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Faber Faber Dance Your Way Home A Journey Through the Dancefloor.
This book is about the kind of ordinary dancing you and I might do in our kitchens when a favourite tune comes on. It's more than a social it's a set of interconnected histories of the overlooked places where dancing happens . . .Why do we dance together? What does dancing tells us about ourselves, individually and collectively? And what can it do for us? Whether it be at home, '80s club nights, Irish dancehalls or reggae dances, jungle raves or volunteer-run spaces and youth centres, Emma Warren has sought the answers to these questions her entire life. Dancing doesn't just refract the music and culture within which it evolves; it also generates new music and culture. When we speak only of the music, we lose part of the story - the part that finds us dancing as children on the toes of adults; the half that triggers communication across borders and languages; the part that finds us worried that we'll never be able to dance again, and the part that finds us wondering why we were ever nervous in the first place.At the intersection of memoir, social and cultural history, Dance Your Way Home is an intimate foray onto the dancefloor - wherever and whenever it may be - that speaks to the heart of what it is that makes us move.
400 pages, Paperback
Published April 4, 2024
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1136 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
July 9, 2023
Part memoir, part cultural history, this wide-ranging exploration of dancing and the dancefloor is well written and interesting. Certain sections really resonated however a 400 page book, with some quite theoretical sections, was more than I needed, despite being a passionate dancer now into his 60th decade.
3/5
3/5
January 24, 2024
This is one of those books that you read with your phone or your laptop nearby, whether this be to look up a song mentioned (more on this later), a venue, a cult figure, and at times you read with enough space for your room to move about in. That’s to say, I tried out the Electric Slide, among other dances mentioned throughout the book, by myself.
Unlike other non-fiction I read, what makes ‘Dance Your Way Home’ stand out is the indomitable enthusiasm that Emma sustains throughout the entire book. As stated by the Music Venue Trust, 2023 was the worst year for venue closures, which isn’t surprising given the consistent trend over the past decade, with more and more nails being shoved into the U.K. and Ireland’s dance history in the form of the pandemic, austerity and the cost of living crisis. I imagine anyone reading the book will already know this, and this crisis is noted in the book, but not lingered on. Instead, Emma spends more of her time celebrating what has happened rather than what is happening.
Part One: Before the Dance is absolutely brilliant, and ironically when I spent the most time on my phone or my feet. The chapters are just so packed full of information as the book travels from Ireland, to the Caribbean, and to England tracing the history of folk dances and the ingenuity of immigrants, all of which is worth further reading (or viewing) on your own, which I guarantee will turn into many rabbit holes. My favourite fact I learned, which I noted in my phone as: “in the 1980s Jamaican immigrants in the U.K. would have reggae nights called “shebeens” which came from the Irish “síbín” which basically meant “home-brewed whiskey” or “speakeasy”, on top of all the songs which I didn’t realise where so influential, or heavily referenced even today.
When I started reading this book, I also compiled a playlist of (almost) all of the songs mentioned which you can find here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7fl...
Much of Part Two: The Dance uses the time-honoured tradition of namedropping, which is often a flex in this case. Emma threads her journalistic integrity, adolescence, and music taste into A&Ring a book that is brimming with more anecdotes than it can handle, ranging from scene pioneers, to one-hit wonders and from academics to dance talents who left the scene (and Mr. Zip).
