Last week I watched two hours of amateur community dance. I would have squirmed in my seat once. But now I thought it was brilliant.
Now this is a sentence I didn’t expect to find myself writing: last week I paid to watch two hours of intergenerational amateur community dance.
There were white-haired women in leggings dancing with wooden spoons; a dancer with mobility issues sitting on a chair, surrounded by people in green T-shirts; a new mum snapping her body and stamping her feet over the nappies, toys and phone chargers she’d emptied out of her rucksack. I drank tepid white wine out of a plastic cup; a woman played the cello while a loose collaboration of human bodies rolled and jerked across an empty stage. And do you know what? It was brilliant. I loved it.
Nell Frizzell is the author of The Panic Years, out now through Bantam Press. Arwa Mahdawi is away
