issue #3 online soon 

Before I turned fifteen, I mostly danced in my head or in my bedroom.

I danced with my fingers as I listened to XFM radio on the way to school or spun around my room

late at night listening to Eurhythmics on my dad’s iPod.

At sixteen, I decided I couldn’t dance. I nodded my head and pouted with my arms crossed at crashed

parties and sticky gig venues.

At eighteen, I nodded a bit harder in the anonymous and unjudgmental arms of Berlin techno.

At twenty we bounced around in the small confines of college rooms during the pandemic.

At twenty-two we did this in Paris.

Nowadays, I dance in any space that will take me.

Dance is often considered an aesthetic practice, an attempt at realising perfection, beauty or some

kind of ideal. I think of the toothpick ballerinas I saw once in the Royal Opera House, or Emily

Ratajkowski in the Blurred Lines video.

Emily Ratajkowski in Blurred Lines

But this isn’t the dance I’ve come to enjoy. When described as an aesthetic, dance becomes

intentional, highly visual and self-conscious. Yet, when I dance best I’m trying to escape these things.


Recently, I wrote an essay on the women’s movement and found myself sucked into the mid-sixties

world of (dancer-artist-feminist) Yvonne Rainer. Her calls to say NO to spectacle and seduction stuck

with me. [1] They reminded me of YouTube videos I’d watched of the free party scene in nineties or

leaflets I’d been handed for ecstatic dance parties in East London. This informal, improvised,

participatory and embodied dancing seemed very different to the world of Robin Thicke. The leaflet

for the ecstatic dance event in a DIY-CIC space in E9 showed a geriatric and a toddler dancing

together and laughing. The leaflet promised the same kind of spiritual transformation as the soulless

nights I attended at eighteen in Berlin did. Except I had more faith in in this branch of spiritual

enlightenment.

Ecstatic Dance Party leaflet

I wonder if my inability to dance freely from sixteen through to eighteen had something to do with me

mistaking dance as an aesthetic performance rather than a lived practice. It wasn’t really until

lockdown that I felt comfortable to follow Rainer’s calls for women to ‘SAY NO’.

So much of dancing seems to really be about where you are and who you’re with. They often don’t even play any

music at these ecstatic dancing events. It’s all about kinetic energy and releasing the within.


To avoid a rapid decline into bastardised spiritualism I return to the image of me dancing. Dancing

within four corners with four friends to ‘Genius of Love’ by the Tom Tom Club in 2021. This is

probably the least aesthetic I’ve ever felt. Stomping and shuffling with very little awareness of my

female form or who was around me. I don’t want to say this practice created a new aesthetic built

from the ashes of Emily Ratajkowski, but I do think there’s something in bodily movement holding

the possibility for re-definition. Aesthetics come and go and generally exclude some kind of body in

their quest for perfection. Like sex or cooking, if I had spent more of my youth doing and less time

performing the act, I’d probably be even better at it now.

Max dancing in Where the Wild Things Are