This does slightly hinder the flow of the book during the early 90s chapters. As someone who has spent a fair share evenings watching the music archive shows on BBC4, this is well-charted territory, and here it feels more like a travelogue of London and satellite cities than a full excavation into the history of dance music in the way that Part One did, but this isn’t a major problem as it creates a background for some of the more touching moments in the book about Emma herself. I did call myself out on this when reading the line:
“Complaining about noise from the West Indian Centre is like asking Mount Fuji to stop blocking the view. It is literally antisocial”
Many of the venues and people mentioned or interviewed are minorities whose “stories of dancefloors are surrounded by stories of people trying to shut them down”, and are worth documenting in the way that they are throughout the book. And there are many other groups represented in the book that aren’t usually associated with dancefloor, such as children at youth clubs before graduating to night clubs or middle aged women (“There aren’t many places for middle-aged women to take up space”)
Furthermore, I would have personally liked a bit more criticism throughout the book, but I imagine Emma purposely favoured a “tomorrow for nuance, today for joy” ethos rather than a depressing account of loss, which leads to my favourite line in the whole book, coming near the end:
“The old story of ‘Rule Britannia’ and glorious empire is aging, and we haven’t developed a new one that enough of us can believe in.“
I think this perfectly summarises the situation. The country and the culture built by the Windrush generation is being torn apart and sold away by anti-social Tories who haven’t danced a day in their life, separating us from the places that brought us together by trying to politically divide us. The purpose of the book isn’t to counteract this, but rather provide a sort of working-class context: of the everyday dancing that was happening in the face of strife, and suggests that music and dancing are more consistent (and interesting) than any right-wing government, which I think is something worth believing in.
Unlike other non-fiction I read, what makes ‘Dance Your Way Home’ stand out is the indomitable enthusiasm that Emma sustains throughout the entire book. As stated by the Music Venue Trust, 2023 was the worst year for venue closures, which isn’t surprising given the consistent trend over the past decade, with more and more nails being shoved into the U.K. and Ireland’s dance history in the form of the pandemic, austerity and the cost of living crisis. I imagine anyone reading the book will already know this, and this crisis is noted in the book, but not lingered on. Instead, Emma spends more of her time celebrating what has happened rather than what is happening.
Part One: Before the Dance is absolutely brilliant, and ironically when I spent the most time on my phone or my feet. The chapters are just so packed full of information as the book travels from Ireland, to the Caribbean, and to England tracing the history of folk dances and the ingenuity of immigrants, all of which is worth further reading (or viewing) on your own, which I guarantee will turn into many rabbit holes. My favourite fact I learned, which I noted in my phone as: “in the 1980s Jamaican immigrants in the U.K. would have reggae nights called “shebeens” which came from the Irish “síbín” which basically meant “home-brewed whiskey” or “speakeasy”, on top of all the songs which I didn’t realise where so influential, or heavily referenced even today.
When I started reading this book, I also compiled a playlist of (almost) all of the songs mentioned which you can find here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7fl...
Much of Part Two: The Dance uses the time-honoured tradition of namedropping, which is often a flex in this case. Emma threads her journalistic integrity, adolescence, and music taste into A&Ring a book that is brimming with more anecdotes than it can handle, ranging from scene pioneers, to one-hit wonders and from academics to dance talents who left the scene (and Mr. Zip).
This does slightly hinder the flow of the book during the early 90s chapters. As someone who has spent a fair share evenings watching the music archive shows on BBC4, this is well-charted territory, and here it feels more like a travelogue of London and satellite cities than a full excavation into the history of dance music in the way that Part One did, but this isn’t a major problem as it creates a background for some of the more touching moments in the book about Emma herself. I did call myself out on this when reading the line:
“Complaining about noise from the West Indian Centre is like asking Mount Fuji to stop blocking the view. It is literally antisocial”
Many of the venues and people mentioned or interviewed are minorities whose “stories of dancefloors are surrounded by stories of people trying to shut them down”, and are worth documenting in the way that they are throughout the book. And there are many other groups represented in the book that aren’t usually associated with dancefloor, such as children at youth clubs before graduating to night clubs or middle aged women (“There aren’t many places for middle-aged women to take up space”)
Furthermore, I would have personally liked a bit more criticism throughout the book, but I imagine Emma purposely favoured a “tomorrow for nuance, today for joy” ethos rather than a depressing account of loss, which leads to my favourite line in the whole book, coming near the end:
“The old story of ‘Rule Britannia’ and glorious empire is aging, and we haven’t developed a new one that enough of us can believe in.“
I think this perfectly summarises the situation. The country and the culture built by the Windrush generation is being torn apart and sold away by anti-social Tories who haven’t danced a day in their life, separating us from the places that brought us together by trying to politically divide us. The purpose of the book isn’t to counteract this, but rather provide a sort of working-class context: of the everyday dancing that was happening in the face of strife, and suggests that music and dancing are more consistent (and interesting) than any right-wing government, which I think is something worth believing in.
