DANCE BEYOND

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Motility 21: Senior Citizen Social Inclusion through Social Dance

Report for the Changing Ageing Partnership (CAP)

Author:

Dr. Jonathan SKINNER

Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology

School of History and Anthropology

Queen’s University Belfast

Acknowledgements
This report presents findings from an Atlantic Philanthropies supported Changing Ageing Partnership (CAP) Research Seed Grant 2007 distributed through The Queen’s University Belfast. The research also benefited from assistance from the following organizations and individuals to whom the author is very grateful: the British Academy, the Department of Anthropology at California State University Sacramento, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, the School of History and Anthropology (QUB), the Sacramento Dance4Life program, The Ballroom Studio (Sacramento), The Blackpool Tower (Blackpool), Dance With Thomas (Belfast), The Latin Quarter (Belfast), Dancesport NI (Belfast), The Irish Ballroom and Waltzing Federation (Dublin), Merrill Gardens Residential Home (Sacramento), Craigavon Borough Council (Northern Ireland), DJ Barry, Elizabeth Hsu, Shirley Ardener, Barnaly Pande, Una Lynch, Philomena Mulholland, and ‘Sarah’. The material and findings represent the author’s work and not necessarily those of the above organizations and individuals.

Executive summary
This report moves away from the traditional functionalist approaches to dance; from dance as cathartic activity; dance as courtship; dance as a choreographic play between resistance and self-regulation – to dance as social inclusion and social, mental and physical healing. It presents findings from a qualitative study comparing social dancing as social inclusion amongst senior citizens in three cities and regions: around Belfast and Northern Ireland, Blackpool (GB) and Sacramento (US). Whilst presenting interview materials demonstrating dance as social inclusion, the report explores three different social dancing models: social dance as tea dance (Sacramento), social dance as practice dance (Blackpool), social dance as motility (Belfast and environs). Findings also attest to the social, psychological and health benefits of social dancing amongst senior citizens. This form of ‘serious leisure’ has the potential: to bring people together across communities creating solidarity, tolerance and understanding; to shatter stereotypes held about living in retirement; to renew of the body and the mind - changing the body from being a source of oppression to a source of freedom. In sum, this social dancing is egalitarian and fosters a ‘young-old’ category of senior citizen with a continued engagement with life - past, present, and future. Social dance, then, holds the promise for successful ageing.

“You see the thing is when you retire you don’t have to live the same kind of life you did before. Alright I work in science all my life, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t change and become a dancer. So it’s a different phase of life. A lot of people they don’t realise that this is the best time of your life.”(Bill, Sacramento)[i] “They opened a new ice rink in Bangor [N. Ireland] and my daughters brought me down and said, ‘Mum, would you like to go skating?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve never skated’. But they said, ‘You do roller - you did roller skating when you were younger’. It was great then: we had a road to fly down and every hill we went on. Well there was no bicycles in those days and not many cars. I could do ballroom dancing so I wanted to see what it was like to do dancing on skates. And I must say I was very impressed and it’s great: flowing and speed! I’ve been doing it for twelve years now. We do rumba, waltz, quickstep, foxtrot, tango. She [ice skating instructor] did want me to compete, but I thought, no, I’d leave it to the younger generation.”(Sarah, Bangor)[ii]

I. Introduction

Bill is sixty five and has been retired for the past fifteen years. In that time, Bill took up social ballroom dancing. He dances two or three times a week around the Greater Sacramento environs, California, attending the tea dances or social dances in the afternoons, and occasionally the weekly Friday or Saturday night dance nights when live bands play. Healthy, fit and comfortably well off, Bill feels that he is making the most of his retirement. Indeed, it is a new lease of life for him, quite literally a new departure with the dancing which he never had time for when he was working.Sarah has just celebrated her seventieth birthday in Bangor, a seaside resort town outside Belfast, Northern Ireland. Since the recent loss of her husband, she has re-entered the local dance world that she was a part of in her teenage and courting years in the 1950s and early 1960s. She started again with the ballroom dancing, added the new salsa dance craze, and is developing her ballroom-on-ice skills that she started in the mid-1990s. Unlike Bill who is a new convert to dancing, Sarah is returning to the dancing which she used to do when younger, and is even adding to it with modern updates and technical variations on a different ground surface. For Sarah, her mother’s old adage told to her is coming true: “’Life’s a circle’, my mother always said, and she always maintained that ‘there’ll always be dancing.’” Sarah was brought up in Belfast to compete at Irish dancing when she was a child and ballroom dancing when she was a teenager; she even starred on the BBC Come Dancing programme when it aired from Belfast. She has passed on her enthusiasm for dance – part instilled in her by her parents – to her own daughters who now dance salsa alongside her, and her daughters’ daughters who are learning jazz and tap dancing after their Primary School classes.

This report is about social ballroom dancing amongst senior citizens. It is a pilot research project exploring the different models of social ballroom dancing amongst senior citizens in and around Belfast (Northern Ireland), Sacramento (California) and Blackpool (England). The range of social dance models were found to range as follows: daily social practice time on the famous Victorian ballroom floor in the Blackpool Tower; a weekly Dance4Life programme of dance for senior citizens by a dance studio – The Ballroom – in Sacramento, and visits to residential homes by qualified ballroom dance instructors; and both a programme of escorted visits to a church or village hall for social dancing around Belfast, and a choice of ballroom sequence dancing nights available through private dance instructors. If body movement is generally utilitarian and materialistic in that it has an end purpose, then dance is thought of as less utilitarian movement - or even non-utilitarian movement - with an implicit aesthetic or communicative end in mind. Whilst anthropologists agree that dance, or ‘structured movement systems’ (Kaeppler 1985), have been found throughout the world and across the spectrum of time – ‘to dance is human’ states Judith Hanna (1979) - anthropologists have disagreed as to how to interpret dance whether as functionalist (Radcliffe-Brown – dance creates and represents social cohesion); structural-functionalist (dance as release/safety valve); dance as ethno-choreography (historical folk dances) or notation versus inquiries into the inner meaning and feeling of dance; dance as ritual drama (Victor Turner’s occasions of anti-structure and communitas, ‘the performance of healing’ [Laderman and Roseman 1996], or Afro-Brazilian spirit possession [Cohen 2007]); or dance as postcolonial expression (Afro-Caribbean Carnival pastiches of European colonial dances). Recently, anthropologists have turned to dance to explore issues of gender and sexuality (Cowan 1990; Kirtsoglou 2004), globalisation (Román-Velázquez 1999; Waxer 2002) and transnational movements and appropriations (Savigliano 1995; Wulff 1998) in dance. In all of these traditional and modern approaches to the study of dance, dance is examined as ‘the layered “choreography” underlying lived activity’ (James 2003: 91). Within this loose form of choreography there are undercurrents of personal and group expression and resistance whether as nineteenth century Pissenlit Carnival marchers in transvestite costume parading though the streets of Port of Spain (Trinidad) over Easter (Campbell 1988); Beni-Ngoma satirical anti-colonial musical ‘marchers’ found in late-nineteenth century East Africa (Ranger 1975); contemporary latino salsa dancers in California using their partnered social dancing as an expression of identity and ethnicity in a modern mobile society (Skinner 2007); the national and religious overtones of competitive Irish dancing with its straight armed jumps and fast foot flourishes or the Catholic church sponsored state ban on folk dancing at the crossroads in rural 1930s Ireland (Wulff 2007); or, finally, the risqué eighteenth century whirls from modish waltz dancers on the Continent (Wechsberg 1973).

