began again in London. (There was an interval in Hawaii with Rosa, a dancing teacher who was also in real estate where she was known as Jane. Videos of our lessons showed an elegant Eurasian struggling with Caliban. I had to buy her some new tights.) In London I persuaded others to enrol with me with a well-known organisation that sells you six introductory lessons and then tries to sting you for hundreds of pounds for a full course. It was a hard sell, very hard because none of us liked being sold to, and we left.
Much cheaper and better are ordinary evening classes, provided you can put up with cheerless school halls and abandoned council chambers. Students tend to be middle-aged, working-class, white, friend- ly and rather proper. The tuition is good and if you are keen enough to progress to medal tests you can get private lessons at reasonable rates. London really is the capital: the best teachers in the world are here. Surprisingly, the same goes for Latin American.
In my one visit to that continent I hazarded a tango in Montevideo, where they have tango clubs. My partner was hies. Her English was like my Spanish but the tango, in which you are joined from knee to breastbone, loses nothing in trans- lation.
Learning takes time, of course, and the first thing I learned was that a week is a long time in my memory bank. Is there, I wonder, any research that explains why some physical skills such as cycling or swimming are not forgotten whereas dance-steps often are? Has anyone ever forgotten how to kick a football? But you do learn — with merciful rapidity — to overcome that joint-locking self- consciousness. Every beginner is bad and no-one mocks you. Very soon you don't mind.
Why do it? Because I like it. It's exhilarating and relaxing, it makes me cheerful. It even encourages temporary moral improvement in that my normal rage is suspended in favour of a calm acceptance of my fellow-beings, something I imagine to be very like forgiveness. For a while after dancing I can ignore even the filth of our capital's streets and am no more cast down by the miserable brutal faces we present to each other. It doesn't last all week, though. Where to do it needs another article but there are more places than you might think. With whom is crucial, though. You need a partner. Ideally, someone of about your own level and enthusiasm to whom you are neither married nor otherwise engaged. You meet weekly to dance and to dine. There exists a perfect partner mine — but there may be others. Perhaps everyone should be someone's dancing partner. Most marriages would benefit.
Ballroom dancing has passed its nadir and is becoming more popular. It'll be a long time before we can all dance again but when we can the world will be a better place. Meanwhile, it's consoling to have found a form of exercise less affected than most by encroaching middle age; and encouraging to think that one day, along with my perfect partner, I may yet totter into vogue.
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