BLACKPOOL DOES THE CHA-CHA-CHA TO CHINA
The city’s famous ballroom festival, a British institution since 1920, decamped to Shanghai this week as its organisers targeted a new billion-pound market
TWELVE crystal chandeliers twinkle in the ornate barrelled ceiling above the polished parquet. Since 1920, they have shone upon the pick of the dance world as they showcased their talents each year on the vast 12,500 square foot cutting-edge sprung dance floor of Blackpool’s Empress Ballroom beneath the gaze of a panel of exacting judges.
For nearly a century, the rococostyle venue has been home to the Blackpool Dance Festival – the most famous and prestigious annual ballroom dance competition on the planet – but this year the Olympics of the ballroom dancing world transported its sequined glitz 6,000 miles to Shanghai in China for a five-day festival that attracted 2,800 competitors from 25 countries.
It may come as something of a surprise to hear that ballroom dancing is increasingly as popular as chopsticks throughout much of east Asia, and last year the famous Blackpool festival saw more entrants from China than any other country.
Its organisers realised that rising Chinese demand was an opportunity too good to ignore and decided to export the glitter of Blackpool to the Far East – together with the famous 12-piece Empress Orchestra which was booked to fly over to accompany the dancers.
“Over the past few years we have seen an influx of Chinese dancers competing in Blackpool,” says festival director Michael Williams, who set out to target China’s 80million practitioners of dances such as the cha-cha-cha and the foxtrot, including 100,000 who dance at a competitive level. “China is an emerging nation in ballroom dancing without a doubt,” he explains. “It’s a billion-dollar business.”
Williams set about replicating the Empress in Shanghai, including its proscenium arch frontage and a large stage for the famous orchestra. “The elements that we have brought are exactly the same set-up and music that we have in Blackpool,” says Williams.
ON THE face of it there may not be too many similarities between Shanghai and Blackpool, but in fact both cities have a strong ballroom dancing heritage dating back to the 1920s and also feature fine examples of Art Deco architecture – including Shanghai’s Paramount dance hall, which is known locally as Bai Le Men or ‘“Gate of a Hundred Pleasures”.
In its heyday in the 1930s, Shanghai’s Paramount was one of the world’s most legendary ballrooms. “A place where Chinese tycoons and gangsters mingled with pretty girls and foreign adventurers in an atmosphere of giddy modernity,” as food writer and China expert Fuchsia Dunlop puts it.
Barely a decade before that, the idea of Chinese men and women dancing together had been scandalous, but in the interwar years Western-style social dancing had taken Shanghai by storm and the Paramount was ballroom in town.
“But like the rest of Shanghai’s decadent pre-revolutionary past, the old dancing scene disappeared after the communist victory in the Chinese civil war,” says Dunlop.
In 1956 the Paramount closed and later reopened as a cinema for revolutionary films. By 1990 it had fallen into such disrepair that a piece of falling masonry killed a passing pedestrian. Following this tragedy a Taiwanese businessman, Zhao Shichong, came to the rescue with a multimillion-pound refurbishment and Shanghai’s ballroom dancing scene underwent a renaissance. And it was not alone – ballroom became increasingly popular throughout China.
The Chinese call ballroom dancing Jiaoyiwu – meaning “Friendship exchange dancing” – and many like to dance in public places, especially in the summer when dusk heralds the smartest the arrival of thousands for large group dances in city parks and public squares across the country.
These take place most evenings and are either line or ballroom-style partner dances. But music from the speakers sometimes leads to complaints. In Chengdu, angry neighbours have hurled water balloons at dancers while in Beijing a man stood trial a few years ago after firing a double-barrelled shotgun into the air to express his rage at the noise they were making.
“Now we’re facing market transformation, dancing in squares has become a way to connect,” says Dai Jianzhong of the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences. Dancing in the squares offers a platform to make friends but increasing numbers are learning to a high level and competing internationally.
A five-year deal has been signed for the Blackpool Dance Festival (China) which will bring in £500,000 for Blackpool’s Winter Gardens, home of the Empress Ballroom, after a deal was set up with a Chinese partner last year, when the first Chinese festival took place. The intention is for the new festival to become one of the highlights of the dancing season.
“The festival is a fabulous event originating from 6,000 miles away,” says May Liu, projects director. “I think it’s great that Chinese people have had the opportunity to compete in this way with other dancers from all over the world.
“Although I’m based in Blackpool now, I am a Chinese national, so it was lovely to speak to the competitors. It was a mixture of pride and excitement that such a great, world-famous event has finally come to Shanghai.”
The Chinese internet giant Alibaba live-streamed the event online from a sports stadium normally used for basketball practice.
“It was always going to be a calculated risk trying to replicate elements of the Blackpool Dance Festival in China,” says Michael Williams. “However, thanks to everyone’s support we delivered a festival to be proud of.”
Communications director Carole Houston said that the excitement in Shanghai last year when the first Blackpool Dance Festival (China) took place, was “almost tangible”. “It was a delight to witness the dancing mania everywhere. The people we spoke to were quite fascinated that Blackpool was actually a place, so hopefully they’ll come over to the North-west to see Blackpool for themselves.”
Ballroom has also enjoyed a revival in the UK in recent years after the extraordinary success of Strictly Come Dancing, which has fuelled a boom in people taking up a dance form that had its heyday in the 1920s. Back then the dances in the ballrooms consisted mainly of waltzes and two-steps.
Exotic Latin American dances such as the cha-cha-cha, rumba, samba and paso doble were as yet unknown.
All that changed in 1961 when the first British Latin American Tournament was held followed by a professional event a year later.
Increasingly, the Blackpool Dance Festival began to attract foreign competitors and in the past few years there have been 50 countries represented at the event with entrants from Japan, Germany, Italy and the US.
Sadly for the organisers of the Blackpool Dance Festival in Shanghai, however, the vast Chinese megalopolis is already twinned with another English city... Blackpool’s north-western rival Liverpool.