Social ballroom dance, in particular, has its own distinctive history. Marion (2008: 20) defines ‘ballroom’ as ‘a formalized style of partnered dancing’, noting that it has both competitive and social aspects to it. Whilst the ballroom partner dancing derives in part from fifteenth century French courtly dancing, the modern twentieth and twenty first century ballroom dancing is split between social and competitive follows national divisions and trends. For example, competitive ballroom dancing typically features Standard (or Modern) dances such as waltz, tango, Viennese waltz, foxtrot and quickstep; and Latin dances such as cha cha, samba, rumba, paso doble, and jive. Social dancing at ballroom events or in ballrooms or between ballroom dancing competitions can include all the dances above – waltz, quickstep and foxtrot, cha cha and jive especially – as well as other popular partner dances such as lindy hop, nightclub two step, West Coast swing, the hustle, merengue, salsa and Argentine tango. Indeed, a dance studio will typically teach all of the dances named here, the social as well as the competitive. Whereas the competitive ballroom dance events are supported and governed through professional dance organizations such as the World Dance Council (WDC) and the British Dance Council (BDC), and amateur dance organizations such as USA Dance, and the International DanceSport Federation (IDSF), social ballroom dance events do not have to have such regulation or syllabus guidance and can be found in dance studios, night clubs, community centres, hotels and even inside or outside of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

The ballroom partner dances and locations evolved from lessons in dances such as ‘the minuet’ taught by dancing masters in Renaissance European courts; to eighteenth century ‘dancing schools’ for teaching deportment and finishing off girls into ladies; and nineteenth century ‘assembly room’ social dances - such as at Bath - for the leisured class to perform their social skills: take tea, socialize, ‘court’ and, of course, dance (see Franks 1963). Ballroom dancing is linked with fashion such that new dance crazes such as the fast-paced Polka-mania swept in to British upper class circles from Czechoslovakia in the mid-nineteenth century, just as the daring waltz had taken over from Austria a century earlier. These ‘danceflows’ extended in all directions: English Country Dance was exported to France in the seventeenth century; wryly titled Contredanse Anglaise, it was to become a base to the nineteenth century French Quadrille square dances.
In the 1920s, ballroom dancing’s popularity spread to the masses. In Britain, popular ‘palais de danse’ were built such as Hammersmith Palais. In 1925 Franks (1963: 187) notes that the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden was a palais in all but name as it fell under the ownership of circus promoter Bertram Mills. Dance halls were built independently or through chains such as Mecca or Rank, formerly two British multinationals now merged into the Rank Group and which now concentrate upon bingo and casino gaming, perhaps following their ageing clientele? The World War II years of deprivation, resistance and rationing, and immediately thereafter, are the golden era of the dance halls in Britain as dance crazes such as the jitterbug jostled with social ballroom dancing to fill out these cavernous public performance spaces. To give an example, London’s largest venue, The Empress Hall, catered for some five thousand dancers when it was not used for ice skating shows, circus acts and Wild West spectaculars. Victor Silvester - a ballroom dancing pioneer and champion of the 1920s with a franchise of over twenty dance studios, and bandleader of The Victor Silvester Ballroom Orchestra in the 1930s - played live in these London Dance Halls. Silvester also hosted the long running BBC series The Dancing Club (1941-1958) which he introduced with some basic ballroom steps; marketed his music (over 75 million record sales between 1930 and 1980); and disseminated social ballroom dance steps and etiquette with his million-selling book (V. Silvester 1977).

Silvester cut an immaculate figure. His bon hommie reserve is perhaps emulated by the ballroom instructor of Strictly Come Dancing TV fame, Anton Du Beke who plays up to – and verbally courts - the female viewers and supporters. Both figures and their media presence are well known to social and competitive ballroom dancers such as Sarah and others I worked with in the UK. Interestingly, Victor Silvester started his illustrious career as a ‘tea dancer’ at the Empress Rooms in the Royal Palace Hotel, Kensington. His grandson Christopher Victor Silvester notes that the young war hero ‘was recruited as a dance partner for ladies of leisure’ and that he only gained respectability from his family and threw off his ‘gigolo’ label when he won the 1922 World Standard Ballroom Dancing Championship (C. Silvester 2005), the first professional competitive ballroom dancing competition. Such tea dances continue in popularity as gentile afternoon events aimed more to the retired elderly towards the end of the twentieth century than the aristocracy at the start of the twentieth century. They can often be found in upmarket tourist venues such as Covent Garden, or hotels such as the Waldorf Hilton where it was reintroduced in 2007 (Anon. 2007) as a consequence of the resurgent popularity of dance brought about by US and UK with their celebrity dance programmes and their competitive ‘best dancer’ programmes (So You Think You Can Dance, Strictly Dance Fever) and UK (Dancing With The Stars, Strictly Come Dancing) - the last of which plays upon the long-running British ballroom extravaganza Come Dancing which ran for fifty years (1949-1998) and was broadcast from amateur events throughout the UK.

Victor Silvester grew his ballroom dancing business through the harnessing of new Modern communication technologies such as the radio, the record and the television. He also developed his studios using the business franchise systems, a structure which the sociologist Stuart Hall (1991) associates with Modern capitalism’s ability to penetrate and absorb peripheral markets. In the US, Moses Teichmann, a young Austro-Hungarian immigrant draftsman who had been learning to dance under the famous Castles - of Castle Walk ragtime fame – changed his name to make it less Germanic and applied his new dance skills to the business administration course he had just sat by trying to sell dance lessons through the post with the aid of kinetiscopes. This business venture failed but paved the way for a successful mail order business selling ‘dance footsteps’ which the purchaser could put on the floor and step on to music. On the back of this innovative use of draftsman skills, an international dance studio franchise was borne – Arthur Murrays, the second oldest franchise in the world. In its heyday in the late-fifties, Arthur Murray hosted a US television learn-to-dance programme (The Arthur Murray Party) which was a feeder for his 3,500 dance studios (now currently 225 [Anon. 2008a]). These are examples of twentieth century globalization and transnationalism as cosmopolitans at ease in a new world order (Wallerstein 1990; see also Hannerz 1996) harness the new communication technologies, emerging mediascapes and finanscapes (Appadurai 1990) to their own ends. They also show how dance trends and flows are tied to social change as well as economic change: Cressey (1968), for example, studied the rise of the ‘dime-a-dance’ taxi-dance hall in Chicago in the 1920s, describing them as a consequence of urbanization, the commercialization of recreation, a decline in moral standards, and the growth in immigration levels with a young male social grouping wanting to pay for entertainment with a member of the opposite sex. Sociologically, he saw them as an expression of the anomie of large modern city life. More recently, Thomas with Cooper (2002a, 2002b) have described this urban phenomenon less critically: in a study of older ‘social’ dancers in south-east London and Essex, Thomas (2003a: 210; see also 2003b, 2004)) refers to the social dancing as an opportunity for senior citizens to experience a ‘strong sense of communitas’, coming together, sharing a common interest, perceiving a common history, moving together with an embodied intersubjectivity. This is particularly strong in the sequence dance where the dancers execute the same moves at the same time and, for Thomas, suggests “a different time when social solidarity, appeared to them to be more important than the cult of the individual or the ‘me’ generation of today.” When I interviewed sequence ballroom dancers around Belfast, Northern Ireland, they said that they preferred this dance because of its anonymity, because they did not stand out and reveal their mistakes. It was more about self-confidence than social solidarity.

