 Mae wedi bod yn iawn i ddechrau'n byw sy'n sgwrs. Yn ymdweud, wrth gwrs, ac yn gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r gwaith o'r ddechrau'n byw ymweld. Mae'n bwysig o'r bwysig o'r blaenau a hwnnw o'r myfyd, mae'n cael ei ddweud. Dweud o'r blaenau, gweithio, mae eitha'n ddechrau, mae'n dweud o'r pwyllfa'n gweithio. Mae'n dweud o'r byw yn gweithio, ac yn dweud o'r seisiau. Ie, dwi'n dechrau'r dynnu yng Nghymru yw'r ysgolion o'r panel. Felly, rhai'r Catwll Melville, rhai'r dyrector regularlyn o'r fideo. Rhaid i'n ddod yn gwneud hynny. Rhaid i'n ddod, fe fyddai'n ddysgu o'r ddod yn ei ddweud. Rhywbeth i ddim yn gwych o'r ddod, Felly ddim yn ei ddod y siaradau. Rhywbeth o'r ddod, iechyd yn ei ddod, sefydlu'r sefydliadau i'r ddod, i'r ddod yn ddod, ddwy ym mwyaf, ymdill iawn, ar gyfer hynny'n ddysgu ynglyn â'r ysgol yw'r ysgol yma i'ch myfyrdd mwyfyrdd. Mae'n amser gwneud y panel o'r rhain o'r mewn ysgol yma yn ffilm. Mae'n ei ddweudio'r ffordd ychydig o'r ffordd ymdill, i'ch ddweudio'r mi'n myfyrdd a'r gwirioneddau mewn ysgol. A o'r tygodd yma, mae'n ffordd yma o'r ffordd mewn mwyfyrdd, mae'n ffordd mewn ffordd mewn mwyfyrdd ffordd a'r ysgol lastio. Alex and others. We did such a great job in the class that I invited to record a 2nd episode, which they did on Tuesday with a great bunch of guests and made music, and talked about dance paraot, music in London. Lots of cross over here I hope you can see. And today we're going to be talking about dance. In a way I think of this as the heart of the festival. We're on the 6th of En out of 12 so it's literally bang in the middle, dwi'n deall arweithio mewn fy hun. Felly wedi bod fy anodd hwn ar gyfer a'i bywm agorodd ddefnyddio, yr idea ar ôl mae'r byw penderwydd mwyaf a chi'n mynd, a rydyn ni'n gwneud mwyaf gwybodd mwyaf yn gallu a ddechrau hefyd yn yr synod, oedd yn ôl ei amser. Fy g sleddyddfyddau, oedrych yn galwant i'r sylgell amsysgolol, mae oedd amsysgol, ni hi'n oeddo'r diogelio mewn paidd骨feydd. I'm not a professional dancer, I may not even be a very good dancer, my partner doesn't think I am. I think I'm right. But I think if you ask my friends where you would find me in the many, many clubs and concerts and things that I've been to over the years, the answer would always be on the dance floor. That's where I, that's my safe space. That is also a place for me, which is not just a place to kind of let your hair down and relax, but it's also a place to think. It's a place to, you know, to bring your mind and body into synergy together, and synchronise it. And the music I was listening to, I feel that in order to understand it and feel it, I really need to move and dance to it. So that's kind of what I'm really interested in, and that's why I've got a wonderful panel together to talk about it. But it's part of a kind of two-parter, so next week, next Thursday, we've got the DJ Summit. You'll see these posters around. So I've got Linedine Nees and Nabilia Iqbal, Colin Dale, Techno-Legend, Charlie Dart and Harold Heath talking about DJing. But to me, these two kind of go hand in hand. That would have been too big a panel to have them and these wonderful people. We've got DJs on this panel as well, by the way. And I think the conversation will lead you to understand that you can't really separate the two. I mean, I have always been struck by, if you go and see the great reggae legend, Burning Spear, or the footage I've seen of the great jazz pianist Thelonious Mark, while they're making music, they will suddenly, one used to get up from his keyboard and dance. And people thought he was weird. But I completely understood it because it was him doing the same thing as he was doing it at the piano, but using his body to express it and the same with Burning Spear. He's an amazing dancer and he kind of channels the music that he's making. Welcome, come on in. So that's enough talking from me. I want to just say a little thing about the panel. The great thing about this panel is it was a joint venture. It just so happened that when I was thinking about who I could invite into this festival to do some of the chairing because I couldn't chair 12 panels as much as I would have liked to. My friend Emma came to mind immediately because I've seen her chair many, many panels and events brilliantly. And also she's written two incredibly good books, one about the total refreshment centre called Made Some Space and the other about Steam Down, the Jazz of Improvisation Collective. And it just so happened that that very minute when I was thinking about Emma, when we spoke to her, it turns out she was just finishing her latest book, which is All About Dance. So what a great coincidence. And between us we put together a panel of people that we thought would really bring something to the table. So age pattern you sit in here is someone that I had the privilege of interviewing before. I won't do the full introduction, I'll leave that to Emma. And I'm still waiting for the other person I invited who's been stuck on a bus somewhere close by. So he will come in and immediately he can have to go and sit down there. So be kind to him, Justin McKenzie, who runs Jazz Refresh. The other two I've not had the chance to meet in fact, I've just met them now and I'm so happy to have been able to meet them. It's one of the great things about doing these kind of events is meeting the people who are involved and that's really why I do it. So without further ado, I should just say just roughly in terms of how we're going to do this, the panel will talk for about 45 minutes. We'll open it up and get you involved and I hope you want to talk and ask questions and also give us your own experiences of dance. We've got a few snacks and fruit juice and fruit and we're going to bring that out at about courses of nine. Bring it out here and encourage you to come down, have some snacks, have some fruit and talk to the panellists and we can have a little chat. And then after that we're going to a pub called the Marcus of Cornwallis which is just opposite Brunswick, the Brunswick Centre. Do you guys know where that is? If you don't ask one of us and we'll tell you, it's five minutes walk just over there. We've got the upstairs room. We'll play some music from our collaborative playlist, some of which some of you have already contributed to that but we want to hear from all of you. So when my colleague, well, Meria, there she is at the back, put your hand up Meria, see Meria there. Find her and tell her what your favourite dance tune is and we'll add it to our collaborative playlist that we'll be playing in the pub and we'll be there from nine to 12 or however long we want to stay around there. OK, there'll be drinks obviously. The pub does serve food if you want to get a meal there, if the fruit juice is not enough for you. So without any further ado, I will introduce my wonderful chair Emma Warren. Thank you Casper. I second what Casper said about... Hey! Hi Justin. Hey! Off the bath, take a seat. Take a seat, we're just starting. Justin MacKenzie ladies and gentlemen. Fresh up for lunch. We're just doing the intro to now, that's it. Welcome. It's a perfect arrival moment. Ah, it is. Yes, so I second what Casper said about, thank you for making it through the strikes and thank you to the strikers for doing the necessary things. While you're here, feel free to move about if you need to move about when it comes to the Q&A part. Feel free to chip in, you know you're here, we would love to hear from you. Could be a question, could be an observation, could be something you want to share and also if you feel to kind of add something while we're chatting, again, please feel free. We're here with certain pieces of expertise, sometimes huge amounts of expertise, but also you know what you know and it's useful to have that. So like Casper said, we'll chat for a bit and then we'll get some input from you lot. So we have on the panel, the choreographer and author of these two books which are very recently out on Ravledge. The choreographer, author and academic, Dr. H. Patton. We have also the author of Equipting on Afro Beats. Da, da, da. And a radio host on a couple of radio stations, Christian Adolfo. We have DJ Mantra, co-founder of the Drum and Bass Night Rupture, 16th birthday party happening on the weekend's time at Corsica Studios, Unmissible. Also co-founder of Equality's Network, EQ50, doing some very, very interesting work around what we'll talk about, what if that. And Justin from Jazz Refreshed who kind of across Jazz Refreshed works encompass a record label and regular nights and someone who made that transition from a kind of a dance floor hosted by DJs to creating dance floors where people are moving to live music. So please can we just say a big round of applause and welcome to the audience? So I thought a really good way of getting to understand a bit about who we have in the room is to ask all of them about their relationship to moving to music, their relationship to dance. And I would say, well we're talking about this subject in this room, we should try and decouple dance from being good at dancing. We're talking about moving to music, we're not talking about dance with big connotations of skill or quality although obviously some of our panellists do have that in their practice, high levels of expertise. So Christian can we start with you? What can you tell us about your relationship to dancing? So even everyone, it would have been I guess four parties growing up for sure like growing up in North East London particularly in Tottenham which is a garden there by heritage and there's a massive garden there kind of community there and it would have been all the farm estate in some of the flats there all the iconic community centre itself. So it would be with obviously family members and I think inherently people you put music on from your motherland heritage and assume that you can just like move to it but unfortunately I wasn't as gifted as some of my peers so when it came to that there was kind of competitions and then aunties and uncles kind of like pushing and forcing me to the middle so I was always just like trying to cling on to the wall like praying to subvert myself into the wallpaper so it would be kind of strange. But then I kind of, you know, it kind of grew in me more and more going into those kind of events and it was less about, as you said, being polished to the Finnish article at that young age but just seeing the feeling of people connecting to music of the Mobitam but not understanding the language but moving through rhythm which I always found was incredible for people so young to have that connection to a place they've never been to and then grow up and have that kind of full circle journey so that would be my first experience of dancing. So moving from like the position of like a hesitant dancer in a kind of very dance literate environment to kind of finding your own way through it. