11 August

The breakdancing made me think. Those who either aren’t good at dancing, or have no experience at it, often feel too intimidated to do it for fear of ridicule. Modern social dancing has no structure at all, which is terrible for people like that, it’s like telling somebody who wants to learn the piano to get up on stage with an experienced band and just start improvising, before they even know where Middle C is. Their friends will say ‘don’t worry, nobody looks or cares’. But they do. And they laugh. It’s a great example of how the removal of certain formal structures in life, in this case any sort of structure to dances, was sold as a freedom but actually disempowers people. When you watch much older dances, say in period dramas, what stands out is how they were precisely designed to scaffold people into a relationship in movement. Good dancers could take that structure and improvise all they liked. By removing all of the structure, only the naturally gifted are really comfortable.