Dancing just for pure happiness

When I was young my parents wanted us to have a sense of our own, unique culture. So they signed us up to the Irish Society and made us learn Irish dancing. Now, my sisters both grew into great dancers, but I was a habitually lazy child who never did anything that might resemble hard work.

I did, however, enjoy the music. And with time the drinking. This, and not the dancing, led to a lifelong career as a party animal.

Through my 20s I was resentful about learning Irish dancing. It’s a limited skill that’s useful for exactly one day each year. The other 364? Well, I might as well have learned taxidermy for all the good Irish dancing did me.

Latin, salsa, interpretive ballet… anything would have been useful in early adulthood. Instead, I stood around hoping some beautiful woman would ask ‘‘does anyone know King of the Fairies?’’

I remember my grandfather telling me about the dances he used to go to back in the day. Way back when New Zealand had a culture of ‘‘going to the dance’’.

There was a formality to this dancing at the start. But as time marched onward, the formality faltered and rock ‘n’ roll allowed for a dancing that didn’t even need a partner.

Something happened somewhere along the road, because by the time I started going out to bars at the start of this millennium the men didn’t dance.

But the women… the women all danced like mad.

‘‘Let’s go dancing,’’ the girls would cry as we sat, pre-loading in cold flats.

But the blokes… well, toxic masculinity hadn’t been identified but we were up to our necks in the stuff. The men would stand around the periphery in a pack, drinking beer, talking rugby, and leering at the women.

Eventually, once the Canterbury Draught had joined the cut-price spirits in our guts, a few adventurous souls would stumble onto the dancefloor. But there was no fun in this dancing. It was upright and uptight.

The main dance of choice was that one where the guy stands behind the woman, feet planted firmly on the ground and making a slap-arse side to side movement with one hand. His dance partner, should she decide to be sucked into his tractor beam, would reverse into the dance and grind her backside against his frontside — stripper style.

Classy stuff.

Last weekend I had occasion to attend a great party. You know the kind? Where the beer’s cold, the weather’s hot and something’s in the air that makes everyone happy to be alive. And I noticed something. When the party really got going, everyone was dancing. Everyone. Like a bunch of pagans at solstice.

And I realised the younger generation has far less baggage than we did. There’s far less pressure to ‘‘be a man’’ and while shaking off bad old Kiwi culture, men have regained their pop.

Has Dancing With the Stars changed things? Or have enough Kiwi men been to raves across the world and perfected their big fish, little fish, cardboard box?

George Bernard Shaw said: ‘‘Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.’’

I think we have moved beyond that. There are now far easier ways to express horizontal desire.

I look out at a modern dancefloor and see people dancing for no reason other than pure happiness and I find myself wondering if perhaps dancing at its best is a vertical expression of joy – something we could all do with a bit more of in our lives.