If you are the one person out there who hasn’t been tempted to investigate what the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing phenomenon is all about then what follows may sound frivolous. But if you do tune in on a Saturday night, I think you will agree that it’s a joy. The joy is not limited to the contestants and their professional dance partners – nor even to the (occasionally crochety) judges. No, the joy is also felt by the 10 million viewers sprawled on their sofas watching this glorious feast of ballroom dancing.
What makes Strictly so special is that there is room, amid theatrics that wouldn’t look out of place in a circus, for the grace of ballet. The programme manages to create a sense of fellowship prompted by popular rhythms and some pretty dazzling gymnastics, alongside the creaky athleticism of the clowns.
It is a timely demonstration of how the breathtaking versatility of professional dancers and the high-spirited, sporting incompetence of the mostly untrained contestants is of equal value. As Catholics, we believe that all joy has its source in something bigger than us. We dance to the tune of our joy; it is the very antithesis of gloom.
The Bible explicitly encourages dancing. “Let them praise his name with dancing,” declares Psalm 149, and the Old Testament is threaded through with notions of dance as a form of thanksgiving, proclamation and praise. Let’s not forget that King David was moved to dance before the Ark of the Covenant (2 Sam 6:14).
While it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, for some liturgical dance helps to enhance prayer and worship. While in Washington this summer I came across a group calling itself “Joyful Dancing”, whose aim is to celebrate the delights of Christian fellowship by helping people to learn how to dance well together.
One of the contestants in this year’s Strictly competition was the broadcaster Jeremy Vine. Vine, a Christian, worried at first that his children might be embarrassed watching his “dad dancing”. Dauntless, he had a fine shot at it. The acerbic judge Craig Revel Horwood said that watching Vine perform was “like playing the Lotto – you never know where the limb will land”. He also compared him to “a stork that had been struck by lightning”. No matter: this particular stork survived the competition for seven weeks. His conclusion? “You enjoy yourself, as I truly have on my dancing journey, even if you aren’t the best of the bunch.”
Though Strictly itself is fiercely competitive, winning takes second place to the joy of the dance itself, especially among those who are eliminated each week, who have a habit of displaying cheerful humility even in defeat. The judge Bruno Tonioli, who was raised as a Catholic in northern Italy, is often moved to “perform” his verdicts with a storm of rococo body movements.
Somewhere in all of this, even in a secular setting, the joyous spirit of the dance seems to be at work. The Herald columnist Ann Widdecombe tells me that she appeared on the show “purely for fun and I loved every minute of it”. Ann, the former prisons minister, was received into the Catholic Church in 1993. She reached the quarter finals in 2010 with professional partner Anton Du Beke, also a Catholic. “I had retired after 23 years of huge responsibilities,” Ann says, “so the only thing I could be hurt by then was Anton’s shins.” When she was judged to be “a dancing hippo”, she parried by comparing herself to Dumbo. One of her most memorable moments came when she performed a startling but magnificent paso doble which head judge Len Goodman suggested was like watching an accident on the motorway: “You don’t really want to watch but you can’t help it.” Anton was far kinder. “If I hadn’t danced with Ann Widdecombe,” he said, “that would have been my loss, because she was such a joy.”
It’s difficult for anyone to be grumpy while dancing: the joy of it will out. Even Isadora Duncan, an atheist, thought that dancing was the divine expression of the human spirit. It doesn’t take much to dance: a little jig in response to an unexpected surprise in the post is enough to feel the joy of expressive movement.
Each week Strictly manages to give us a harmonious celebration of kinetic beauty and joyful incompetence. Thanks to the unlikely joint efforts of both its highly skilled and virtually unskilled movers it turns into something quite splendid.
On with the dance, I say.
Jane Taylor is the author of the novel Over Here (Thunderpoint Publishing Ltd). The final of Strictly Come Dancing is on BBC One at 6.35pm this Saturday
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