‘There should be more places to dance in public and we should mandate dance spaces at work’
PETER LOVATT, aka Dr Dance, is a hip-swivelling, toe-tapping, bottomwiggling academic who has made it his life’s work to study the benefits of dance and share them with the nation. At 55, with his wayward greying curls, horn-rimmed glasses, waistcoat and tie, he looks the very model of an English eccentric, especially when he shows you his groovy moves.
But the absolutely joyful thing about Dr Dance and his manifesto (yes, he has written an actual political manifesto in which dance is at the fulcrum of his policies) is that he insists it doesn’t matter one jot whether you can dance or not.
Oh, and do stop worrying what you look like when you get on down, is his mantra. You will be primed with the same onslaught of happy hormones whether you have two left feet or twinkle toes like Darcey Bussell.
“We are literally born to dance,” he booms. “Have you seen all those wonderful, spontaneous outbursts of dance on social media as exhausted frontline care workers in scrubs dance together to keep their spirits up?
“What I’ve noticed is a lot of spontaneous dancing going on. When we are in a crisis situation we revert back to forms of activity that bond us and help us get through.
“Dance brings people together. We are seeing people dancing together in an authentic way, just as they did in the Second World War. When we hit difficult times people come back to the most natural things.
“Dancing bonds societies and makes the individual safer within the group. People who dance together like each other more, feel more similar to each other, trust each other more and show more social behaviour – that is, they are more willing to help each other.”
And now, of course, is the perfect time for us all to uncover and rediscover the benefits of moving to music – whether you do so with your family, by yourself, or using online tools such as Zoom to dance “virtually” with others in their homes.
Dr Dance’s new book has the latest research sitting alongside brilliant dance “recipes” for elevating mood and boosting our mental and physical health.
According to him, moving to a beat can even make you look better.
“I want people to know that dance is an amazing activity, underpinned by scientific fact,” he enthuses.
“It’s the surprising secret to being smarter, stronger and happier, and it also makes people more beautiful too. We should all be dancing more. There should be more places to dance in public and we should mandate dance spaces at work.
“It makes us more productive, more connective, more creative, more prosperous, fitter, healthier and happier.”
He pauses for breath and I wonder if he’s about to pirouette out of his chair – after all, this is a man who has a ballet barre installed in his home as an essential household item – but instead we take a nifty quickstep through some of the science.
Not least the fact that a study published in the British Medical Journal last September found that regular dancing led to a 20 to 30 per cent lower risk of depression and dementia, a 30 per cent lower risk of colon cancer, a 20 per cent lower risk of breast cancer, and a 20 to 35 per cent lower risk of cardiovascular disease. “And it also has a hugely positive effect on our problem-solving ability,” he insists.
THIS is something the doctor – who trained for five years as a dancer and appeared in professional musical theatre before side-stepping into an academic career – has discovered through research at his Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire.
“At my research lab, where I am using science to study the relationship between movement and the brain, I have found that different types of physical movements affect our ability to think in different ways.
“There are some problems, for instance, that have just one correct answer.
“Then there are problems with potentially hundreds of different answers.
“These multiple-answer problems require ‘divergent’ thinking.
“In our lab experiments we found that people who did 20 minutes of improvised dancing became more creative in the answers they had to divergent-thinking tasks. For example, before dancing, participants could generate four or five alternative uses for common objects such as bricks or newspapers, but after dancing they could generate seven or eight.” Then there is the
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