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Indi, what about you? So I guess my relationship to dancing is very much through like the rave in that kind of context. I did actually, when you were talking about dancing to like your mother tongue and thinking that an early memory I do have is being about six or seven and my dad's from the Punjab and being in one of my auntie's living rooms and then doing this snake dance or the women. Only the women could go there and there was no music. It was all through stamping, clapping, singing, wailing and just, it was like a frenzy, do you know what I mean? And it was just wild and just like ducking and diving through all these Sylwarkames and Chunies everywhere and getting wrapped up in it. And I love that feeling of just the hecticness of it because within that I can find a stillness. And I think when I go raving now, the music's so loud and it's, but actually in that kind of context I can get quite, my mind can get quite still and in those spaces is when you kind of feel yourself. You know, I don't like people talking to me too much. I like to be by myself in a corner. That's my kind of spot. I'm not a skilled dancer, but I feel it and my body moves to it. And for me, especially with the kind of hecticness of life and motherhood and all that kind of stuff it can be a very healing experience. I really feel what you're saying about stillness and I know that I've experienced that maybe some of you have as well the kind of the way that moving to music can just allow someone describing it to me as your brain dropping into your body. Yeah. And yeah, so thank you for that. That's a really nice. I've tried to meditate and I'm still trying. I'm not going to give up. I find it very, very, very hard. But if I'm moving that moving meditation I can sometimes get it in yoga and I can get it on dance floor definitely. Yes, a dance floor meditation. Justin, what about you? What's your relationship to moving to music? What can you tell us? Well, I'm a child of the 80s. So I guess I'm a hip hop child. So when I was in primary school and it's kind of informed the rest of my life actually musically. But I grew up in a church but hip hop was just coming through electro and these things. So like from the States although it was already from the 70s but in the early 80s b-boying or breaking as we call it came over. So we had like a line of mat in the bike sheds. Definitely have bike sheds these days but you know the bike sheds that we were breaking mat and some of we beat boxing and we were just the culture just engulfed us. You know everything from America that you saw on television was to do with hip hop or actually just breaking really mainly electro and that kind of music. So that love of b-boying. I'm not a good b-boying by the way on break up but I've always loved that culture and that is kind of and the whole musically everything and that kind of informed my direction to where I'm today. I would say but I'm also a youth of the my kind of youth and into my 20s in of the 90s and anybody who you know of any age of going out in 90s knows that the 90s were the peak I think of rave and like party culture and club culture before the mice of like clubs getting decimated and you know it was like house parties there were loads of clubs to go to the West End wasn't as restricted to be like you know parking and stuff like that. There were clubs all around London. You could go to pretty much anything. I was really a lot on the kind of street sound scene to like a lot of rare groove a lot of that kind of stuff but also involved in hip hop eventually by the age of 18 becoming a DJ and that's where my path to today came from but it was collecting records from that whole hip hop culture of breaks and samples and learning where they came from also learning instruments I learned instruments when I was young so having a connection to actually playing stuff as well but yeah, dance has always been a part I mean I was part of the soccer scene my family is from Trinidad and Grenada so that was from family and then going out and being really involved and Raga became a big thing in the late 80s and when I was in school we got involved in that and there was always a dance to go with things even in hip hop you'd go out and you'd want to be able to jump off your foot or do a particular thing so there was always that and I think it wasn't until going out clubbing in my late teens where that sense of just dancing without a kind of routine or dancing without just dancing for the sake of it kind of came from so yeah and it's always been connected and as I'm sure we'll come to later even as I moved we moved I think we moved away but we broadened to go to live music but live music that wasn't necessarily known for having dancing in it we still carried that sensibility for you and I think that's what's so interesting about what you've done because it's definitely rooted in a dance floor culture just before we move on can you tell us about a dance move that you kind of managed to master that you were like very pleased about? As long as I don't have to do it No, no, no, just tell us Just tell us some of the words I've managed in my life I say like master I don't know Okay, master, something that you just got in Arsenal Okay, I'm going to say quick three things one is I managed to do the windmill when I was really young I can't do it now which was a really big thing I mean when you were into b-boying or breaking people could spin on their backs people could even spin on their heads but to do the windmill yeah, it didn't last long because then as that kind of went out and I tried to get back to it later I couldn't do it again and now it's too late but the other thing was whining and particularly soca you know I'm not mad skilled but I can dance like that and also and this is you know a lot of people probably won't know this people in the panel are white but there's a crubbin which is like kind of a slow jam dancing which is kind of out of fashion now, I would imagine you don't really see it people don't really go down to these slow but there was something in culture particularly coming from like Lovers Rock where you danced and that was really big when we were going out dancing with people but in that slow jam style Thank you, I'm very glad I asked you that because I will call seeing you on a Menelik Shabazz's documentary about Lovers Rock and in it you're describing exactly that one you, the rubber dub and you're describing in detail exactly what's happening kind of like mechanically dance wise when people are dancing like that Yes, yes so I do want to know about your relationship with dancing but seeing as you arrived here would you mind giving us a little bit more detail about what Justin is talking about? Okay, well number one I would say I disagree with him about it having gone out it's still very much about it depends on what age group your scene you're moving in but if you go anywhere where where you hear the real roots reggae and you're hearing Lovers Rock et cetera you will still see them doing that dance so that is a way of what we call coupling that's man and woman coming together dancing together in an intimate way it started in back in the day when we're going back now to around the 18th century and so forth when they were dancing the mental they would do the mental dance and the mental dance they do a kind of side-to-getter side dance side-to-getter side and as they're moving they would move closer together now after a while now when the spaces got packed then people couldn't move laterally anymore there wasn't enough space so they did what we call rental tile you stand up on the one spot the whole night and you dance and you use the body I love to demonstrate that you use the body where standing on the one spot you could either move round and your pelvis makes a figure of eight so the man and the woman making the figure of eight holding each other and so you don't move off that tile the whole night so that's why it's called rental tile or you could be moving circling in semicircles moving one to the next or you can go round the world where the