II. Three cases of Social Dancing

In the following sections, I present findings from a study of senior social dance in Blackpool, in Belfast and around Northern Ireland, and Sacramento. I felt it necessary to dwell at length on the history of the dance hall for it is an environment which features in the interviews and the memories and nostalgia of many of the social dancers I interviewed in the UK. I am not attempting a comparison of the three locations. This is more an examination of different forms of senior social dance as social inclusion. The research is in very different locations, with people with very variable levels of dance knowledge and mobility, and uses a variety of research methods (interview, participant observation, questionnaire, observation) over a range of time periods. It is therefore a sampling of senior social dancing to show the different social dance models in use and to show the beneficial affects of social dance amongst senior citizens.

A. Blackpool, England – Social Dancing as ‘Serious Leisure’

For this leg of the research, I spent a week in Ballroom in the Blackpool Tower, dancing, interviewing, observing, and talking with the senior social dancers. I was accompanied by a young professional competitive ballroom dancer who gave me fresh insights into the social world I was exploring. Blackpool is the Mecca of ballroom dancing. It is where the British National Dance Championships, and the Blackpool Dance Festival are held. Typically the adult ballroom dance events take place in the Empress Ballroom in the Winter Gardens, a cavernous Victorian ballroom which can hold up to three thousand people. The British public, however, will be more familiar with the Blackpool Tower Ballroom from regular Come Dancing TV broadcasts. It is the Blackpool Tower with its built-in circus, aquarium, amusement rides and ballroom where you find regular social dancing taking place. There, in the middle of the structure, is a large ballroom – with a capacity of 1,900 people - with Victorian-like paintings and ceiling decorations fitted in 1934-5, and a world-renowned Wurlitzer organ. It is a place dating back to 1894 and now billed as ‘The Ballroom Experience’ where tourists and locals can visit, dance to the organ or circus band, and take tea and cakes.

During a Winter Season week at Blackpool, I was able to interview staff, visitors and dancers at The Blackpool Tower Ballroom. There, off-season, tourists and social dancers sheltered from the wind and the rain and watched, listened and danced away their mornings and afternoons. The dancing was gentile and proficient, ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins 2007) for social dancers who train and practice their dancing skills and used the Blackpool floor to enjoy the social dancing environment, the live music and organ, their fellow dancers and transient audience. Despite the constant movement in and about the room, there was a relaxing atmosphere and a feeling of great continuity that featured in the interviews. Chris Hopkins, one of the Ballroom organists, recounted a narrative history of the ballroom and its dancing, noting that it was 111 years old, that he had been playing there for hourly rotations with other organists for the past fifteen years, but that the main organ legend was Reg Dixon who played non-stop from 1930 to 1970. It was only in a new era, in 1980 that all-day dancing had been introduced. The history of social dancing in the Blackpool Tower is connected with that long history of twentieth century tourism, the rise of the seaside resort and its demise:

CH: In 1980 they introduced all day dancing, which required another organ.
JS: Was it mostly in evenings then, before …?
CH: Yeah, it was mostly evenings, and the odd hour in the afternoon. But I think dancing was at its most popular, social dancing, certainly in its most popular round about the war years, and the fifties afterwards. And when the package holiday came in in sixties, it was still strong then, but we saw a dwindle then and Blackpool started its long, long decline from there onwards.[iii]

A veteran organist, Chris ‘reads’ the audience and the dancers and tries to tune into their tastes whether ballroom, Latin or sequence dancing. During the Summer high season, a resident band plays to the visitors. During the Winter low season, the organist plays with occasional breaks from the circus band as they move from the circus to the Ballroom to play a set. The social dancers appreciate the live music, responding to it and following it just as much as the musician is responding to and following the dancers. Román-Velázquez (1999) found similar emergent relationships between dancers and musicians in social salsa clubs in London.

Hopkins continued with descriptions of the social dancing taking on a party atmosphere over the weekends when the retired dancers are joined by the dancers who are at work during the week. Then, over the weekend, the social dancers swell from the week-day numbers of between 2-4 up to 30, to several hundred dancers all dancing and socializing and reappearing each week “a bit like being on a cruise ship”. Hopkins regularly saw retired social dancers over his years as an organist and talked to them from the stage. The longevity of the dancers always surprised him:

CH: Without a doubt most of the people that have come in here during the week are old people. Now you’re talking between seventy and ninety years old, so I think the dancing definitely prolongs due to the exercise they get, a fantastic load of exercise, so you know, they wouldn’t think anything of getting up at 85, 86 year old and doing a rumba or a samba for instance.[iv]

This was shared by the Social Dance Manager in charge of The Ballroom. The Manager’s favourite couple is a “gentleman who’s 96 and his 87yr old wife” who can only walk with the assistance of sticks, but can dance around The Ballroom as soon as the music starts playing.

JS: Can I ask you about social dancing and health amongst the elderly?

Manager: Yeah. I think it keeps them very much alert, you know. I mean I’m saying that these steps that they learn them parrot fashion but they still have to learn them, they still have to know where they’re going to do them. I think it also … the tempo of the music they’ll change to the tempo of the music so you listen to a four two beat or you listen to a four four. You have to have the mental capacity to know that. And I’ll tell you what, it is actually quite physical. I was actually shopping one day and that elderly couple – you know in their nineties - came walking towards me, both them with a stick [really] really. And I sort of looked and went, oh it’s you, I recognize from the dancing and she said, “oh hello, you work there don’t you?” And I said, “well what’s the sticks for?” “Oh we have to walk with a stick in the streets” [really]. I have never seen them walk in here with a stick. All of them are like that, even if it’s a bad day sometimes he does bring the stick in [yeah] but when he’s on that floor you would never believe that’s he’s a gentleman that has to walk with a stick. So, it’s amazing … and I’m sure a lot of it is mental [yeah] so … you know he doesn’t dance with a stick [yeah] you know, and I’m sure it keeps them going you know.[v]

Here, social dancing contributes to the longevity of the dancers, giving them something to enjoy and focus upon - to live for. It quite literally fires off the endorphins and takes away the aches, pains and disabilities associated with old age. It is only when the music is over and the moving connection with one’s partner subsides that the arthritis and rheumatism return to haunt the social dancers.

