Dancing to music: what could be more joyful? Rhythm and sweat, release and abandon, feeling rather than thinking, being yourself and becoming someone – or something – other. Dancing gives us, however fleeting, a glimpse of freedom. It can tilt reality. This appalls puritans and fundamentalists. Too many young people “prefer the dark night to daylight”, complained James Anderton in the 1980s. “They dance like there is no tomorrow, and they spread the virus of drug abuse wherever they go. They are not of this world. They believe in very different things to you and I.”
Anderton, subject of a Happy Mondays song called God’s Cop, was chief constable of Greater Manchester Police from 1976 to 1991, and believed dancing (or those kinds of it of which he disapproved) was deviant, contagious even. Plenty of lawmakers, before and after him, have thought so too, seeing the dancefloor as a battleground, a potentially countercultural space that, according to Ed Gillett, they have sought to “constrain or commodify”.