two pelvis is locked together and they're making a circular action so you see all of this this is what they call the rub some people call it scrub some people call it the dub but all of this is about dancing intimately and this this has stood the test of time it still goes on now it even went through the time where the hairstyle curly perm where man and woman used to have the curly perm which uses a lot of activator a lot of chemical in the hair to make the hair curly and so sometimes when you're dancing with the partner you'd find out you have to close the eye and sometimes by the time you finish dancing the eye would be a bit sticky to open because of the products but that's really what the dancers are about and it was a way of being able to communicate with each other and at a point this is where part of what you talked about about the stillness coming inside because at a point the two heart beats would be synchronised and the two of you will be in a room full of people but it's only the two of you that exist for that moment in time and sometimes it gets to the point where the two become one and you're not even conscious of anything else but being involved in that moment and it was about the enjoyment of dance it wasn't a sexual thing because people would come and they would dance the whole night and then say thank you and go their separate ways at the end of the night as well but of course there would be some who won't can I get your number? but also in dance we can sometimes understand the difference between sensuality and sexuality isn't it? this is highly sensual that's not necessarily sexual and that's an important thing because that runs through dance completely okay if I talk about myself and my relationship to dance then I was always one of those children that my parents would say in the Jamaican way we say your heads up means that you are a little bright and you know a bit manish because I would we would go to parties which were family parties like you mentioned and that would be either for a birthday birth night party with college or it would be for christening or for wedding now when you go to a wedding you know the bride always looks beautiful on the day and all the man them line up to dance with the bride children would be running around and playing except for one child who line up with the rest of the man them I used to line up because I don't feel like I go to the wedding if I don't dance with the bride as well and sometimes my head would be at her navel but I would be dancing with the bride as well okay so that's where my involvement with dance really started and so people used to call me and much like you they would call me and say come and dance something but unlike him where he was to recede in the world I would step out and I would show them the latest dances and things and then as I grew up my cousins would be back and forth from Jamaica whenever they go and come I would want to know what's the latest dance what's the movement they're doing because in Jamaica the dances they progress and we name a lot of them so as soon as a new dance come out everybody have to name that dance where there's the chucky where they use the shoulder changa changa changa changa changa changa changa or you know later on we took some of the American influences as well like the bump where you jump and you bump bump the hips and bump the buttocks et cetera against each other all of these things we used to do within the dancehall space and so when I'm talking about dancehall space now I mean the location where it's done and so and within the dancing now within our community there were two sets of dances basically which kind of will lead into his root and my root because you had those who they called Soulhead that listen to soul music rare groove et cetera you go take extra shirts to the clubs sweat up and go and change and sweat again and dance vigorously the whole night and then you used to have the roots man them those are the ones that follow reggae music and they would go to the dances and they would dance all night and move in a way that they look cool now I used to straddle the two so like on a Friday night I go to the soul club and I sweat up and dance and there was a family of girls five of them who we used to go to I and my friends we used to go out and one of the sisters was always my partner would be invited to all the dances so that we could lead the dance when they want to get everything going we would dance and that was soul music rare groove et cetera but then from Friday and from Saturday night now it would be the reggae club and I would be in the reggae club Friday and Saturday night dance into the roots et cetera and then at that time change of clothing as well because you would put on your garbage jumper which was a special Italian made jumpers and people wore farra pants unfortunately I used to play basketball so my legs were always too big to fit into the farra so I had specially tailor made pants and so dance was part of the cultural identity it was a way of going home within this space and also it was a way of learning from the elders because as a child children was to be seen and not heard so when adults were there and we had the dining room where the children should be playing games and things and then you find a kitchen where the cooking is going on my sisters and cousins and things you'll be in there and then you have the living room where the adults were where big people talk so they would be talking about home things that used to happen home and there and they would be dancing and because I was the eldest boy I was allowed to be in there to play the music and to serve the drinks so I kind of trained up as a DJ from then but then later on I ended up marrying my wife she's a DJ in one of the longest running female songs called in Zynga songs so she now took over the music playing side and I leave that to her but music dance has always been part and parcel of our family and it goes through the children, all of my children they will dance something sometimes you'll hear them put on a mahalia Jackson and they start to dance and people will say when you know about that but it's because they've come through the music and when the whole rap came in I was always interested in it but because of the roots I didn't go down that route I watched it from Monday's sorry I can also recommend in Zynga songs sometimes do some shows on NTS and play out quite frequently so easy enough to get to know if you don't already it's interesting what you're saying about this interplay between the dancers in Jamaica and in the diaspora because Christian there's a strong element of that in your story or in your telling of the Afrobeat story and I wonder if you can just give us a brief sense about how that plays out in your context and then maybe if you can tell us a bit given that we're in a university about the role of university Afro-Caribbean societies in the transmission of the music that you've written about so I think for me the dances are like so I guess you have to look at I guess the kind of mid-2000s late-2000s and how I guess for a lot of kids you have primarily West African heritage how the internet and Afrobeats from the continent was kind of bubbling up and how the dances were coming instantly that kind of marker or connection to home in some kind of way and in the book I made the parallel between seeing some African footballers in the Premier League and when they're celebrating and how they're dancing and how immediately you saw the connection between popular artists in Niger and Ghana through the music they're playing and the dancers they do once are their songs alongside their I guess kind of comrades or friends who are playing football as well and how that instantly is like spread to another whole different kind of population who don't know where the players are from but are intrigued to know where the dance is and where the culture is with them and dancing with names, right? Yeah and names as well so I think I mean they're whole myriad of different names I think for me the one that kind of covers sadly with like Afrobeats coming to the mainstream would have been the Azonto and I think at that time coincided with the World Cup being in South Africa the first time the World Cup was ever in Africa as well and then Ghana's run to the court finals and I remember England went out very early in that tournament and for a lot of people that was there second on the dog team and everyone started to grow to the the movement around it and I think dance was a big thing around it with the celebrations that song from FUSA DG as well it had been shot himself being a British Ghanaian heritage it had been shot the original one in London with two I guess kind of Maimonis but they had that white mass in their faces better word obviously of African heritage but they were just going around dancing just interacting with everyone and I think for me that kind of showed universal appeal of what dance can do with I guess essentially having a mascot but everyone wanted to like after their night in the pub whatever would just jump in and get along and then seeing how the kind of black bodies transported from the motherland and then being able to do that going back the other way with it blown up is I guess one of those kind of key dances a lot of kids who growing up in school might have felt ashamed of saying where they were from in Africa or the parents heritage finally had that kind of glue to go and dig a bit deeper through music and through dance in