October 4, 2024
Much has been written about dance music culture in the post rave era. Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture is one of many, and a personal favorite - the tagline even claims to be a journey through "Dance Culture", but in my memory fails to mention much about dancing. Few books have emerged from the dance scene that touch on *dance* culture. They all focus on that latter word in "Dance Music", the former often ignored.
Dancing was actually my way into rave culture. Breakdancing to Chaka Khan's I Feel For You was where it all started for me. One of my favourite festivals in the last few years wasn't a music festival but a hip hop dance festival called Summer Dance Forever, where after a day of dance battles, the best dancers in the world shared the dancefloor in the beautiful Amsterdam Paradiso every night. It might well have been the best week of my life.
And now finally we have a book that celebrates DANCE culture and investigates the many intriguing things many of us have experienced on the dancefloor but rarely see voiced out loud and appreciated; the way dance styles have unique accents in different cities, how you can communicate so much to other dancers with a single move, the mirroring and remixing of other peoples moves. And of course the pure joy and genuinely therapeutic healing powers of dancing. As I write this I'm still, almost a week later, bathing in the afterglow of a truly special weekend of dancing with some special people in a very special place in Carcassone we call the Temple of Gnostic Sonics.
Dance Your Way Home is by its very nature partly autobiographical; a journey through Emma Warren's own inhibitions, and growth through physical expression, and well buffered by incites by other dancers from various music and dancing styles, but always staying with the personal, not professional, value of dance. And it's a beautifully written and inciteful book. I shared a clip from the audiobook on Instagram recently. But it's such a wonderful book, I could have happily shared a clip from anywhere. I loved this book. I hope I bump into you on a dancefloor someday Emma.
Dancing was actually my way into rave culture. Breakdancing to Chaka Khan's I Feel For You was where it all started for me. One of my favourite festivals in the last few years wasn't a music festival but a hip hop dance festival called Summer Dance Forever, where after a day of dance battles, the best dancers in the world shared the dancefloor in the beautiful Amsterdam Paradiso every night. It might well have been the best week of my life.
And now finally we have a book that celebrates DANCE culture and investigates the many intriguing things many of us have experienced on the dancefloor but rarely see voiced out loud and appreciated; the way dance styles have unique accents in different cities, how you can communicate so much to other dancers with a single move, the mirroring and remixing of other peoples moves. And of course the pure joy and genuinely therapeutic healing powers of dancing. As I write this I'm still, almost a week later, bathing in the afterglow of a truly special weekend of dancing with some special people in a very special place in Carcassone we call the Temple of Gnostic Sonics.
Dance Your Way Home is by its very nature partly autobiographical; a journey through Emma Warren's own inhibitions, and growth through physical expression, and well buffered by incites by other dancers from various music and dancing styles, but always staying with the personal, not professional, value of dance. And it's a beautifully written and inciteful book. I shared a clip from the audiobook on Instagram recently. But it's such a wonderful book, I could have happily shared a clip from anywhere. I loved this book. I hope I bump into you on a dancefloor someday Emma.
August 15, 2024
I do not usually read non-fiction, but I’m so glad I read this book. I found some sections took more effort and perseverance from me as a reader because they seemed very heavily written for the purpose of providing a history lesson, with vast amounts of names, dates and places. I found consuming and maintaining this knowledge in large amounts draining at times - however I recognise this as part of myself as a reader as much as how the narrative is presented. As for the rest of the book, I feel like I’ve learnt a lot from the experience of reading non-fiction as well as learning so much more about what dance means and what it can do for us. I greatly enjoyed Warren’s commitment to stressing her thoughts on dance and its irreplaceable connection and impact to human experience. As a little side note, reading this book felt even more special after having met and spoken to the author and having had my copy signed by her.
January 29, 2025
I booked myself in to a dance fitness class as I finished this book.