The Social Dance Manager of the Blackpool Ballroom recognizes the varieties of social dancer from the tourist walking through the Tower experiences to the tourist on pilgrimage to the Ballroom, to the practice dancers, the sequence dancers hiding in the dance crowd and the more social of social dancers such as Graham who often dances same sex sequence with his partner. She, the Manager, is in tune with the needs of the place and the visitors from 10am in the morning till 11pm at night. She even encourages her staff to dance with tourists to please them and has been known to twirl around the dance floor herself. Prince Philip social danced on the floor during their centenary celebrations.

I interviewed approximately another dozen dance couples, individuals and groups. In all cases, bar two, I found the employees words and sentiments echoed and reiterated. The two exceptions were from a competitive ballroom dancer who was disturbed that her dance future might lie in this slow and casual social dancing direction, and from a recent widower stepping in from the rain and curious about the ballroom dancing which his partner once did and brought him along to. The other dancers were all retired and committed to their ballroom dancing. One couple had spent their retirement money buying a flat near to the Ballroom so that they could enjoy the social dancing, another couple traveled from London once a month for a weekend of dancing there, and the others seemed to travel within an hour and a half’s driving distance. All attested to the benefits of the dancing whether physical health (weight management, blood pressure, posture, cardiovascular health and suppleness/mobility) or mental health (social contact, alertness). One couple from Huddersfield dance three times a week and spend the weekend visiting The Ballroom at Blackpool. They have been dancing ballroom for more than fifty years – thirty of those years together as a social dancing couple. In cases such as this, there is a strong togetherness and familiarity in their joint hobby. Also, there is a nostalgia for the dancer’s past in the sense that they and others were returning to an earlier time, a time of possibilities and a life to lead. This was, especially in the 1950s ballroom dancing and dance hall context, a time when the dancers were courting, looking for a partner to marry and raise a family with. In other words, the ballroom can be a space and activity giving on to potential, possibility and uncertainty, whereas now it was a space for memory, nostalgia and comfort for them.

The social dancers perceived themselves to be “a community from similar interests”, those proactive against the debilitations of old age, fitting in with the ballroom dance scene and knowledgeable about their hobby whether new or not. Sarah likes to come out dancing at least once a week and to stay in touch with “the personalities on the floor” and to heed her mother’s words “not to be a wallflower often quoted to her when she was growing up in the 1950s. Jenny “felt like a lemon” at her 25^th wedding anniversary, sitting watching all the dancing and not knowing how to join in. For Sarah, it was watching the dancing on a holiday cruise in the Mediterranean that started her interest in the ballroom dancing. She and her husband have now been social dancing ballroom for thirteen years. Both dancers enjoy feeling “elegant” in the “nice” surroundings. Both dancers and their husbands have more time for their hobbies now that their children have left home for university, and they wanted an activity which they could do together such as dancing. Jenny’s husband has prepared for his retirement by carefully phasing down his hours driving a taxi, slowly replacing them with more golf, swimming, choir and dancing. Whereas he is less enthusiastic about the dancing as Jenny, he is glad that they are doing a very affordable activity: “dancing is fair cheaper than drinking as a hobby,” he declared! Another couple juggled their part-time business shifts so that they could dance together in the middle of the week – “the high-point of the week for us; it got us through it all.”

The Wednesday afternoon is a well-known sequence dancing afternoon in The Ballroom. It is when the social dancers practising their ballroom are driven from the floor by sequence dancers dancing in a large circle, each couple following each other or the dancers in front. At the end of a set of dances, the floor emptied and a couple set up a hokey-cokey popular dance. This was deliberately including tourists and children. A social dancing couple led the dance and sang the gestures for the non-dancers to follow on. I thought that this was a good example of mixing and interaction and social dancing across the generations. It was only after the dance, when talking with the social dancing couple who had initiated that dance that I found out that it was deliberate to get the non-dancers and their children off of the dance floor because they were a potential hazard to the social dancers, disruptive and getting in the way. The entire conversation is as follows:

DANCER 2: When you’ve got children [yeah] they’re a nuisance having them running around the dance floor. It’s dangerous for them and us [yeah] and we’ve often said if they play the hokey cokey it’ll get the children up, they’ve been on the floor and then they can bugger off.

DANCER 1: It’s one of those social things, dancing. It brings people together and they start talking. You can sit in a pub and just talk with each other but no one speaks to you. Then you go into a dancehall and you’re talking to people.

JS: It’s true, yeah. Eye contact and the like.

DANCER 1: Exactly. People come from Yorkshire, the Midlands [yeah], and there’s one couple that used to come – we haven’t seen them yet but there’s time – come up from Exeter …

DANCE 1: For a week.

DANCER 2: Stay in a cheap B&B and they come here just to dance.

DANCER 1: Because there’s no dancehalls down there [yeah].[vi]

The ballroom space at Blackpool is jealousy guarded and preserved by the dancers. They have found a place and a pursuit which is time limited in that they can only attend on certain days of the week, in certain seasons – numbers decline when it is wet or snowy, and whilst they can – whilst they are still mobile. The interview with this couple from Stockport and their friend continued:

JS: Why do you dance?

DANCER 1: For pleasure.

JS: Yeah. My next question was how does it feel when you’re dancing? What do you get out of it?

DANCER 1: When they have music like this [yeah], absolutely fantastic.

DANCER 2: It’s a very emotional feeling isn’t it really.[vii]

The dancing is a constant in their changing lives. It is their comfort zone which they have been familiar with for decades. In salsa, I have argued for a ‘salsa second skin’ as dancers use the dancing to relocate easily in a modern mobile society (Skinner 2007: 498). This concept, this physical knowledge, ‘decontextualised’ according to Hannerz (1992: 257) is not new. Nor is it a symptom of a ‘disembedded’ malaise about society as Giddens (1991) would lead us to believe. These social dancers have danced through the generations and are intimately grounded with their localities and with their dance compatriots. To return to the social dancing trio, the dancers and their dancing acts are rooted in the history of the dance, the dance hall, and their lives:

JS: Can I ask, you’ve been at it a while, has it changed over the years?

DANCER 2: Well we have danced to Victor Silvester music.

DANCER 1: It’s the speed of the dancing that’s changed.

JS: Oh right.

DANCER 1: Yeah. The tempo has changed [yes]. Victor Silvester, he’s very slow where it’s a little bit quicker now.[viii]

The nostalgia for the dancing and the dancers’ youth was apparent whether the dancers were in high-spirits or depressed and lonely. A number of dancers were dealing with bereavement on and around the dance floor. They were revisiting the places where they danced with husbands of wives, reliving memories, or breaking the boredom and monotony of old age with a trip to the ballroom.

