I WON'T DANCE, DON'T ASK ME

I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, Madame, with you
My heart won't let my feet do the things they should do

Yes, the lyrics are rather clumsy, but not half as clumsy as my usual galumphing performance on the dance floor: I do not smoothly glide, I proceed in a circular direction like a robotic lawn-mower and I am best described as a lady-kicker rather than a lady-killer. This sad fact embarrasses me, as actually I love dancing and have tried hard to become reasonably adept, to little avail.

The rot set in at the age of 8 when I declined to attend the school Scottish dancing classes – for some idiotic reason I thought this activity “pansy”. I missed a treat and although now I can just about manage The Dashing White Sergeant and the Eightsome Reel (if someone barks a few orders); more involved affairs like Strip the Willow or The Duke of Perth are to me a closed book. It is not as if my family were non-dancers: my dear Father, who liked to shake a leg, shuddered to remember he once, aged 10, danced the Highland Fling over crossed swords in full tartan kit to an admiring audience (I would have slashed my toe-nails). My paternal grandfather was a dancing teacher and ballroom proprietor who knew all the early 20^th century dances backwards and indeed taught Mr Asquith how to do the Black Bottom in about 1925. So dancing is in my blood – it just hasn’t reached my feet.

My estrangement from Scottish dancing is based on technical incompetence and has nothing to do with the garb. I love wearing the kilt and with a black jacket and silver buttons above the Clan Donald tartan, I am every bit the proud Lord of the Isles. I certainly do not have knobbly knees, but rather fleshy and robust ones, perhaps, I confess, not entirely things of beauty.

Mr Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennett dance

Maybe I was born a century too late: I enjoy the processional kind of dance (when I know the steps) of the 19^th century era – the Schottische, say, or the Roger de Coverley - or those energetic tuneful delights the Polka or the Viennese Waltz. I greatly envied Mr Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennett in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice dancing, at Netherfield, English Country reels like The Barley Mow and when Miss Bennett discomfits Darcy with searching questions, to the steps of the alarmingly named Mr Beveridge’s Maggot.

Faint echoes of these dances survive as I used to relish the Military Two-Step, the Paul Jones and not least The Gay Gordons. At the age of about 12, my parents insisted I acquired a few social graces and with my brother, was despatched to a dancing teacher and from her learned the Modern Waltz, Foxtrot and Quickstep, supplemented by the Tango (spin turns a speciality) and Rumba. My expertise was shaky and when my dear Mother dragged me to the floor encouragingly, she could not suppress the odd wince as I crushed her dainty feet or led in an unscheduled direction; but I could now at least hold my own.

These skills soon became irrelevant in the late-1950s. The Quickstep was passé, the anarchic American Jive of the golden era of Swing (Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller etc) gave way to the demented gyrations of Rock n’ Roll. Nobody needed a dancing teacher – it was all ex tempore. I frequented dance-halls, the classic girl-meets-boy rendezvous in those days, and had a degree of success with the ladies. It was not always an easy road. I recall espying a sensational gum-chewing blonde girl wearing white boots and a silver lamé dress and I bore down on her oleaginously. On asking her to dance, I was briskly rebuffed with “F*** off, you toff!” You cannot, alas, win them all.

In my university days, Chubby Checker brought us The Twist, not a difficult one to master if you could picture yourself as a hyper-active screwdriver and great fun too. I also recall impressing the easily impressed with my expertise at The Madison with a cunning backwards hand turn. With the advent of the Beatles with their unforgettable songs, frantic dancing and huge decibel-counts were routine. I hopped happily through the 1970s and in the 1980s my final bow was learning The Shake, not exactly a dance, but more a kind of physical collapse to music, where you imitated a twitching jelly.

I have really sat out the latest dance crazes but now that I am much in Greece I admire my lovely Greek wife who dances a mean Syrtaki, enthusiastically joins in the celebratory Kalamatiano or the local wedding favourite Samiotisa. The male Greek, hormones ablaze, dances in the front of the line in the Tzamikos, holding a kerchief from the second in line and is expected to kick a great height shouting “Opa!” like a crazed Tiller Girl, a role I politely decline. My aged joints simply would not take it.

I happily pay tribute to those who dance well and to their idols – Fred Astaire, Jack Buchanan, Gene Kelly and John Travolta and I still give the palm to Fred and Ginger dancing Cheek to Cheek in 1935’s Top Hat

Heaven
I'm in heaven
And my heart beats
So that I can hardly speak
And I seem to find
The happiness I seek
When we're out together
Dancing cheek to cheek

So much pleasure was given by this couple with their mastery of the dancing medium and their infectious charm. Their films are their monument but an idiosyncratic building in faraway Prague also serves as a shrine to them and to the Muse of the Dance, Terpsichore.

The Fred and Ginger Building, Prague

SMD

12.01.13

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013