itself and what about the university part of it the role of the university societies so that was a bit I think personally on my journey was I remember going to like the library the first week to pick up my books and stuff and which was when? in Canterbury and I remember I finished and I was leaving and this girl came up to me and was like really good I was like what? I said do you want to join the ACS? and I was like I don't know what it was it was an acronym and then it was like a dug a bit deeper into it and I think we were really lucky because the girl who was our kind of president she had a good blend of the music and the culture as well so there were like different kind of lectures that were speaking about different kind of topics around the continent and that kind of crossover but then also the dances within that as well and a lot of them you realise are 2007-2008 from UK funky into Afro beats so a lot of the MCs or the people who were promoting that scene were themselves becoming entrepreneurs and putting on these nights across different universities which had big African, Caribbean populations or like students in them so like Rinell Kingston London South Bank but then also in the East Midlands we had the Monford Leicester nothing of none of them trend and those are all like big kind of incubates for people who are probably from London couldn't get back as usual to kind of experience my life on the same level but we were able to have this kind of touring party to have these DJs go and play this music have the latest music from the continent and I think in a way it's almost like positivity around the narrative because a lot of the music before that we have a lot of like youth from London or making from UK always had slable of being really aggressive or negative connotations around it and it felt like at that moment it was finally like transitioning and realising that this is a really kind of positive space we can all be and even if we're dancing in a way that people can't understand it's friendly some people we can always come together your book's brilliant and there were lots of different things in it that relate to what we're talking about because you make that kind of interconnectedness of music and dancing which is so well understood in certain areas and so poorly understood in other kind of more Eurocentric environments but there's one phrase before India I'm going to ask you about the rupture dance floor shortly but can you just tell us a bit about the phrase gone missing so yeah there were I was lucky to interview two kind of early prominent dancers who feature a lot in the early kind of y cathry beats videos called The Home Bros they're based in East London and when I interviewed them they took about this idea of going missing and it's almost aligns with I guess what you talk about stillness that some of us have mentioned here where there come a point in the night where it's kind of like twilight maybe hours and there aren't maybe so many people or in the space where it being even but it's almost as if like the ancestors started to pull your strings a bit more and you start to move in a way in which even you shock yourself with regard to like how do I even be able to move my body in such a way I think that's what they come across when they say it as well and it's amazing because they have these classes every week where a lot of the afro beats that I stay want to kind of break a tune they'll go there first and play play to them first and see how people react to them without it being released first and then kind of go back and tweak a bit more so I think that idea of kind of going missing is almost like in another way like finding yourself as well because some of us are so unseen up in the day to day but when we go in that space and kind of go MIA we come out of there kind of reconnecting through ourselves as well What would you add to this? Well it's a couple of things really because one when you speak about the society for Caribbean studies or the afro-caribbean societies as they used to be called that isn't something that's a continuity that has continued because I remember back in the day those were the ways in which we used to connect with a lot of young people who were in the university setting I used to be part of a company called I Gidopan African Dance Ensemble which was the biggest african dance company in Europe actually and it used to be based in London here but we used to tour the whole country and we used to go to the different the different union and perform there and then they would have dances and things that connected so this sounds like a continuity of that in terms of being able to allow young people to connect and so therefore even in terms of the training when we trained I trained in Ghana with the national dance company there and then later on we used to tour with fellow fellow cootie and we used to open the show for him at Glaston, Brion all these other places so there was always that connection between the traditional dance practice and the contemporary, the popular and so popular culture was always connected to the traditional culture but the other thing as well was that in terms of the young people I saw the development of the Afrobeat and the high life had been there before that and then you had hip life in Ghana and over in West Africa and then you had quite old that was developing in South Africa and it was called Degang in Zimbabwe and those areas and so it was an amogamation of all of this coming together but I would say that I think dance hall was quite key to that development as well because out of you know when we speak about the music you had development of ska in Jamaica during the time of independence and when Jamaicans were first coming here you had the ska then from the ska it went to the rock study from the rock study into the dub and the reggae and then from reggae now you had the development of dance hall but then the influence of reggae out of that and the influence as I said before you had the soul heads you had the coming together of the two mixing in the music and that was the development of Lovers Rock people like I know some of you might know Janet Kay when she sang silly games and that's where all the men have to hold their ears because all the women go for that high note so you had the whole of that development and then from out of that now you had the development of the jungle and garage drum and bass etc coming and all of that kind of laid the ground to open the way for Afrobeat and I remember a lot of African students and African people the young people they used to hide behind them the reggae as well and a lot of them ask where they come from they say Jamaica and so you would have somebody with thick Nigerian accent saying he's a Jamaican and we would know that he's not a Jamaican but we knew that it was an identity thing and so I think it was the whole Afrobeat movement and what then enabled the young Africans from the continent to be able to break out and announce themselves and their presence here and then be able to sit, we sat down to get aside by side now rather than one hiding or masking the other and so that's where the kind of mutual respect and then the collaborations start to go on because you have so many artists such as Shaka Wale and Bernard Boy all going to Jamaica to collaborate with the Jamaican artists and then they're coming back and then now you have some of the Soka artists then like Masha Mantano who has been collaborating I'm working with all of this and so the big pot stirs but what happens is that the movement is a key thing where the movements are starting to blur where you now start to see movements that were specifically dancehall movement before they're now coming into Soka they're now in Afrobeat and then Afrobeat movement coming into dancehall and then you see like it's funny, I smiled when you talk about what are the things your please yoga that is whining because within the Jamaican context man don't whine on their own women whine but men can only whine when they're dancing with a partner but not on their own because it's seen as a feminized movement but within the eastern side of the Caribbean whining is something that's done by both men and women Do we need a clarification of the wine? Does the room need a clarification of the wine? He mentioned it but with the whining what happens if I'm going to give a mechanical explanation it's the torso circling around but it's rocking back and forth at the same time so you get this tumbling action so it's circling and it's whining at the moment at the same time so I call it tumbling as well it's like it's tumbling if you look at the clothes in the washing machine when they start to tumbling so when you're dancing that way you can dance on your own or you can dance with your partner and whine in the space that's why because the focus is on the pelvis within Jamaica we kind of try to control it they don't want the focus on the male pelvis they want the focus on the female pelvis so that's why as a man you can be the best dancer and not lean on all these dances and things but the camera will move from you as soon as a woman starts to whine and once she can whine good definitely the focus will move from you to her whereas in other parts of the Caribbean man and woman can whine independently or together there are so many layers aren't there I mean even just in this one tiny aspect of the dance that we're talking about the layers who's allowed to move which parts of their body are reminded of in a different