RES: Yeah, because when you get to my age, that’s all you’ve got to think about really is the good times [Right] and there aren’t many good times you can see in the future. Life gets boring when you get older. What are we going to do? Like at your age, whatever you’re going to do at your age do it now [yeah]. You just get up in the morning and just go from one day to the next.[ix]

In this interview, the dancer, a lone man, was returning to his lost partner’s love for the dance. He watched and relived and replayed memories rather than make new ones.

B. Belfast, Northern Ireland – Social Dancing “For the Craic”

If the social dancing model in Blackpool was one of serious social dancing, part practice for other occasions, then the majority of examples of social dancing in Northern Ireland follow a more self-entertaining model of social dancing “for the craic”. Whilst this study does not claim to be all-comprehensive, it has looked at social dancing amongst senior citizens in Belfast, Bangor, Hilltown, Aldergrove, Lurgan and Banbridge, a range of dance and performance events and practices where I have used a triangulation of research methods from participant to observer, interviewer and questionnaire sampler. Key evenings studied have been public classes and social nights, social dancing between ballroom competitions, and charity and community social service provision with a key ‘Reminiscence Through Dance’ programme supported through a Help the Aged grant and expertly facilitated by Ms Philomena Gallagher.

Social dancing in Northern Ireland has a particular social history and context to it given the history, scars and social traumas of The Troubles and the festering divisions between Protestants and Catholics. Music and marching have, in the past as well as the present, been used as markers to distinguish peoples and to mark out territories (Jarman 1997, Bryan 2000). Ballroom dance – unlike Irish folk dance - however, has always been an opportunity to bring people together: that is when they are allowed to – by church and parents with Catholics influenced by the 1935 Dancehall Act in the South and Protestants influenced by former First Minister for Northern Ireland the Reverend Ian Paisley’s declaration that ‘dance is an occasion of sin’ (Wulff 2003, 2008); feel safe to – one participant who grew up during the Troubles noted that she could not cross town to get to dances (see also Lysaght 1995); and have the resources to – Sacramento and Blackpool are more affluent locations where dance studios and dance lessons are dances are more widely acceptable practice.

A sample of 50 questionnaires from different dance events asking how often people dance, how they started and what they get out of the dancing revealed that some retired dance enthusiasts were dancing as often as 6 nights a week. Often parents had started the dancers dancing, and they had attended Irish Dance School. Younger social dancers fitted their social dancing in and around a schedule of gym activities. Most noted that the dancing was very affordable, costing between £10-40/week (“less than on booze ‘n’ ciggies”), with one person noting that they spent £100/week on lessons and dance accoutrements. Moreover, the dancing made them “feel fitter”, “feel freer”, better about themselves, “confident” and “elegant”, and more caring generally towards themselves. The social side was particularly important for the dancers and featured in nearly all of the responses: “Keeps me fit, great for socializing and a great laugh” noted one respondent, who subsequently turned out to be a dance instructor! There was also “a sense of achievement” for the dancers who still considered themselves students or learners. Besides losing weight and staying active, several questionnaire answers added “improved coordination” and “brain stimulation” to their answer for what they got out of the dancing. Several had begun dancing with friends and then stayed on dancing when their friends had stopped. One couple had met at a dance thirty years ago, and they continued to dance together in memory of and to celebrate that first meeting.

The social ballroom dancing in Northern Ireland has been shaped and encouraged by an Actively Ageing Well Programme (2002-2007) that was run between Age Concern Northern Ireland and the Health Promotion Agency for Northern Ireland. This was an initiative to put in place 6-week physical activity introductions for older people that ranged from salsa to ballroom dancing, tai chi to walking and swimming (Beattie and Greer 2006). Over 60 community and older groups were supported throughout Northern Ireland, and I am pleased to say that a large number of them are still very active. A part of my research has been to attend some of the ‘Reminiscence through Dance’ events facilitated by Philomena Gallagher as an ageing in an inclusive society activity. This community development programme was rolled out across all of Northern Ireland, but has a particularly strong base of support around Craigavon and Banbridge. There, social dancing features in the Craigavon and Banbridge Health and Social Services Trust programme of activities. This means that independent living senior citizens and those needing transport can be catered for. Events such as social dances are arranged in community and parish halls and can range in size from small groups of 30-40 (see Figure 1.0) with a hired DJ, to 300+ dancers with a live band and featured artists. For the ‘Reminiscence Through Dance’ programme, facilitated by staff over fifty years old and so accepted by the attendees, band music by the likes of Victor Silvester was played and a microphone was passed around the room for the participants to describe what they remembered from their dancing youth and from the music. This then prompted dancing in those able to dance, though it brought non-dancers and those not able to dance at the events.

Figure 1.0 ‘Reminiscence Through Dance’ programme, Lurgan – Northern Ireland (photo by author, 2008)

Ms Gallagher commented upon the programme as follows:

It’s a way of educating them and enjoy starting to take care, better care of yourself, as well as keep physically active but most importantly keep socially active, and one of the ways that they love doing that is through dancing because this would have been the culture.[x]

The senior citizens are aware of the physical benefits of dance, less so the social and mental. The companionship with peers is important. The getting ready for a dance reminds them of when they would have dressed up for ‘steppin’ out’ dancing in the 1960s to big marquees in the countryside which would hold several thousand dancers before traveling Irish showbands such as The Blue Aces from Waterford. These country dances would have had social waltz dancing and an Irish ceilidh dancing influence with similarities with Scottish country dancing. In many respects the dancing on offer to senior citizens followed a community care model of church, charity and state provision as opposed to the private serious leisure model found in Blackpool. It too is based upon nostalgia, but nostalgia for a fun past. Dancing in these social dancing moments takes the dancers back in time. Again, Ms Gallagher notes:

It’s such a great feel good factor [yeah] and they will just say, “we felt alive”, “we felt young again”, “we felt excited”, “we felt we could take on the world”, and that was all through dance.[xi]

Other interviewees all shared a knowledge of the nightlife of the 1960s, dancing at dancehalls and clubs around Belfast such as The Orpheus, the Starlight, and even Belfast Zoo’s Floral Hall.

