The TV adaptation of Everything I Know About Love, Dolly Alderton’s memoir chronicling her roaring 20s in London’s Camden, is awash with drinking and dating, youthful misdemeanour and lots of messy charm. But unexpectedly it is also joyfully full of dancing. Every episode sees Maggie (Emma Appleton, the Alderton character) and her three housemates rocking dancefloors, bouncing round the kitchen table, doing a conga in the hallway; as natural to them as laughing, hugging and swigging wine. Dancing is a way they communicate with each other, a way they bond and celebrate, daily.
There’s even a storyline based around contemporary dance, a rare sight in mainstream telly. Wannabe dancer Amara has been cut at countless auditions and gives up on her dream, taking a corporate job instead. She embodies Alderton’s struggle between pursuing a life that’s exciting, authentic or sensibly “adult”. But there’s more to Amara’s story. She’s black, and lists the subtle, and less subtle, tripwires that have crossed her path: directors who assume she’s a street dancer because of her colour; the teacher continually telling her to tuck her bum in (“That’s just my body”) who then tells her curtly she won’t have a career in the industry. Alderton must know some dancers because this rings very true (though the show is set in 2012 and there has been an awareness shift in the industry since then).
It’s amazing to see this frank depiction of Amara’s experience as part of a raucous romcom, but beyond that specific storyline, dance permeates the fabric of this show like a spilt drink seeping into your sofa, or a new app infiltrating your love life (Maggie and Amara go for Tinder in a big way). It’s there when Maggie gets home after a terrible night of rejection, pulls off her dress and grooves around the house to Cymande, reconstructing her sense of self as a sexy and beguiling woman (the nakedness felt a bit made-for-TV, like the way all girls in onscreen houseshares wander round in knickers and hip-skimming T-shirts, but still). She dances to drag herself out of depression on a solo trip to New York, throwing herself around to Slade (she drinks, too – the two often pair well). And almost every night, it seems, she and her friends find themselves drawn to a dancefloor, whether in the back of a kebab shop or a swanky club, or just their living room, to celebrate new jobs, shake away stresses, wring out pleasure from every moment. Their elation is palpable; their bubbling vitality visible.
There’s a line in Jonathan Coe’s book Mr Wilder and Me, where the protagonist remembers walking with her young daughters and how they would break into spontaneous skipping or hopping, “the mere act of walking was sometimes not enough … to express the intensity of their delight in motion, in the joyous novelty of their relation to the physical world.” This is the early-20s version: those women can’t help but move.
Sometimes they dance to attract men. There’s a scene of deep cringe where Maggie goes to a do in a community hall with her parents and gets into competitive sexy dancing over a middle-aged friend – because, by dint of youth (and beauty), she knows she has power. But just as often they’re dancing for themselves, and each other. In a flashback in episode two, Maggie and best friend Birdy are excitedly practising a routine to Kylie’s Love at First Sight for Birdy’s batmitzvah. But when Maggie finds out an older boy she fancies is going to be there, she panics. “We can’t do the dance if Dan’s going to be there. We will look like losers and we will die, we will literally die.”
The potential for hot shame, and the stifling pressure to be cool, follows her to adulthood, where 24-year-old Maggie tells her lover she was learning a dance with her housemates. He’s an earnest poseur, a boy-in-a-band who wears a hat indoors. “I’m just telling you not to do that dance in public, anywhere,” he tells her. “Because I don’t want people to laugh at you.” It’s enough to make you chuck something at the telly, the way girls so often squash their feminine joy for the sake of some idiot with his own insecurity issues. In the flashback, Dan is horrible to Maggie, but in a triumph of resilience and chutzpah – and buoyant female friendship – they do the dance anyway. It symbolises their defiance, and the decision to prioritise pleasure, as Self Esteem would say.
Despite all the casual sex, the real story in Everything I Know About Love is about the intensity of female friendships, and dance is a perfect epitome of that bond: the joining of energies, the syncing of bodies and minds through music, throwing out your life force and catching someone else’s in return. To have all your molecules fizzing at the same frequency – that’s love right there on the dancefloor.
