New Book ‘Dance Your Way Home’ Explores Dancing’s Cultural Status

A new book that dives deep into the history of why we dance, the symbolism behind every slide, and dance floor communication will make its way to music lovers’ hearts in March 2023. Penned by music journalist Emma Warren and published by Faber, the Dance Your Way Home book is an “intimate foray onto the dancefloor.” 

In an Instagram post, Warren said the idea of writing a book that interconnects memoir, social history, and cultural motifs came from a couple of lines from her last book, Make Some Space. The fragment passed along the message that “dancing in the dark is a human need, that we’ve been doing this forever, and that it’s a kind of medicine.”

“Three years later, after multiple conversations and tonnes of research, writing and editing (not to mention recreating dance moves in my flat) there’s a book.”

Instead of focusing on the dancey groove we all fall victim to when our favorite song drops, Dance Your Way Home shifts focus towards the “interconnected histories of the overlooked place where dancing happens.” 

Whether at an afterparty, sweaty rave, Irish dancehall, or youth center, dancing generates its own culture away from the beats. 

Faber’s blurb about Dance Your Way Home reads: “Why do we dance? What does dancing tell us about ourselves, individually and collectively? And what can it do for us?”

Calling it a “landmark social history of the dancefloor,” Faber said that the Dance Your Way Home book opens a new cultural horizon.

“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 egalitarian communication across borders and languages.”