Lewis Erenberg (1998) coins the term ‘Swingin’ the Dream’ when describing the creative transition from jazz to big band swing in the 1930s Depression era of post-Prohibition United States. This movement - and the showband movement in Northern Ireland and Eire of the 1950s and 1960s - are when dancing became a part of working class and youth culture, occasions when post-World War economic, social and sectarian (religious or colour) difficulties could be subordinated for the ‘ephebism’ of the dance (Gottschild 2000: 14).[xii] More recently, Juliet McMains (2006) has described the allure of competitive ballroom as a ‘glamour addiction’. Sarah’s experiences of growing up in Northern Ireland put her at the heart of this leisure explosion, and the ballroom dancing would have been more permissible and respectable than other dancing whether it be jive or swing at the time or even salsa more presently. She grew up in a liberal mixed Catholic family from the Upper Falls Road, encouraged by her parents to dance like they did. As she recalls, “my mother always thought that it would help me in my life and bring me ... me confidence to be with people and to be able to communicate with people and give them confidence too.” After a day working in a shirt factory, Sarah’s evenings were “exhilarating, dancing the night away! […] Happy memories!” More poignantly, Sarah is now dancing approximately three nights a week with a new younger crowd of friends, maintaining the routine of life she promised to her dying husband four years ago. She has lost weight from her new-found dancing (“it keeps your body in good repair”), and is experimenting and playing with her balance and weight with the dancing on ice where edges are so critical. She feels uplifted and ”invigorated” from the dancing and meeting new people, and her heart is relaxed and strong from the waltzing in time with the music.[xiii] Finally, Sarah attributed her dancing to keeping her safe and not just sound; the dancing made her a more tolerant and cosmopolitan individual. It kept her out of the Troubles:

Well I think that’s why I never was involved with the Troubles because the dancing was a mixture of everybody. [Right] They come from the Shankill Road and the Falls Road. And nobody would ask you what you were or who you were. We just loved dancing full stop. And I had friends ... actually I danced with men, partners that come from the Shankill Road but we never had any problems like. If you like dancing, you go dancing. You’re not ... it doesn’t matter what people are or who they are really.[xiv]

Earlier this year Sarah celebrated her seventieth birthday with a reunion of dancers from her ballroom social years, and her more recent salsa nights. She remembered the old dance routines she had danced some fifty years previously alongside her new latin moves, and astounded everyone with her high energy levels. All this, she attributes to her passion for dance:

I was really taken aback when I arrived to see all my friends from long years back. Amazing to see them all and my whole life just fell in front of me. And then all my dancing friends were there and they had sneaked out my dancing clothes, [huh-huh] my shoes, my dancing shoes and I had to do a demo with them.

Yes, which was very exciting. And the people were amazed and I’ve had letters, cards from friends which said I ... my energy was overwhelming. What is the secret? And I just say ‘keep dancing’.[xv]

C. Sacramento, USA - ‘Dance4life’ Social Dancing

Sacramento, California, is the legislative capital of the most wealthy state in the United States. It has a population of approximately 2 million if one includes the metropolitan districts, and it has expanded some 10-15% since 1990 with in-migration from Asia, Latin America, the former Soviet Republics, and considerable resettlement from Los Angeles and San Francisco (Anon. 2008b). It is the most integrated and diverse city in the United States according to Time magazine and the Harvard University Civil Rights Project (Stodghill and Bower 2002). This is evinced in the composition of the population: in the city precinct of 400,000 residents, a 2000 census (AreaConnect 2000) estimated a population breakdown of 20% latino (88,000 people) and 40% white (165,000 people) with 63,000 African American and 68,000 Asian. 11% of the population are over 65 years of age. Furthermore, whereas Belfast has the one main dance studio which has survived through the Troubles, Sacramento has five or six key dance studios, some of which have been in existence since the 1930s. There is, then, more of a tradition and affluence to dance and to attend dance studios and dance nights about Sacramento. There are dance programmes of visiting professional teachers teaching the elderly in residential homes; private dances put on for the retired and semi-assisted living communities; and a public dance programme – Dance4Life – organized bi-weekly in The Ballroom of Sacramento, Sacramento’s largest dance studio at 3,750ft², a newish studio founded in 1996 and now grown to support some 17 professional teachers. This studio caters for most forms of dance ranging social hustle and West Coast Swing to competitive ballroom, Argentine Tango, Zumba fitness (latin dance aerobics), and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons it has a popular social ballroom dance for “seniors 55 plus”.

James is one of The Ballroom organizers and describes the afternoons as “popular, very social times”. They begin with 30 minutes of dance music which acts as a warm up session. This is followed by a short ballroom lesson for another 30 minutes, and then two hours of non-stop ballroom dancing music. Attendance is between 30 and 80 people for the afternoons, with sometimes several hundred coming in for the party dance nights on the weekends which are for all ages. The progamme has been running for 12 years and has been deliberately modeled on the tea dance, with refreshments and cake freely available at all times. It has become a regular meeting place, drawing retired dancers from a 60 mile radius. The clientele is of a similar age span as those dancing in Blackpool:

The ages range from as young as 55 up to 95. We have people in their late 70’s who are very avid and capable dancers. That couple just passing us, they are in their 80’s and they have been dancing together for 50 years. It is wonderful exercise for them. They recognise that and they come to be able to socialise as well as practise their dance. It is tremendous exercise and improves their balance, their physical abilities.[xvi]

James continued with his description of the afternoons by mentioning the characters whom they have come to know, and noted that the lessons and the dances are geared the same way as the evening classes for the general public. Even the quicker tempo dances such as the quickstep and the Viennese waltz are included in the afternoon dance schedules.

At the start of this report we heard from Bill, a dancer at The Ballroom of Sacramento. To continue with his biography, Bill is a scientist who took early retirement when he was fifty. The last fifteen years of his retirement have been “the most wonderful fifteen years” in his life. Bill’s retirement has enabled him to change his life and to take on the identity of a dancer. He dances in the evenings as well as the afternoons, and finds his thirst for dancing unquenchable:BILL: So it’s a different phase of life. A lot of people they don’t realise that this is the best time of your life because you have more from your life, if you have a little bit of pension left, because you get some money so you don’t have to worry about money. You don’t have to worry about competing with anyone.JS: How does the dancing make you feel?

BILL: Oh absolutely wonderful. There is nothing in the world like it to me. When you get the right partner that can move with the music you do and synchronise it’s the highest high that you can get! It’s almost like on drugs, almost. But even better. It’s amazing. Really great. I come here at 7 o’clock, I leave at 10/11.[xvii]

Bill also reflects upon the other dancers around him and how the dancing has been a new – and in many cases improved – lease of life for themBILL: The people that you see in here, and they started two to four years ago, most of them they could barely move with the music, they couldn’t dance. They were not … I would say they were not even healthy, they were very timid. But now a few years later they’ve been taking lessons, they move around, they talk to people, they ask you to dance.[xviii]The social dancing makes them more self-confident, more agile and mobile, more healthy and more happy. Bill’s friend Penny has been dancing at The Ballroom since the inception of Dance4Life twelve years ago, and has been social dancing around Sacramento for twenty-seven years. She likes to feel herself moving and being moved. It keeps her young and is a part of her weekly timetable of activities: she only dances four times a week now since a knee operation curtailed her daily dancing. Now in her seventies, Penny has used her dance hobby to transition into retirement. And it continues to help her: “It’s good for your heart and your lungs and your muscles. I don’t know of anything it doesn’t help, even your outlook on life because you see people and see how other people are.”[xix] Jessica has gone even further and has used her retirement to change employment as “a computer programmer of twenty-five years sitting” to that of trainee dance instructress teaching in a converted room at home and practising, training and recruiting students at the weekly tea dances. Now sixty, and dancing since 2000, Jessica felt that she burnt out from the demands of her programming job, but that she could never feel the same way about her dancing:

My husband and I started dancing in 2000 and we became really addicted to it: I love it. I absolutely love it. We practised every day and then about a year and a half ago I decided to become a Dance Instructor. It’s very good exercise and as a teacher I also had to learn to lead and I really appreciate what the men have to do because they really have to use their brains. It’s not what step am I doing, but where - how does that go, where does the lady go, how do I get her to go there, how do I make sure I don’t run into somebody else. They have to think a lot. The lady’s good, she just has to follow. But she should know.[xx]

For Jessica, Bill and many of the other dancers at the Dance4Life afternoons, they have never been more active, more healthy and more alert.