context Barbara Ehrenreich who wrote Dancing in the Streets pointing out that in certain contexts the legs were considered so unbelievably shocking and sexual but even like the legs of furniture were covered in houses let alone moving them or showing them parts of the body move in and out of acceptability don't they across time and across space and one of the things that you were all talking about is we've got this image of like the guy at the back who's not moving very much but he's got the movement that he can have or that he allows himself to have and then you've got the guy who's in the middle of the dance who's moving more and this kind of makes me think about a drum and bass dance floor in my head if I think about I was going to some of those nights back in the day particularly in the north I was living in Manchester at the time and it's one particular very very intense kind of jungle drum and bass night and I can see some men who are not moving very much who are wearing quite a lot of clothing it's very hot but you know the pufferjacket is not coming off but they're not moving very much but they're moving some and this is the movement that they will allow themselves and then you've got people who are really moving a lot like amazing dancers like stepping people moving low up and down in space around and I wonder if you can give us a sense of the rupture dance floor you know I know you've been going for a long time so it might be harder to like just capture it because it probably was different 16 years ago now if you can give us a picture what would we see we've been going for 16 years now and it does vary people come to us quite a lot because for drum and bass it's seen as one of the most diverse dance floors club nights for that we still have a long long long way to go in my opinion but it's definitely getting better for me the best dance floors is just people who can express themselves in any which way that's true to them whatever that may be and also when you have people from all walks of life different genders, sexualities different incomes like all of that coming together for the music that makes a really interesting and powerful experience I think it brings something to the energy of a dance floor but I think as I'm quite conscious that with rupture and with the DJs that the music has generally got shorter like tunes are getting shorter the length of tunes are getting shorter you know back in the day the standard length would kind of be seven minutes and now you're looking at a lot of tunes are kind of three minutes and under and that impacts the way a DJ it can become very the next bigger bigger bigger faster faster faster energy energy energy the whole time when you just have one hour to play it's kind of this hype thing of who can kind of kill it the hardest and when it's all about that it doesn't allow the dance floor to kind of breathe and settle into it and allow for people to properly dance it's all slapping the walls and arms up and I love that don't get me wrong who does it shouting for reloads and stuff but I do think that there is something that you miss then in the kind of journey and I think when DJs are allowed to have longer sets and journey and realise that it's not all about kind of you know faster faster about kind of creating the most amount of intense energy possible it allows the dance floor to actually dance you know and I think this is where the kind of crowd comes into play so much because as a DJ you know I might drop something that's a little bit deeper and all it takes is me seeing one or two people just feeling it whether that's their eyes closed for one minute or whatever because if you're playing something deeper people aren't going to be erupting you know and that can sometimes that's what people are chasing as a DJ and you can feel quite you have to be quite brave to be like no I'm not going to go there yet I'm going to we're going to wait you know and see how this kind of goes and all it takes is you seeing one or two dancers appreciating that's like oh let's go even deeper let's see do you know what I mean and then kind of building it up in different ways so it's very much a kind of calling response the DJ to the crowd but I think in terms of rupture it is an intense dance floor I'm not going to lie it's busy it's packed it's really loud that the systems we use obviously there's a lot a lot of bass there's you have to really find your spot if you want to kind of have a bit of space but it's respectful for me of course there's so much talk about creating a safe space on the dance floor particularly for women and we're quite lucky in a sense I think me and my partner like it's something that's been such an important part of us and in creating good dance floors that it kind of trickles down you know like not that we're above I don't mean it like a trickle down thing but the message gets the intention is clear yeah exactly we've never had to do kind of big statements and stuff like that which I appreciate people you know should do I think if they feel like it's going to create a safer dance floor but we're lucky in the sense that we've never had to do that but I do also think that there is a real power in unsafe dance floors not in terms of being touched by people anything like that that's disgusting but I grew up going to squat raves and illegal dance floors and they're amazing because there's an element of danger and that is actually a really thrilling experience as a raver because you know you might have been travelling for three hours to get there and then it's busted and then you've got to go to the next place and it might not be until four or five in the morning until they've actually set up the rigs and it's on but that mission and that commitment to it then when it does when the music does start it creates this very very intense atmosphere and even in unsafe buildings there's something to it not condoning people getting hurt but there is something for really being in this kind of abandoned cinema and this abandoned bingo hall that it's really exciting and I think it creates a very very special and unique energy and unfortunately it's way harder to do now like really hard I think there's something very interesting in there about a younger generation that suffers like generational massive anxiety and huge amounts of stress the idea of unsafe spaces seems really counterintuitive especially when safe spaces come to mean some very specific things about respect for others but I'm with you and I've found myself having some interesting conversations on this subject recently about the power of going through the fire and what that can do for you and in fact Damon Frost the US hip hop dancers who took kind of breaking to Europe first in the early mid 80s spoke about this as well about the idea of kind of the dance horizon initiation something that you can go through in order to sharpen up your tools and you can't necessarily get that in an environment where everything is too kind of safe I mean we don't really have quite the right language for it it's an interesting area did anyone else have anything they'd like to add to that I speak about that well this book dance all in slash securities it's an edited collection where everybody within it we speak about dance all as an in slash secure space because what secure some people makes others insecure so for example you know what you've been speaking there reminds me it has resonances with back in the day when we used to have blues parties where blues parties were held in basements of developing spaces or used to be held in factories where you could when you could find a factory that you could get hooked up to in terms of having power etc within those dances it was a case of being within a space where it felt safe because it was a darkened space with many bodies around so you could almost feel the heartbeat of the others around you and so that created a sense of what Victor Turner calls them communitas an intense feeling of camaraderie and that happens particularly when everybody dancing to the same rhythm so you might hear the music a and you see all the shoulders rising and falling at the same time you might feel sometimes you get double and triple dances because you might be dancing with a partner in front of you but the place is so full that there's somebody pressing behind you so you're feeling their bottom is dancing with yours and your kind are controlling their dance and their controlling your dance and the people either side are controlling and so there's this intense feeling of security among you but there's also the insecurity that it could be raided at any time so it could come and shut it down so there's that but also the insecurities even in terms of the way they dress because you have some women that may wear what we call bear as you dare so they wear braw tops or they wear battle riders with their shorts that are very very short at the back you can the cheek so to speak but it's a case of look but don't touch this was their space where they can present themselves and negotiate their identity to suit themselves but it was also a space in which people could admire and people became as we call it in Jamaica is a space where some identification or some aditisation you become somebody of worth you become visible within a society where you are made invisible so during the moments that you're within the dance space you become visible because if you're a good dancer everybody will be looking at you and when I say a good dancer it doesn't