Bring back school discos!
Bring back school discos!
May 23, 2023
If, as the old quote goes, 'writing about music is like dancing about architecture', what is writing about dancing like? In the capable hands of author Emma Warren, it manages to be an intoxicating mix of memoir and social history. This is the story of dance culture, told through the eyes, ears and bass-echoing belly of Warren. It's a tough ask, capturing on paper the feeling of dancing - in the kitchen at parties, in a smoke-filled nightclub, in a community hall class - but Warren has a good, toe-tapping stomp at it. I liked this, even as a total outsider to the dance scene (I never liked clubs and always danced like your middle-aged aunty at a wedding even as a youth). Consequently, the sections that described the 'in' clubs and crowds began to drag a little. What hit the mark for me was the honest, intimate and effective descriptions of the pure soaring joy generated by spontaneous, ordinary, life-affirming, celebratory dance.
October 19, 2024
I feel quite undecided on this book and I'm still unsure I should have rated it 3 starts instead of 4. In some ways, I feel like the book I read is not the book that was sold to me by the blurb. The blurb starts off with 'Why do we dance together? What does dancing tell us about ourselves, individually & collectively?' These are some of the questions I ask myself all the time, I love going out and dancing for hours and it makes me so unbelievably happy and I would love to understand why that is. However, this book doesn't extensively answer these questions. There are a few paragraphs here and there about a few studies that found that dancing helped more than exercise for people who have depression or how dancing whilst pregnant can improve the cognitive development of the baby but those were tiny sections of a 400 page book.
I love dance music so the chapters that generally described the birth of house, techno, dnb, dubstep and the dancing that came with it were interesting but I was generally done with the topic after the first 300 pages and I had a break in reading this book before that too!
Dance Your Way Home is very much a semi-biographical book about the history of dancing, specifically in terms of dance music so it's a very niche topic for a book. I would consider myself part of this niche but unfortunately I felt cheated as I thought this book was more about why we dance rather than a social history of dance and even if I can let that part go, the book felt too long for the subject matter.
I love dance music so the chapters that generally described the birth of house, techno, dnb, dubstep and the dancing that came with it were interesting but I was generally done with the topic after the first 300 pages and I had a break in reading this book before that too!
Dance Your Way Home is very much a semi-biographical book about the history of dancing, specifically in terms of dance music so it's a very niche topic for a book. I would consider myself part of this niche but unfortunately I felt cheated as I thought this book was more about why we dance rather than a social history of dance and even if I can let that part go, the book felt too long for the subject matter.
July 31, 2025
I went in expecting a more academic book, something of a cross between ethnography and musicology, and that is where the book starts with its exploration of Irish dancehalls and dance laws. After that though, it is largely a memoir of UK dancefloors from around 1980 to the present, with plenty of juicy sidetracks involving an ever-growing network of producers, DJs, dancers, journalists, doctors, and all sorts of normal folk. I have never visited the UK so I found this book very interesting and enlightening, especially the bits about actual clubs like Plastic People + the birth of dubstep. I don’t consider myself a dancer at all, but I still agree with the Warren’s thesis that everyone can and should dance their story. Just a little long maybe, it starts to repeat itself at a point. Still, read it!
Also, I felt an ungodly amount of envy reading this book…like why wasn’t I there?? Let me write for jockey slut!! Let me interview daft punk!! Let me dance to underground resistance!!!
Also, I felt an ungodly amount of envy reading this book…like why wasn’t I there?? Let me write for jockey slut!! Let me interview daft punk!! Let me dance to underground resistance!!!
April 18, 2023
I just finished the audiobook and thoroughly enjoyed this. I was a little worried at the beginning as Emma went through a community history of dance in the UK, more because it wasn't what I expected rather than a lack of interest. (Also, I'm not from the UK) Once she got into the more modern history of dance and nightclubs in the UK and across mostly the Western world, it really caught me. Emma was able to give life to the impact small communities, groups or locations made on the broader dance culture. She doesn't try to be comprehensive and is unapologetic in giving the history through her own eyes and the eyes of people who were in the scene at that time. This is a fantastic read for anyone who enjoyed dancing in clubs, or if a specific club or music scene has made an impact on your life.
