Sophia Money-Coutts on the hell of dancing in public
Do you remember the first dance you went to? I was 10 and it was in a village hall in the Scottish Borders. I wore blue eyeliner and a hessian sack that was apparently working night shifts as a dress. Mum plaited my hair. The overall effect was Saturday Night Fever meets Little House on the Prairie.I loitered on the sidelines of the village hall, wondering how to join in with the throng in front of me, then I plunged in towards Douglas, the class heartthrob. I barely knew what a crush was but I understood that dancing with Douglas, standing close to him while shaking my hands as if trying to dry them, was weirdly desirable.
“Douglas, do you want to dance?” I squeaked, when I finally reached him.
“I’m busy,” he replied, nodding his head towards the prettiest girl in our
year, Jen, with whom he was already dancing. My sack and I slunk away to a plastic chair where I drowned my sorrows with orange squash and waited for Mum to pick me up.
Dancing has been a source of fear ever since, which is why I was so dismayed to read this week’s headlines about Snowball the cockatoo and his dance moves. According to a study in the US, Snowball’s ability to flap his tail in time with Queen and Madonna shows that anyone – or anything – with a brain and “certain cognitive capacities” should be able to dance.
It’s a marker of “developed socialisation”, apparently, whereas scientists had previously wondered whether dancing was an activity that humans had invented and finessed over the centuries (these scientists had presumably never studied folk dancers).
For those of us who shrink from dancing, who dread the moment at a wedding when everyone’s summoned to move in time to Stevie Wonder and you haven’t quite had enough wine, it’s unhappy news. There is no longer any excuse for our belligerence towards the dance floor. If a small feathery creature with a brain the size of a walnut can dance, so should we, says the study.
Except, sorry, but I think it’s nonsense. Some of us are just no good at it. After that first episode in the village hall, I went on to observe the strong correlation between those who were good at dancing and those who snogged at teenage parties. It was deeply unfair, I realised, but those who confidently swayed their hips and jiggled their shoulders were simply more alluring than those of us who couldn’t. And so it proves through life. Look at Mick Jagger and Carlos Acosta – absolute sex gods. But Mr Bean and 2010 Strictly Come Dancing competitor Ann Widdecombe? Not so much. I have tried. Goodness I’ve tried. You’re deemed a stick-in-themud if you don’t dance. A prig. Too self-conscious and uptight. So every now and then, I sashay on to the chequered floor and point my fingers in the air as if warning everyone it’s about to rain. I
Those who were good at dancing were the ones who got snogged
rotate my shoulders like I’m at the chiropractor. I smile and mouth along to Girls Just Want to Have Fun even though my actual idea of fun is a cup of tea with my shoes off. And yet I feel as awkward as I ever did, as stiff as a brick. I’m slowly making my peace with it. Twenty-four years on, I’m almost over Douglas and that scarring episode in the Scottish village hall. Just please don’t tell me that a parrot with a mohawk is more “socialised” because he knows the moves to the Macarena.