mean that you're necessarily a professional dancer but if you can dance well people will admire and give you that space and so it's within all of this various levels start to take place like when you spoke about what was the word again the phrase that gone missing yes within the dance hall space people talk about getting lost they get lost in the dance they get lost in the dance they go to another level where when they're dancing it might be somebody you know very well and you call to them and they don't even see you because they're somewhere and you have to touch them and say oh sorry and then they'll see that you are actually speaking to them or you're acknowledging them because people travel and so even when you can I take a second just to try with them if we can can we all just stand a minute a quick minute you step up so just stop we do one foot in front of the other we're going to just push forward back forward and you circle and circle and circle yes bogle I heard when we do the bogle everybody do the bogle when you have the darken room and the music is pumping and everybody doing the bogle together there's a sense of camaraderie that comes into the space we're all together all one and the bogle it changes it's forward but in the UK it became backward so let's try that one just go back I'm back I'm back and I'm forward I'm forward I'm forward and that's the whole go thank you very much so you see first when I ask you together I say everybody looking around but once you actually started doing it people then got into it and you forget about the fact that whether you're doing it well or not and even in the song itself and when Budjabanthans sing he said I must have done that but that's not how bogle is she's not doing it good but she's rocking the same way meaning that she's not the best of dancers but she still can't dance and joining because it's all inclusive everybody has the possibility and that's what happens within most of our social spaces whether it's a family space everybody has the opportunity to dance and be part of it and even if you're not so good they're still going to beg you up and say you know like sometimes go Christian go Christian go Christian and he can withdraw everybody takes it and how they they feel it at that point and this is where we have to be really grateful to the people who create spaces for us to dance in because we can't really talk about dancing without talking about space because otherwise where are we going to do it together both of you put on create spaces for people to dance in and maybe a final thing we can talk about before we hear what you that I hear have to say and please want to it's just about I'm interested in the idea of repetition and regularity you did jazz refreshed every week for a long time in west more recently regularly in East London in Brick Lane right so what does it do to the dance floor to have that space every week when I talk about the dance floor I'm talking about the people who comprise it how important is that it's a strange one because it's a strange world so for those who don't know we jazz refreshes jazz music but it's not it started a lot of people think we came from the jazz world when we started we didn't we came from playing hip hop playing soul playing socom broken beat broken beat for those who might know the genre and look into it it had a massive influence over us because we were there one of our crew was one of the kind of architects of it that's our cue from Bugs and the Attics so he's one of our crew and when we were putting on nights this night called co-op in Kern Road to Plastic People what's going on and this kind of touches what you were saying actually about DJ the relationship between DJs and the dance floor because I think that's where it starts where we see in a lot of music the parallel of how things when a music kind of it's starting out or it's becoming it's experimental it's allowed space because people don't know the music not familiar with the music so someone like co-op where it was a night made by producers who were DJing the music so they might come with a new tune on that night they just finished, mixed it and it's you know you may never hear it again so there wasn't this thing of anthems there wasn't like I want to hear that big tune it was what's coming tonight and those tunes had a long build someone might be like nine minutes long where it starts off and eventually you get into the music maybe three minutes into the tune but the beat was there so people were just dancing and it was really quite pure in that sense and from where we were coming from when Broken Beat became a thing in the early 2000s like 2000, 2000 basically 1999, 2000 it was quite refreshing because we were playing a lot of other music where there were anthems we were trying to battle against that thing of just going for the chair playing the big tunes but you hear it everywhere we were trying to be a bit more left-bield but we also were collectors of jazz and we were getting a bit fatigued we were playing a lot of parties so we wanted to do something that was not actually to a dancing, funnily enough it was not for dancing it was for a lounge play on music because jazz at that time I know there was a jazz dance and there were jazz dancers that still continued from the 80s and stuff but it was very separate to what we were doing and we just wanted something to play but when we started to play in Mamma by West London it was like 2003 a lot of the stuff used to be dancing but it was still a lounge until we put live music on which was a few weeks into it and then kept it live but the jazz, we went to jazz things as well but around that time if you go jazz now it's not like it was then you had the talent of musicians but you didn't have the scene and you didn't have the kind of energy within the scene and a lot of the early people that we put on our stage at Mamma were actually musicians who were from the broken beat scene so people like Kylie Tatham Marta Clivello who had jazz chops and when they played it was a dance thing and once we had gone through that then you went to playing one week might be straight ahead the next week might be some Afro-Cuban thing so not every week was for dancing but the whole atmosphere of what going to jazz was at that time which was kind of sit down you clap at the solos and you make a little bit of noise but it wasn't rowdy, we didn't come from that so our whole ethos when we put on a jazz live night was you stand up and you make noise for the bands and if they're playing something to dance to you dance to it and it was always important for us to have DJing before and DJing after and not just DJing jazz either which is kind of ironic because that's why we started and we had live jazz on but it was about showing connections between jazz and other music hip-hop, broken beat, jungle whatever it was there was some kind of sample or something that had a thread that connected back connected all music together really so it was important to play that before the band will play and after you play the mix of everything and what that did to a lot of musicians was when they were able to see people dancing to their music it kind of also adjusted the music they were making because we were kind of giving a space to musicians who may be playing in South Bank or some other places or runnies in these places which were a bit more straight jazz places but their own music they were making that wasn't getting platformed we were open to that you don't get split yet bring it experimental stuff so when you start to see people dancing to your music it affects how you perceive what you're doing and a lot of the jazz dancers from the 80s so like IDJ and these kind of jazz dance scene that we had and these guys were like 16-17 they weren't you know big people now but they were like just dancing to jazz a lot of the musicians who were making their music didn't even know that people were dancing to their music so certain tunes you hear and you think wow that's like a tears up the dance floor the musicians making it wasn't even making it for that and they were like mind blown when they actually interviewed and showed people dancing to their music it's weird said that about New York City couldn't believe people were dancing to it and you think it's weird with hip hop even with samples and how people were using them and how it's made this music a lot of people didn't understand this thing so for us it was important that there was this element and it wasn't always about dance because sometimes it's about a kind of movement like you're saying so when you think of dancing it has to be in your zone sometimes it's just rocking and just like a very kind of hip hop rocking to certain bits something that makes you to move in that moment or it might be a moment where you're making noise to the band and stuff like that because not all of the music had the sensibility of that kind of dancing but what was interesting was as the music became more danceable so you started seeing a lot of bands were influenced by broken beats so people like Yn Ysgol Cymal all these kind of people even before that vibration stuff you could dance to it all that stuff was really kind of big and now when you listen to across the whole jazz scene on their albums their music is danceable but I still believe we have a club night as well called Roof Movement which is a very general club night and I'm always trying to invite the musicians to come down and listen to the music played and then see people dance to