Oh also, the author/ narrator is a pleasure to listen to.
Oh also, the author/ narrator is a pleasure to listen to.
September 15, 2024
This is recent history the way I like it: well-researched, with many conversations with sources, but also with a personal focus on the places and scenes that the writer used to inhabit. As with some other books I've read recently, this revolves around the work of individuals to create spaces where they can express themselves, where their souls feel comfortable.
I don't particularly like to dance -- walking is the movement that makes me feel like myself -- but I can see its appeal. I especially like the observation that dance is a technology for bringing people together.
I don't particularly like to dance -- walking is the movement that makes me feel like myself -- but I can see its appeal. I especially like the observation that dance is a technology for bringing people together.
June 17, 2023
In a surprisingly moving and wide roaming account of the dance, dancing and dancers, Warren joins the dots between community, solidarity, self-expression, anxiety, body image, youth movements and dance. At first I felt like reading about dance would be futile but this often very personal account is easier to relate to than a cold and academic analysis. In this respect it reminds me of Matthew Collin's Altered State, which can only be a good thing!
February 18, 2024
“Dance Your Way Home” is a beautifully written, deeply personal paean to the transcendent and unifying power of the dancefloor, made all the more poignant by being published at a time when club venues across the U.K. and Ireland are disappearing from the cultural landscape. Emma Warren adeptly captures how dancing is not just about the physical action or movement; it is an expression of collective joy, a form of solidarity as well as release.
January 7, 2025
I've been reading a bunch of books about dancing, dancefloors, raves, music -- and I think this is the best book on the topic of dancing and dancefloors, as a specific niche within the larger bucket of books. It's not the sort of book I'd encourage everyone to read -- it's rather niche and you'd need to have some dance experience to most deeply appreciate it.
Recommended pairing: read alongside "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" by Bill Brewster.
Recommended pairing: read alongside "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" by Bill Brewster.
January 1, 2025
Simply must read all to do with dancing culture linking to the foundation of musical landscapes of clubbing and clubs/venues of how it brought all backgrounds together to enjoy for leisure, as stress relievers, for passion, for sense of belonging with the masses of dancers and beyond. Very good guide for all DJs particularly.
May 28, 2025
Solid, but perhaps a bit more general than I expected. A bit hyperfocused on certain times, places and styles in a way that I think ultimately left this feeling a bit niche. Warren is writing from her own experience, which is appreciated, but this felt more anecdotal than like a deeply researched exploration.
August 15, 2023
Great memoir / cultural history of dance music. Had some fun anecdotes about now-legendary producers and learned a lot about famous clubs and parties. Unfortunately I can only read someone’s description of dancing so many times before my eyes glaze over.
Strong start, slow finish.
Strong start, slow finish.
May 5, 2025
A great book about modern dance and why we need it in our lives. It takes us partly through the authors life as well and her interactions with various artists and scenes. Learnt a lot from this book and if you enjoyed I’d recommend “last night a dj saved my life”
December 13, 2023
hope on the street core! ikyk!!
a little repetitive but ultimately quite special and captures why the dancefloor matters so so much to me and to others
a little repetitive but ultimately quite special and captures why the dancefloor matters so so much to me and to others
December 27, 2023
A fascinating book about the importance of dance and dance music to wellbeing and our histories
January 13, 2024
Read my review on StoryGraph here:
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https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews...
February 13, 2024
thanks Leah
May 23, 2024
4.5
Loved loved loved this, thank you Emma Warren for a personal heartfelt historic bounce across cultures, eras and their dancefloors.
Loved loved loved this, thank you Emma Warren for a personal heartfelt historic bounce across cultures, eras and their dancefloors.
October 21, 2025
A book filled me with nostalgia and joy. The bits about the West Indian Centre and Plastic People reallt hit hard as they were such special places to me.
December 2, 2025
It was not what I expected.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews