Time to come dancing
Even my kindest friends wouldn’t think I was designed to be a dancer. I avoid taking to the dance floor at any kind of event, and on the odd occasions I’ve been “persuaded” – usually after a bottle too many – the outcome is not pretty.
I was born with two left feet and no sense of rhythm, so the idea that I’d become one of Britain’s “Dance Champions” would be on the extreme end of improbability. But it’s happened, and this week I was among the delegates at a Dance Summit in the City of London alongside the likes of Arlene Phillips, Lisa Snowdon, Angela Rippon and Mark Foster.
To avoid any ambiguity, I should explain that being a Dance Champion means that we champion the cause of dance in the UK – not that we’ve won a prize. And in fairness there are some other people more like me in the group: our chairman is Rod Aldridge who’s a successful businessman and we have colleagues from the Arts Council and the Central Council for Physical Recreation as well as some patient civil servants in attendance.
The aim is straightforward: “to inspire, enable and empower people of all ages and backgrounds to try dance” – and to help meet the national targets of getting more people involved in physical activity.
So my involvement isn’t, thankfully, because of potential in the Pasa Doble. It’s because it ties in with the sport and activity legacy around London 2012 that I’ve talked about here before – and also, inevitably, because there was an idea at one stage that we should concoct a national dance event that might have links to the Olympic opening ceremony.
I’m pleased to say that the expert choreographers and I are as one here: the biggest event on the planet is not the place for amateur dancers, and much as we love him it’s not the right venue for the John Sergeant experience.
But there’s a lot we can do. The BBC’s Sport Academy included dance as part of its repetoire for keeping fit, and the evidence suggests there are millions of people who wouldn’t take up sport but might well be persuaded to dance if they could find the right environment.
Worries – and I know this only too well – include: “will I make a complete idiot of myself?” “am I the wrong shape for dance?” and even “what do I wear if I turn up for a dance class?” – with those being the kind of questions we need to address if people are going to have a bash.
Miguel Doforo, Darren Bennett, Angela Rippon, Mark Foster, Arlene Phillips and Rod Aldridge attend the launch
Now, this may seem a long way away from the 100 metres and the brilliant sport we hope to see a couple of years from now, and you could argue activity through dance is something that should be happening anyway – irrespective of the fact we’re the host country for the OIympics. But what I witnessed at the Dance Summit and I pick up frequently is a growing sense in the UK that 2012 is a special year and it does have the potential to inspire people above and beyond the routine.
Sometimes this can be represented by people feeling grumpy if they suspect they’re being left out: there’s been some crossness in the Dance world that the Cultural Olympiad didn’t seem to have much dance in it. But at its best it’s a feeling that this is a chance of a lifetime to do something uplifting and different, and if we can’t create the right spirit in Britain in 2012 then we might as well give up.
So we’ll see how dance fits into that, as we continue the quest to define the sporting legacy for the nation too. This remains not as straightforward as it might be because as in many sectors there’s almost always good work underway at grassroots level across the country, but it struggles to achieve national impact and often there are overlaps between different ‘official’ bodies and problems in co-ordination. “Dance Champions” is one attempt to address that.
But the question that’s been nagging away as I’ve been writing this is can I say I’ll have a go myself? Still not sure, to be honest. But I just used the Dance Champions website to see whether it had any classes near me, and it does – and as I’m now firmly in middle age a group called “Mature Moves” caught my eye. The cheering thing is I’m still too young for it: it says it’s for people between 60 and 100. So I’m afraid I’ll have to cede my place at that one for eight more years at least.
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