One social dancer noted that he had deliberately prepared for his retirement. He had retired two months ago, but had started ballroom dancing seven years earlier to prepare for this time. For him, the social dancing was a practical form of relaxation and exercise: it got him out of the house and mixing in the community. It also gave him a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. In this case, the dancing was a gentle replacement for employment with the state. Another former state worker, also Chinese, came dancing to stave off any possible feelings of loneliness in his retirement. He brought his new girlfriend with him could not speak English but could dance well and so was able to communicate and join in with the other social dancers on the dance floor and with him off the dance floor.

There were two regular characters at the Sacramento Ballroom Dance4Life dance afternoons, a retired race horse jockey and a retired US Marine. Frankie trained Sea Biscuit and other horses in the 1940s before getting injured and retiring. Now 88 years old and still a ladies man, he dances twice a week to get rid of his arthritis (“I’ve got arthritis, but when I’m dancing, there’s no arthritis pain. It goes away completely”).[xxi] He is practising for a dance holiday cruise up the West Coast to Alaska with his new girlfriend. Jacob is nick-named ‘the road runner’ for his speed around the ballroom. He is 84 and has been social dancing ballroom for the past 71 years. As a young Marine fighting in the Pacific during World War Two, Jacob used his dance skills to get guest passes off base so that the officers wives could have a man lead them in their dancing. He met his wife during the war and has been dancing with his ‘Irish feather’ ever since. Dancing is their self-medication. They are dancing with each other for approximately six hours a week: they try to be on their feet for six hours a day doing weight bearing activities; moreover, Jacob’s wife has Parkinson’s Disease and on dance-days Jacob loads her up with pro-enzymes to stop her shakes. They find that there is more space and it is safer dancing at The Ballroom. There is a dance etiquette and people are careful not to bump into each other, so they are unlikely to injure themselves or fall over. They are able to pace themselves and are even able to use the next-dance signs to work out which dances to sit out on.[xxii]

Andy K., the dance programme co-ordinator, has been running the dance programme for the last three years. He sees it as “a sort of low impact aerobics for seniors”.[xxiii] In other words, the Dance4Life programme targets dance as exercise for the actively retired. The programme started as a tea dance but with a schedule and a lesson, it has become more of a bi-weekly dance exercise session with tea and cake supplied (including day-old bread supplied by a 92yr old baker and social dancer). Because it is an indoors activity, the dancers are not affected by the vagaries of the weather or by the insecurities of the shopping mall. The dancers are “having a good time and have people of their own age to talk to”.[xxiv] Finally, Andy pointed out – and reiterated the point from other interviews – that the social dancing was especially good at helping offset Alzheimer’s disease:

ANDY: It helps with Alzheimer’s disease because it makes you think, yeah. Especially for the men. Because as they’re men you have to lead the lady and at the same time you have to basically dance in two directions, you have to dance in the present and the future and that keeps your mind going and it forces you to think and there’s something been written about that it might help with the Alzheimer’s so that’s why.[xxv]

In these three cases of social ballroom amongst senior citizens, dancers come together in a variety of fashions, connecting – mostly with their life partners – for several hours of exercise, enjoyment and practice. At each of these dances, cakes, sandwiches and tea are provided or are available for purchase. In the Blackpool Ballroom, dancers are able to practise their moves and routines on a quality dance floor. There is more socializing on the dance floor in the Northern Ireland case studies with party dances such as the conga and hokey cokey. There is a strong group feel at the Dance4Life events that begin with dance lessons and caters for bringing on a range of dancers. There is more switching of dance partners there too, though the dancing was the most conventional with no same sex dancing visible (male to male same sex dancing was apparent in Blackpool, and female to female dancing was commonplace in Northern Ireland – largely due to the sex imbalance with a higher male mortality rate than female). Except for the Blackpool dancing, the events had a localness to them with the hustle and West Coast Swing included in the dance programme in Sacramento, and some ceilidh group dances in the Northern Ireland dance programme – in this last group, those that attended but could not dance would join in by singing or tapping along to the music.

III. Dance In-Tense

Whether performing, practising, or dancing for fun, the senior citizens in Blackpool, Sacramento and around Northern Ireland attest to the benefits of social ballroom. The dancing gives them an agility and nimbleness which is both physical and mental. It gives the dancers - whether new to the dancing like Jessica or a dance veteran like Jacob – an enthusiasm for living, a happiness, and releases unrealized or previously dormant levels of motility. It creates communitas. It makes people feel young again, in touch with others for Sarah, or even renewed as in Jessica’s case. It staves off illness, and even counteracts decline.

Medical and health studies attest to the qualitative findings presented in this report: dance augments mental, emotional and physical well-being and counteracts social isolation (Corbin and Metal-Corbin 1997; Young and Dinan 1999); the mental challenges of dance decreases dementia (Verghese et al. 2003); dance is restorative and recuperative in its marshalling of levels of concentration and release and dissipation of accumulations of energy (Lagan 1986); and dance fosters inclusion, understanding, acceptance and tolerance. In fact, Lima and Vieira (2007: 140) conclude their study of ballroom dance as therapy amongst the elderly in Brazil by suggesting that through partnered social dance, ‘the body may change from being a source of oppression to a source of freedom.’

One particularly interesting finding from this comparison of social ballroom dancers in Blackpool and Sacramento, and around Belfast, has been the role ‘tense’ plays in the social dancing, and how the past, the present, and the future all feature in the dance afternoons. Nostalgia for ‘days gone by’, as well as ‘bygone days’, is evident in all three tea dance afternoons. It is in the Blackpool venue, live organ music, reliving dancehall nights from the 1950s in Belfast, as well as those moments of pleasure grasped during World War Two amongst the Sacramento dancers. Moreover, in social ballroom dancing, the dancers are rekindling body memories of former movements and intimacies. ‘Dancing precipitates an incredible longing. To recover the pleasure - in the imagining and remembering, the connecting again with my limbs, my breath, my body is to ignite desire,’ recalls Gotfrit (1988: 123) during her participatory study in discos of women’s nights out. This is a nostalgia not just for the authentic, or for the real of an organic sense of community. It is a nostalgia for one’s former self. Gotfrit felt this pull, the ‘pleasures of memory’ in her body, her locating of her self by ‘interfacing’ with others through the dance. This was all triggered in her as soon as she heard the first bars of music and felt a wooden floor beneath her dancing shoes. These nostalgia strings are played upon expressly by the new compilation of Victor Silvester (2001) tracks traded under the evocative title ‘You Danced to these Bands’.