it because not only does it affect the way they make it but it also affects how they mix it because one of the problems with not going this is a kind of side issue but one of the problems with not going to places where your music is played in a dance context alongside other dance records is that the mix is a light so it's this thing of because they get mixed in a kind of way to the sound of Sonics of Jazz where it's like you to go to a dance and get it mixed to that level It's an interesting thing about one of the reasons why Moses Boyd's Ryle Huffle sound it so big was because Kieran Hebden for Tet mixed it for him and definitely I think some of the other musicians in that world could be listening harder to you We'll have one more thing and then we'll wrap up and move to you good people Sorry, I think I think from what you're describing there I think it describes very well the fact that very often music that makes you dance is music that touches you in some way it has to touch you and give you a feeling and a vibe that moves your soul so to speak and so I think that's one about the mixing and the weight that's very important because for example when you come to reggae and dance hall if the music isn't played at a volume where you can feel the vibration it doesn't make you feel like you want to dance it's when you actually can feel it because with the music you feel it vibrating even when it comes to soca music when you go to carnival here you'll go to carnival here and you feel the carnival when you pass the sound systems but you don't necessarily feel it when the steel pan passing by in the same way but you go to carnival in Trinidad and when the steel pan because you're talking about 100 pans 100 people playing pans and some people playing 5 bass pan around it so the same way that you feel the vibration of the music that's how you feel the vibration of the pans when they're passing you and I know that sometimes I've been to jazz clubs and when the music turn up and you can feel it actually get that intimate connection with the music again and I think also I haven't been to rave dances but from what I'm hearing it's the feeling the frequency that people tune into so I think it's that thing about when it touches you Bob Marley say when music hit you you're feeling all pain but you feel it feel it and I think that's the important thing yes I think sound does vibrational instruction it's a lovely way to leave this part of the panel which has been a proper joy I have to say so before we ask some questions can we just say a big thank you and a big round of applause I know it's not easy to be the first person to ask a question but if you do we'll be very grateful oh yes okay then so we've got a question here and then we'll go to you thank you so much that was really interesting two of the topics that you kind of have all touched on one is heritage and one is safety is dance for any of you this question as well is dance the space in which you can express and connect with heritage safety who would like to answer that first because of me surely I think more and more it's become it's unspeakable now so consciously I've definitely moved away from being you know that kind of reserved recall by the wall to now when it comes to an event or an environment I'd be very often I would just like swanna for my own and you know if it's like a big club whatever we'll just kind of seek out all this kind of sounds that I feel connected to in a way and then within five minutes or ten minutes I'll probably recognise and my friends or someone I know will be around me and I think it speaks to that kind of subconscious relationship we have because very often when I leave or I find the track there are elements of maybe hip life high life maybe an eight nine minute tune which I kind of just pick out and I go and dig further and realise that it hits me more on a personal level than I realised in a moment in the dance and when you can also kind of remix maybe dances that I improvise from maybe your parents might have done to like more contemporary stuff things that's when you kind of really feel like it's moved and it's become this journey where it's not just union friends but it's a way for union peers to almost realise or recognise that this is a space where maybe your parents had that in the whole party in the home setting but you're getting to embrace and feel that with peers who kind of had that kind of same lineage or relationship to music so that direction or that kind of relationship is massive for me Can I speak with that as well because I guess talk from a personal perspective it was soca and calypso really I mean what we call kaiso which is old school soca growing up and going to family parties and stuff like that I think when I got to rave to soca it was very unique to anything else I was going to and there was this connection to so I'm born in Hammersmith from west London and it's an interesting it's interesting being I guess black British if I want to call it because we grew up for our parents calling back home the Caribbean and for me I've always called back home the Caribbean where I've noticed that I didn't live there but that's how we felt and when I especially we always miss the soca and house stuff but when I started going to soca things my kind of connection to people who had that same experience was kind of heightened even though a lot of my parents had that experience but going to somewhere where the dances were were quite unique the language was quite unique and that was across islands so you might talk about walking up for instance which is a Beijing term which is just like a harder wine it's like a faster harder wine but that whole connection to the Caribbean was you have food you have music but dancing was a big part of that as well and it I guess we have talked about safe spaces because you have a shared experience of people there is a safety in that even if you're not all from the same place safety is a strange word there is a lot of things that the meaning involves but I think in terms of I'll give an example if for instance a soca tune is played I hated to hear soca in general parties because I always felt that soca was always seen as this thing as hot hot hot and people would always joke and do funny almost take in the mic kind of dances so actually being in a space where this music is part of heritage and people are taking it seriously whether they're part of heritage or not they're taking it seriously meant it was a safe space that I could express myself because people always look to me or my peers to dance to this music because it's your music as opposed to being in a place so that more connection and in finding those situations I wouldn't dance to music you'd think I'd be glad to hear it but I wasn't so there is a kind of connection between safety I guess and being in those spaces thank you for your question we'll go to this question slightly contrary to the time so we'll go to you at the back and then maybe we'll get some food and stuff and then we can come and have more like one on one conversations feel free to come and talk to us we're not going anywhere immediately and then come and dance with us after yes to your question please sorry we're going to go to the front first let me try to frame my question I already felt that passion that I love dance and when I was a kid you can do it so freely you have no constraints and you don't have any limits I think kids are the most free human being when you're a kid you don't really need music you body, you just feel it and you can just move whatever way you want however we realize when we grow up you just gradually have one more limit and you're more and more self aware and so now when I I still like dancing but when I dance now you feel like you probably need the best time and the best location the best music the right music to dance with so how would you like go back to like a free child like how do you undo the damage on your own ok, who would like to let's go alright I saw you looking at me well the thing is dance is an activity that is about the individual and I guess part of what you're talking about is the fact that society kind of puts a certain value to dance and a certain value to cultural activities and so therefore dance then occupies a certain space it's either it's either your professional dancer or your social dancer if you're a social dancer then you're supposed to dance within specific places like if it's a disco or if it's a party et cetera but then also within that there's kind of there's a hierarchy of how the dance goes because dance is seen as a feminised activity so they expect women to dance men not supposed to dance until a certain time when they're drunk enough or it's getting towards the end and so it's about getting ready for a pickup and so therefore that positions dance in a particular way where people then become conscious of when they're dancing others are spectators watching them dance rather than being participants if you're professional then it's about being on stage and performing and being of a certain standard and quality but then also when we come off stage it's about you supposed to be the one that leads the dance everywhere because you're the professional dancer and the thing is it doesn't take into account that all of us have differences in how we relate to dance me personally but I'm a very shy person and so most people they laugh when they hear that but I can perform when I'm on stage because that's my job and I turn on the switch and I perform