Roger Scruton is right – everyone is dancing the wrong way

The 71-year-old philosopher claims that today we dance "at", not "with", one another

Rex Features

I was stood quite close by, when two swing dancers started to shimmy. The crowd had drifted into a sort of malaise by this point, with a foot-tap here and there, and plenty of nodding, but nothing that would truly qualify as a dance “move”, quote-unquote. It was a fairly typical evening, in a fairly typical part of East London. A band was hooting away, and I seem to remember that it had something to do with New Orleans. Two beautiful fake palm trees, with Christmas lights for leaves, were being studiously leaned against by the drinkers who got there first. If there were enough palm trees, everyone would have adopted the same position.

It struck me, even before the swing dance began, that nobody had the faintest idea what to do with their bodies at this point – before the booze really took hold - no matter how fervently the saxophonist wailed, or how rapidly the drummer beat his cymbals. Needless to say, I was stood stock still.

Then came a sight to put a twinkle in the eye of Roger Scruton. The 71-year-old philosopher has written an essay, called ‘Dancing Properly’, that decries, in great and grumpy style, the dance of today. People have forgotten how to dance “with” each other, he says, and so are reduced to dancing “at” one another, everyone twisting to their own particular rhythm - the boy in the blue corner attempting some kind of knee-based manoeuvre, while the girl in the red spins around at a safe distance. It seems unlikely that Mr Scruton has done much field research. But I can vouch for him this far.

I like to dance, a great deal in fact, but am considerably better at it on my own than with a partner - which is, all things considered, rather the wrong way around. Of course, eye contact is easy. But then – forgive me – you come to the placement of hands, the motion of hips, and the general direction of travel. If both parties have different ideas on these subjects, the whole thing looks less like a dance than a very polite form of fighting.

So it was a wonderful surprise when these two people – who looked more or less like everyone else; as in, I don’t think they were plants – took off. They were like elastic bands, tangling and untangling. A space around them cleared. And they kept their bodies in touch (elbow, hip, finger, forearm) for the next half hour or so, in complete synchrony, if not in love with each other (who knows?) then definitely in love with a form of dance that could hardly be more passé.

I almost keeled over with jealousy. There is a part of learning to swing that is twee, a sort of try-hard anachronism, one step on the ladder to riding a unicycle. But what fun it looks in finished form. From their whirling bodies, I peered down to my feet, noodling about aimlessly in the same square foot of dance floor, and felt pretty blue.

Scruton savages techno-style dance music. It is, he says, “loud enough to make conversation impossible, and, provided the pulse is regular enough, to jerk the body into reflex motion, like the legs of a galvanised frog”. To me that cuts both ways. There is something terrific about succumbing to the level of a galvanised frog. Or there can be. Zap, zap, zap, thud, thud, thud. Yes nobody is touching, but one can see that there are two or three hundred other frogs leaping about and croaking around you, so there is some madcap togetherness. In any case, I don’t think I have the guts to head down to the local sports centre on a Tuesday evening and take another swing novice in my faltering arms. You get the dancefloors you deserve.

“Dancing Properly” will not revive the foxtrot, nor the tango. “Young ladies,” Scruton says at one point, “especially love the idea of formation dancing”, but this seems pretty finger in the wind, in terms of factual reliability. Still, wouldn’t it be fine if people, even a handful more, learned the steps. There is a lightness of spirit in touching people, swinging them, and swaying around. Let me lean you into a sweeping generalisation: society, particularly young society, likes to think of itself as a “no holds barred” kind of place, but in truth it doesn’t seem to know any holds at all. More’s the pity.