These senior social dancers are not dancing retrospective mental and physical memories, repeating themselves from their earlier years, replaying poignant memories with the mind and the body. Gotfrit (1988: 129) claims that the dance floor is where ‘desire and pleasure are courted and orchestrated’, where its public regulation can be relaxed, especially for women. Furthermore, she (126) adds that it is on the dance floor that one sees of experiences ‘the preamble to other pleasures of the body, in the forms of flirtation, romance, and sex’. My experiences participating and observing dancing amongst senior citizens is that it is generally less predatory than Gotfrit’s reported dance environment. The dancers I worked with were either there as couples, or were there for the entertainment and community than finding a – new – life partner. As such, for all the nostalgia which attracted them to the dance events, and their memories of previous dance nights and dance partners, they are very much dancing in the present. They are concentrating and flowing anti-clockwise around the dance floor “in the here and now” of the dancing. The stimuli of the music, the ambience, the people brought about their responses. The immediacy of dancing, rather than the prelude to the dancing or the tea or return home after the dancing, resulted in the feelings of happiness, the sudden absence of aches and pains, the release of endorphins, the loss of self-consciousness, and the sudden motility realised.

The dancers were also dancing for the future in several senses of the word. The leaders were dancing their moves, leading their partners, and leading into the future as moves fill space ahead of them both physically and temporally. The leader has to think ahead and predict where moves will take the social dancing couple, what will best show them off, how to avoid other couples in their anti-clockwise rotation around the dance floor. Furthermore, in terms of a future, the dancers are acting out a fantasy of the imagination. They are playing a ‘Fred and Ginger’ in a new era, creating and dancing-out their proto-narratives. Appadurai (1996: 3, author’s emphasis) describes ‘the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity’. He argues that we live in a postmodern condition wherein we can realize our fantasies and are no longer curtailed by class, feudalism or slavery. On the dance floor, these twenty-first century social dancers are able to develop perhaps dormant alter egos, to have motility realized, to become new subjects such as in the case of the new dance instructor Jessica, or the new dance addict Bill. Whether or not there was a disconnect in one’s ‘body-self relationship’ - a break between ‘storied bodies and storied selves’ (Sparkes 1999: 26): between lived body and self and imagined body and self before dancing, or during the period when dancing lapsed in one’s life as with Sarah - social dancing in ballrooms and community centres is a performance of self-actualisation. Renewal can be seen on and around the dance floor. In sum, this leisure engagement makes ‘the young-old’ category of senior citizen and can be considered ‘an egalitarian [people’s] version of the high life as they come together for social dancing’ (Walsh 1993: 118). Brown et al (2008: 91) conclude their study of Carolina shag dancing amongst the elderly on similar lines to mine: that meaningfulness derived from social dancing leads to a continued engagement with life - past, present, and future - and holds the ‘promise for successful ageing’.

This report has sought to bring social dancing "out of the dark" (Ward 1993: 29). It moves away from the traditional functionalist approaches to dance; from dance as cathartic activity; dance as courtship; dance as a choreographic play between resistance and self-regulation – to dance as social inclusion and social, mental and physical healing. The study of social dancing amongst senior citizens has hardly been a study of dancing by twilight, it has been one of altered premises, shattered stereotypes, and pleasant memories.[xxvi]

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[i] Interview with ‘Bill’, Bangor, Northern Ireland, May 2008.

[ii] Interview with ‘Sarah’, Bangor, Northern Ireland, May 2008.

[iii] Interview with Chris Hopkins, The Ballroom, Blackpool Tower, February 2008.

[iv] Interview with Chris Hopkins, The Ballroom, Blackpool Tower, February 2008.

[v] Interview with Social Dance Manager, The Ballroom, Blackpool Tower, February 2008.

[vi] Interview with social dancers from Stockport, group no. 3, The Ballroom, Blackpool Tower, February 2008.

[vii] Interview with social dancers from Stockport, group no. 3, The Ballroom, Blackpool Tower, February 2008.

[viii] Interview with social dancers from Stockport, group no. 3, The Ballroom, Blackpool Tower, February 2008.

[ix] Interview with social dancer spectator, The Ballroom, Blackpool Tower, February 2008.

[x] Interview with Ms Philomena Gallagher, ‘Reminiscence Through Dance’ coordinatory, September 2008.

[xi] Interview with Ms Philomena Gallagher, ‘Reminiscence Through Dance’ coordinatory, September 2008.

[xii] Gottschild (2000: 14) defines this as ‘the full force of individual and/or collective power, drive, attack, vitality, and flexibility. It manifests itself as a combined sensual, spiritual, and metaphorical intensity and energy’.

[xiii] Here, Sarah was citing from recent medical research into social dancing waltz therapy for heart failure patients (Belardinelli et al 2008). Interview with ‘Sarah’, Bangor, Northern Ireland, May 2008.

[xiv] Interview with ‘Sarah’, Bangor, Northern Ireland, May 2008.

[xv] Interview with ‘Sarah’, Bangor, Northern Ireland, May 2008.

[xvi] Interview with ‘James’, The Ballroom of Sacramento, California, August 2008.

[xvii] Interview with ‘Bill’, The Ballroom of Sacramento, California, August 2008.

[xviii] Interview with ‘Bill’, The Ballroom of Sacramento, California, August 2008.

[xix] Interview with ‘Penny’, The Ballroom of Sacramento, California, August 2008.

[xx] Interview with ‘Jessica’, The Ballroom of Sacramento, California, August 2008.

[xxi] Interview with ‘Frankie’, The Ballroom of Sacramento, California, August 2008.

[xxii] Interview with ‘Jacob’, The Ballroom of Sacramento, California, August 2008.

[xxiii] Interview with Andy, Dance4Life co-ordinator and dance instructor, The Ballroom of Sacramento, California, August 2008.

[xxiv] Interview with Andy, Dance4Life co-ordinator and dance instructor, The Ballroom of Sacramento, California, August 2008.

[xxv] Interview with Andy, Dance4Life co-ordinator and dance instructor, The Ballroom of Sacramento, California, August 2008.

[xxvi] ‘Sarah’s’ words reiterated the work of the Reminiscence through Dance programme when she remarked: “It’s not like sort of remembering The Troubles which were all the negative, reminiscing that goes on I think.” (Interview with ‘Sarah’, Bangor, Northern Ireland, May 2008). And the Social Dance Manager at The Ballroom attested to the pleasure involved in just watching other people’s pleasure: “I love it. [Yeah] I only came for twelve months and that was twenty-eight years ago (laughter). I worked on level five which was the children’s play park and then I came down here and I’ve said to the boss, “I don’t want to go elsewhere now”. I want to stay in here now [yeah]. I mean it’s my age group in here, you know.” (Interview with Social Dance Manager, The Ballroom, Blackpool Tower, February 2008).

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