when I know it's time to perform but when it's personal it's my personal time and I'm in a space where it's a party unless I'm with the right crowd who I know and I feel comfortable and safe with them I feel shy and so this thing of security and insecurity it happens all the time where for the women it will be about judgment judgment by other women as to oh, she's performing for the man them or she's showing off or she's she's doing it for some other reason and it will be for some of the man them yes, she's performing for me and that's why you tend to find a lot of the female dancers in particular they dance and they find their husband through the dance but as soon as he gets her he doesn't want her to dance anymore because there's a way in which we view dance dancers kind of like the audition towards other things so maybe the answer to your question is about finding places where you feel with kindred spirits kindred spirits in relation to sexuality or culture or shared interests and maybe that childlike person is liberated in places where you're with like-minded souls thank you for your question sorry to interrupt the question there is one answer to that question as pertain to red culture ecstasy we're talking about a psycho seriously, it's not a joke this is the cure for emotional constipation the rise of that because of the dancing for me and dancing and also dancing I think that's creative you're exposing yourself so it takes that element of courage and emotional courage for some people to actually be able to express themselves like a lot of the producers they're behind screens and they're in solitude making amazing music but there's a huge difference between that kind of creativity which is amazing to actually expressing yourself on the dance floor and that's where I do think drugs play a huge part and I think, you know you can see the difference of course the dancers of change there's a lot more stumbling going on it's not good dumpster compared to ecstasy which is kind of a fast-track route to your inner child and that feeling of liberation and connectedness with everyone and the music means that you're able to get to that kind of place of pure expression in half an hour but then you see the thing is the pharmacology pharmacology in terms of the use of drugs is something that you will find some use in them within the dance hall space and reggae space but people don't need that they can find it because it's more akin for me personally it's more akin to when you're in church and you're singing the choruses over and over till they become mesmerised and you feel yourself being lifted and you no longer care about what others are thinking that's what happens within the dance hall space as well and so it's when you part of it is about being around the right people being secure with your crowd like when you say on your eyes and you know there's some of your your brethren them your crew around you so you know that you're safe you're safe to leave and transcend and come back because you know that there's others who are watching out for you in that sense so leave to transcend and to come back one last question quick question and a quick answer ok I have to speak through my entire life just one thing actually amazing conversation lots of subtle things that are not really written down so to say which has unfortunately for me I lost my emotional constipation as the 14 year old white North West London boy in the electric board which is a very black movie club both jazz room upstairs and the boogie room downstairs and room for movement is that natural kind of continue more narrative through that whole thread of those clubs but I was also reading the drama base as well and I guess my question two very small questions one which is about spatial awareness I found spatial awareness is very different in different kind of clubs like for instance in the jazz the heavy jazz dancing club where I get taken apart by Jerry from my DJ and then come back six months later and take him on and do ok I found actually the better the spatial awareness in the club because people were very much more aware of their movements or more controlled in their movements so there's never any issue of crushing or problematic things there might be other things going on but in terms of spatial awareness in the dance floor it was a very it's always been extremely healthy for me and more in the black clubs of spatial awareness has been better I don't know if there's a comment on that and secondly the one thing I find about dance now maybe in the UK it's a bit different in the UK there's always been club dancers that separate between the social and professional dancers some of the classic dancers like Clive Clarke were professional dancers and club dancers simultaneously we used to DJ at a place where you could tell the difference between the contemporary dancers who stood very upright and the club dancers who stood more kind of good and the second question so it's kind of spatial awareness very different in different clubs and the second one very short was just to say in terms of I feel that people learn to dance a bit more through video of what we're going to classes now rather than learning in a much softer way of learning with their friends in plus where they're a little bit less like now I see kids dancing and I know where classes they've been to do certain hip hop movements certain jazz dance things they learn in a certain way whereas it used to feel like it was a little bit more organic in each growth and do you feel that's the case so I think that's because there are less clubs because where do you go to learn these dances where we didn't have the internet back in the 90s it was in its infancy so we didn't have these videos there was no YouTube how do people learn to dance they went to clubs and previous to that I think with the demise of clubs and also what you see even on the dance scenes you see now and that kind of forever dance which is in Amsterdam and the old in Paris there's a big house dance scene which kind of bleeds into other music as well jazz and it bleeds into other things but with that a lot of the dances that you see those people dancing they study their moves by themselves they learn it isn't in the organic way of how you see people I'm finished I should practice sorry, practice but you know I think there aren't a lot of these spaces I think we take for granted what we grew up with in a way you did, you went to dances you learnt the dances by actually just being around people in that way I think now there's a lot of competitions there's a lot of places where house dances go but the kind of general dancing there's TikTok there's a lot of people doing moves they're doing moves as opposed to a lot more organic stuff that's what I feel about it but to the spatial thing it's interesting because when I when I raved a lot and in those days there were black clubs and there were white clubs and it wasn't in a way that it sounds horrific but actually it was based on music lines more than anything else so it wasn't like you didn't have white people in black clubs and vice versa but it was based upon the type of music that's being played and some of the black clubs were owned by black people as well and these things which you don't really have now now what I found was talking about drugs and substances the drip culture in black clubs is a lot less and even when we used to put on parties the clubs didn't like us because people weren't drinking and so the kind of spatial awareness and it does kind of go into spatial awareness as well of the kind of I'm just going to dance around and don't caves around me you didn't really get that so much not that you didn't get drunk people in black clubs but they kind of stood out they were the people who pushed it to the side and even in a soca club where people you could see people mashing up together in ffives and you might think oh spatial awareness, when people want to dance by themselves no one's knocking them that's intentional so there was a difference I'm kind of praising it down to things like the drink and substance culture which wasn't as prevalent in black clubs and there might be other reasons but that was my observation at a time where there was a lot of drinking and even in house parties where maybe there was a lot of drinking you'd find that people didn't you lose spatial awareness because you become more I guess into yourself and you might have that thing but that's kind of that's what I put it down to I don't know outside of that but there was definitely a difference I do agree with that I've got to get people to eat this food so listen I'm going to intervene there's so many people that you've raised so much that we've got lots to talk about there but don't stop talking so here's the idea we've got a table of snacks and fruit juice and I'm going to bring it out here and I'm going to stick it right here right where Jerry's my friend is the panel is going to stand up and move their chairs back we're going to put the table here all of you are going to come down here and jump on it and jump on the panel and talk to them with your mouth full of fruit and get rid of as much of it as possible because it's going to pair it and then we've got about 20 minutes then we're going to go pie pie for like to the pub over the road please do all join us evening phone for one drink some juice and keep going and then we'll also have some music when we get over there okay so you're with me you're going to stick with us alright thank you